For everyone who is appalled and outraged that a sitting President would show open support for white supremacists, your outrage is justified.

But please try to wrap your head around the fact that this is pretty much the only historical Presidential tradition Trump has upheld.

The government openly supporting white supremacy was a social norm within the lifetime of our current President.

He's not even diverging from the America he grew up in.

The government NOT being openly racist was a shift that occurred in Trump's ADULTHOOD.

It is NEW.

A lot of us grew up in a weird period in American history where it was socially tacky to be openly, aggressively racist in society.

This period has lasted maybe 40 years?

Historically speaking, it's a hiccup.

John Lewis for instance, was born with open racists in the White House, lived through this era when racism went underground and then died with open racists in the White House.

What you believe to be the rule is the exception.

You just happened to walk in at a weird time.

In actuality, white people were really exhausted after years of the Civil rights movement and decided it would be best to start pretending immediately as if racism had died ages ago and that everyone has moved on.

But the racists were still around. Hell. Still in Congress.

White America just leaned hard into tokenism and chastised any Black person who dared suggest that racism might still be fully operational.

Racism was fine as long as you weren't gauche about it.

So the gaslighting continued as America pointed at a handful of rich Black folks

When Trump began the birtherism campaign, he was appealing to everyone who resented being underground.

When he ran in 2016, he called "Come out, come out wherever you are!"

And like a swarm of hidden Musketeers digging up their swords and tunics, the supremacists heard the call

Unfortunately, decades of the post-racial America nonsense left everyone unprepared for the virulent comeback of white supremacists.

By pretending racism was over instead of actually addressing it, it had time to fester and grow and evolve and replicate and camouflage.

And because white people bought into their own post-racial propaganda, there was little if any introspection or deconstruction of whiteness. Even among the left. Especially in the center.

This created a hospitable environment for right-wing white supremacy to get mainstreamed.

America sold itself a perfect package of self-deception.

White people across the board could continue to enjoy the spoils of white supremacy while disassociating themselves from the acts of white supremacy and insisting that Black people were just over-sensitive.

America reduced racism to a handful of poor, angry toothless white people with hoods that they'd laugh at on daytime talk shows

By publicly shaming the Klan, white America could deny all complicity in every other manifestation of white supremacy in society

Especially their own

Racism was dead. The playing field was supposedly level.

So Fox News wasn't a real problem
The war on drugs was fine
Incarceration was merit-based
The police weren't biased
Social programs weren't needed
Affirmative action was bigoted
Poverty was the fault of Black dysfunction.

Even the left bought into these repeated platitudes, devising strategies to "help"' Black people that hinged on the premise that systemic racism was over.

Countless initiatives based on the idea that Blackness was defective and needed help

Instead of whiteness.

The white Left, having convinced itself of its own lack of racism, spent decades compromising away the rights of Black people for the sake of bipartisanship.

Since racism wasn't a thing they had to consider anymore, they could feel good about themselves while helping the Right.

And so when Black people were in the streets decrying the systemic racism of American policing, white America shrugged in unison.

When Black people saw the Alt-Right coming, white America rolled its eyes and told Black America to let it eat brunch in peace.

All that talk about a post-racial America and nobody ever thought to make white people answer the questions

"When exactly did national racism end, what ended it and what does that end look like to you exactly?"

Might have saved us all some trouble

But America just kept moving

The simple fact is that the Civil Rights movement only ended for white people.

White people moved on.

Black people continued to suffer under white supremacy. They just weren't allowed to discuss it in public anymore cause that kept white people from moving on comfortably.

White America told Black America to sit at the lunch counter, drink from the water fountain and shut the fuck up.

And that's how we got here.