Someone asked me recently if I still experience racism. “Surely it doesn’t happen anymore,” they said, with the kind of confidence only available to people who’ve never had to live it. I was genuinely taken aback not by the question itself, but by the vast chasm between their perception and my reality.
If you’re not a person of colour, you do not have the lived experience. You get to exist in a world where racism is something historical, something solved, something that happens somewhere else to someone else. The rest of us do not get that luxury.
Then the events of the past weekend happened. The President of the United States, the leader of what we’ve been told our entire lives is the “free world,” the country that has prided itself on being the moral compass of democracy, shared a video depicting Michelle and Barack Obama with their heads superimposed on the bodies of apes.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The excuses rolled out with practised efficiency. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us the left was overreacting (a form of racial gaslighting), that it was “just a fun scene out of The Lion King.” For the life of me, I can’t remember apes in The Lion King, but perhaps I watched a different version. Then we were told a staffer posted it at 11pm without watching it all the way through. Then we are told that the President thought it was about voter fraud. Then it was an accidental “rollover” of a video. Trump himself said he wasn’t going to apologise even after the video stayed up for 12 hours before it was taken down. Finally, we heard Trump cannot possibly be racist because he didn’t “intend” to be racist.
Here’s what I know about intent: it’s irrelevant. Impact is what matters. The law knows this. Victims know this. Everyone except racists and their apologists knows this.
Most of our bullying and harassment laws tell us that intent doesn’t matter; it’s the impact that matters. When we teach consent in schools, we don’t say “well, he didn’t intend to make you uncomfortable.” When we address workplace harassment, we don’t shrug and say “he didn’t mean anything by it.” The impact on the victim is what counts. But apparently, when you are powerful enough, when you are male enough, when you are white enough, intent becomes a magical shield that deflects all accountability.
There was uproar from both sides of politics, yes. But overwhelmingly, the response was a collective shrug and “it’s just Trump.” It’s the political equivalent of “boys will be boys”, a crap excuse to justify piss-poor behaviour from someone who is supposed to represent the biggest democracy in the world.
And it’s not just happening over there. Here in Australia, Barnaby Joyce appeared on Karl Stefanovic’s podcast and declared that if migrants don’t like it here, they can “go back to the shithole they came from.” This is from a former Deputy Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Barnaby’s new party, One Nation, a party we’re told is “on the rise” and “resonating with more and more people”, continues to traffic in the same racist rhetoric, now apparently with growing support.
So, tell me what’s the point?
What’s the point of teaching our children about respectful relationships when the most powerful man in the world posts racist memes. What’s the point of hate speech laws when bigotry flows freely from the top with zero ramifications?
What’s the point of all those diversity training sessions, all those anti-bullying campaigns, all those carefully crafted school policies, when our leaders demonstrate daily that none of it actually matters?
Feminists have long understood that the personal is political. What happens in the halls of power shapes what happens in our homes, our schools, our workplaces. When leaders normalise cruelty, they give permission for it everywhere else. When they face no consequences, they teach our children that power means never having to say you’re sorry.
I grew up with racism my entire life. The casual comments, the “jokes,” the microaggressions. I thought, naively perhaps, that we were moving forward. That each generation would be better than the last. That my children wouldn’t have to endure what I endured.
But now we live in a world where the leader of the so-called free world shares videos depicting Black people as apes, and half the response is to defend his right to do so. We live in a world where calling out racism is treated as more offensive than the racism itself. We live in a world that I genuinely don’t recognise anymore. It’s exhausting. It’s disgusting. And enough is enough.