Dr. Frances Cress Welsing: Donald J. Trump and The Reconstruction of White Supremacy

“I think that a critical word is reconstruction. I mean that's the word that has been used by historians and maybe misused. In other words, I look at starting with the emancipation of black people from formal enslavement - and slavery was a phase of the system of racism/white supremacy, enslavement of African people. So then the slaves were emancipated, and the slaves thought: ‘well, the shackles are off and now we're free. And we're going to be able to do whatever we need to do to maximally develop ourselves.’ And what the… emancipated African people were then faced with was a whole system of laws that were called Jim Crow laws. We can call them white supremacy laws, were set up and put in place to block Black people from really being able to move forward. And… many Black men… could be captured and put… on plantations to work even though [slavery] had come to an end. And so I say that was like the reconstruction of white supremacy.” 

Third generation physician, general and child psychiatrist, and attempted counter-racist scientist Dr. Frances Cress Welsing died on January 2, 2016. She devoted more than a half-century to healing Black people and using her extraordinary skills to educate us about the global system of racism/white supremacy. The loss of this scholar and healer is colossal, cannot be quantified. 

However, Dr. Welsing would not allow us to be discouraged. She would demand that we complete our cosmic assignment: replacing white supremacy with justice. Our appreciation for her contributions are best demonstrated by employing her teachings, demonstrating maximum Black self respect, and mimicking her indefatigable commitment to the production of justice on the planet. 

To that end, days before Dr. Welsing’s transition – and nearly two months before the first Republican primary – she proclaimed that President Barack Obama’s successor would be Donald J. Trump. Approximately six months after her death, Trump was formally recognized as the Republican presidential nominee. Her clairvoyance was not the product of “Black girl magic” or haphazard guesswork, but rather, decades spent studying white people. Dr. Welsing courageously followed logic and confidently broadcast her analysis of what racism/white supremacy is and what motivates individuals who classify themselves as white to brutalize Black people and/or support Trump. 

Dr. Welsing’s brilliance is only enhanced when juxtaposed with the historic failure of White journalists to anticipate Trump’s success. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank declared, “Trump will lose, or I will eat this column.” Milbank swallowed his pride and his words – “newsprint and ink” – when Trump secured the necessary Republican delegates. Nate Cohn’s New York Times’ column offered many questions and few answers for how he and most others flagrantly misjudged the Trump candidacy. 

“Was Mr. Trump’s victory a black swan… an unlikely event with complex causes, some understood at the time but others overlooked, that came together in unexpected ways to produce a result that no one could have reasonably anticipated? Or did we simply underestimate Mr. Trump from the start?” 

Her seminal publication, The Isis Papers: The Keys To The Colors, explains how Dr. Welsing positioned Trump’s rise within the context of collective white behavior. 

“All major and minor behavior-energy crystallizations or behavior-units in the global white collective – no matter how simple or complex, old or new, short- or long-lived – must conform, in the final analysis, to the basic behavior-energy equation of white over non-white (or white power over non-white powerlessness). This is the necessary power or energy equation for white genetic survival.” 

Trump’s ascendancy was a predictable – necessary – creation of the 21st century global white minority. The white population’s declining percentage of the U.S. and world population, eight years of a black family occupying the White House, and a general anxiety about the declining potency of white power mandated a Trump-like figure to reconstruct white domination. Much of Dr. Welsing’s life work as well as fundamental aspects of her definition of white supremacy/racism are affirmed by Trump being a general election away from being the 45th President of the United States. 

Following President Obama’s 2012 re-election, National Public Radio (NPR) hosted a post-election assessment. David Brooks pronounced, “the Republican Party has become the receding roar, for a lot of white people who are longing for a way of life that will never come back. Every other institution, in American life, has done this… They've adapted to a world with many more Latinos, many more Asian-Americans.” Dr. Welsing diagnoses this “roar” as the central motivation for the white collective’s perpetual hostility towards the global non-white majority. She maintained that individuals who classify themselves as white practice racism (white supremacy) “for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet Earth – a planet upon which the vast and overwhelming majority of people are classified as non-white (black, brown, red and yellow) by white skinned people, and all of the non-white people are genetically dominant (in terms of skin coloration) compared to the genetic recessive white skin people.” 

Permanent dissatisfaction with a melanin-dominant planet inspires and maintains unyielding devotion to global white rule and brutality against non-white people – especially Black people. 

