On November 21 of last year, six months plus four days before George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, I attended a commemoration in New York in honor of Toni Morrison, who had died the previous August 5. The event took place at Saint John the Divine, in New York, one of the six largest cathedrals in the world even though it is not entirely finished. Every space in the main nave, except for a corridor in the center, was covered with folding chairs, squeezed together in a way that today, in our pandemic times, already seems to belong to the past. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, was the first to speak about the life and work of Toni Morrison; And what she said at that time has come back to my memory these days, as the United States once again faces as it can the most terrible of its many demons: endemic racism.
Remnick started by talking about the time he called her to ask for an item. Morrison, who had an enviable sense of priority, said in her most affable tone, “I can't, honey. I'm baking a cake. " But much later, after the 2016 elections, The New Yorker summoned a series of writers and intellectuals to try to make sense of what had just happened: "To explain the inexplicable," Remnick said. But she added: "For Toni Morrison, what happened was not inexplicable." This is his response to the magazine's request, as Remnick read it that November afternoon in Saint John the Divine: “So frightening are the consequences of the collapse of white privilege that many Americans have turned to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as a sign of strength. These people are not as angry as they are terrified: theirs is the kind of terror that makes your knees tremble. ”
I haven't been able to get through these days — these days of running into the white cop's knee that takes George Floyd's breath away over and over — without thinking about those trembling knees of fear Toni Morrison was talking about. It has been almost four years of systemic racism by the Trump Administration and the Republican Party: four years of racist violence elevated to state policy, four years of seeing Central American children in concentration camps (because the border cages are, for all the practical effects, as Alberto Manguel already wrote and we signed many in The New York Review of Books ) and to immediately see young black men who are murdered. But they are not killed by police, as in the Floyd case, or by armed civilians who appear to have come straight out of the Ku Klux Klan, as in the case of Ahmaud Arbery. They are murdered by a brutal mindset: a way of understanding the world - that of the white supremacist - that has always been there, but that today has power.
It has been four years, in short, to see every day that Toni Morrison was right. Trump voters are not angry, as we were being told grimly before, but terrified by the white world that escapes them, spurred on by Fox News commentators. Violence against the defenseless translated as a sign of strength: four years ago, Morrison forever defined what the Trump government would be: fear, violence, cowardice and cruelty.