The Trump Boat Parades are the greatest examples of ignorant white privilege.
I have to say ignorant because if you are woke, you could not, would not participate in a Trump boat parade. With wisdom you could see that a boat parade is screaming “look at me and my money”.
Boats come from two types of homes: where dad does what he wants, mom says “don’t question him” and the boat payments are his way of saying “my money, I’ll spend it as I want”. The other home that a boat comes from is, the home where a boat is easily afforded and no one is deprived just because someone bought a boat.
No matter which home the boat comes from, a boat screams “I have excess dollars, look at me”. Boats are excessively expensive and the care of them is even more expensive.
It’s not a good message in our economy. Not right now. There are millions of people without jobs, millions of families who don’t know where the next meal is coming from. Showing these families your money is like rubbing pepper on a kitchen cut; or rubbing salt onto a burn.
The Trump boat parades are indicative of an attitude that says “we don’t care about you and your suffering, we don’t care that you are starving, we have enough money and we can burn it”. What Trumpers don’t realize is that the people who don’t have enough money are the majority of people in this country. Pre-pandemic over 75% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. The country is hurting economically, more than anything else. More than anything else, we are facing economic deprivation.
It’s clear to a feeling person that showing off with money has been out of style since the nineties. No one appreciates ostentation.
The Trump boat parades are a way of identifying with Trump. It’s a way of saying “hey, greed and even racism is okay”. The wealthy are obsessed with the idea of not allowing anyone to take their own money – which is fair.
However, they (the wealthy) also want one other thing and that is to worship on the altar of capitalism. Capitalism is the thing that makes all stealing, raping and looting justified. After all, it is done for the almighty dollar.
Racism serves the purpose of having a handy victim so that no white has to feel “less than”. By having an entire race of humans that can be subjugated and told that they are less than, whites are able to keep their heads up high.
By identifying with Trump, whites are able to justify their greed. They are also able to be “better than” and to subjugate an entire other race. This is also why it is so hard for Trump supporters to give up on supporting Trump. White men can thoroughly identify with Trump. Old men whose values are under attack by the up and coming generations that cannot agree with their values.
Lots of people don’t want to give up the nineties, it was okay to be greedy and even condescending. It was especially gratifying to keep their boots on the necks of others. Feeling superior was a national pastime. Every working supervisor in America was busy grinding their feet onto the backs of working Americans.
None of this has changed. We are still a group of people that want to feel superior and one up on everyone else. Who doesn’t walk into a room trying to figure out how to present as smart, or moneyed or cool?
All Americans are complicit in the racism dance. We never did enough to resolve racism. We gave the concept a lot of lip service, but never enough real effort to eradicate racism. We could have outlawed racism decades ago. We didn’t. Just like the minimum wage, we sat complicitly allowing awful things to happen to others.