“Think we should make slaves again….”
Media reports that, “The (Facebook) account of John Nygaard, of Dell Rapids, South Dakota, made a post stating “Think we should make slaves again….”
The account also said, “Vote Trump. Fuck These people.”
Mr. Nygaard was apparently a Dell Rapids Fire Rescue volunteer before his foray into social commentary.
The Nygaard post was on a page also receiving prominent coverage of white women in black face deploying the N-word.
Enter a (now former) Kansas State University student who posted a black-face image on Facebook and Snapchat with a provocative message, “Feels good to finally be a nigga.”
She said, “That word kind of happens in our friend group.”
The Dell Rapids Fire folk seemed to have dropped Nygaard like a hot branding iron, describing his comments as, “insensitive and narrow minded.”
We can safely assume that Nygaard is under the Trump circus tent and may be familiar with Trump’s assertion that if he loses, the election will have been stolen from him.
The call to slavery is astounding.
The road out of slavery was a grinding and glacial ultra-marathon for blacks who had to fight every inch of the way for the rights of citizenship.
Nygaard’s notion to re-enslave steals the election from them, a fact he seems completely ignorant of.
The Nygaard post also represents the extraordinary gulf between the rhetoric of Trump and his followers and their actual beliefs.
“Make America Great Again” is the mantra, complete with flags flying, yet their beliefs and positions are completely un-American unless you roll us back to 1850 or so.
Some talk of the Nygaard post as racist.
“Racist” fails to convey the pure hate required not simply to deny rights but to subordinate humans to an inhuman condition.
Trump and his followers seek a fantasy America ruled by a cohesive clique of Christian Whites babbling English to one another.
It’s never been that way, ever.
The Whites, when people of color were subjugated, spoke in the tongues of their mother country and railed at each other over warring Christian sects, their habits of hygiene and alcohol consumption, to name but a few.
They formed clans, then neighborhoods and often cities in order to block out the “other.”
It worked until the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement made constitutional rights enforceable for all Americans, a fact that Mr. Nygaard and his cohort must surely despise.
Trump’s out to undo all that, he’s a George Wallace with wacky hair.