In subsequent years, NPR and other outlets have reminded white people that the planet is becoming blacker. A 2014 report – released days after the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri – declared: “The future of humanity is increasingly African.” UNICEF research “estimates that by the end of this century, 40 percent of the world’s people will be African.” They project the continent’s population “will soar to more than 4 billion by 2100.” This prognosis was not met with jubilee. 

U.S. population estimates are no whiter. 

In June of this year, The Wall Street Journal warned that “White Americans no longer account for the majority in hundreds of counties across the U.S.” Donald Trump has directly addressed “the fear of a black planet” better than any other candidate. His vows to erect a wall on the Mexican border and to prohibit Muslim immigration are naked appeals to white trepidation about encroaching, dark bodies. 

Toni Monkovic theorized how Trump’s rhetoric is particularly alluring in regions where whites feel intimately menaced by non-white people. “Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration language lands with force for people who fear the browning of America. Within three or four decades, several reports have indicated, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the United States population.” 

During one of her final interviews, Dr. Welsing deconstructed how whites’ minority status is at the root of their group pathology and tyranny. 

“People who classify themselves as white are beginning to feel and become aware that whites are a tiny minority on the planet. And to the extent that there's any motion at all, even discussion about ‘Black Lives Matter,’ or any discussion about the absence of diversity where the person whose mindset consciously and/or subconsciously is thinking: ‘I'm white. And certain things are my right because I am white. And I can do whatever it is that I want to do to non-white people, and I can get away with it because that is my right as a white person in the system of racism/white supremacy.’ So that's their crystalized conscious and/or subconscious identity. Well, if cracks begin to appear in the system of racism/white supremacy, even cracks such as a discussion about gun control, then subconsciously the white person can start feeling like my system that has protected me, that has given me privileges above those that persons who are non-white have, it's sort of like the foundation is shifting.” 

The 2008 election of Barack Hussein Obama represents a tectonic cataclysm. 

The post-Civil War 19th century witnessed unprecedented accomplishments by formerly enslaved Black people. Ex-slaves reconstituted families, established schools and churches, and won political offices formerly restricted to White men. These feats galvanized a pogrom of white terrorism to re-shackle Black Americans. In White Rage, Carol Anderson describes how white citizens perceived “Black empowerment as a nightmare.” Former president Abraham Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature” failed to shape white conduct in the march to the 20th century. Whites like former South Carolina Governor Benjamin R. Tillman, who boasted about killing black people, were instead guided by “the threat of negro domination.” Anderson documents how the Klu Klux Klan and other White terrorist organizations slaughtered Black citizens with impunity, as “the Reconstruction era descended into nothing less than an age of violence and terror.” 

More than a century later, white Americans resurrected many of the same behavior patterns in response to the Obama presidency. Days after his 2008 victory, the Chicago Tribune recorded an eruption of white supremacist activity: 

“Barely three weeks after Americans elected their first black president amid a wave of interracial good feeling, a spasm of noose hangings, racist graffiti, vandalism and death threats is convulsing dozens of towns across the country as white extremists lash out at the new political order. More than 200 hate-related incidents, including cross-burnings, assassination betting pools and effigies of President-elect Barack Obama, have been reported so far, according to law-enforcement authorities and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups. Racist web sites are boasting that their servers are crashing under the weight of exponential increases in page views. Even more ominously, America's most potent symbol of [white terrorism]—the Ku Klux Klan—has begun to reassert itself, emerging from decades of disorganization and obscurity in a spate of recent violence.” 

Anderson documents that, “In Obama’s first year in office alone, there was a 400 percent increase in death threats.” Dr. Welsing regularly referenced this historic escalation when refuting the fabricated notion of a “post-racial” society no longer dominated by white supremacy (racism). To the contrary, she decoded and highlighted the white fury targeting the Obamas – and black people at large. 

Lagging well behind Dr. Welsing, Monkovic did correctly correlate the racist displeasure with President Obama to Trump’s crusade. “Some social science research suggests that the simple fact that President Obama is black might have contributed to a sense of lost power and resentment among whites, and, of course, Mr. Trump first came to political prominence by questioning whether Mr. Obama was even a citizen.” 

Although accurate, Monkovic and most others lack the comprehensive analysis to explain Trump’s appeal within the historic and global context of white culture. In 2011, Dr. Welsing clarified how the white psyche interprets President Obama as a blemish on the White House, an affront to white power. 

“So then the next phase is a black man runs for president of the United States of America. Well, even though there was white support for his presidency, when he got into the White House and you have a Black man with his [Black] wife and his Black children and his Black mother-in-law in the White House, even the people who classify themselves as white who called themselves liberals began to think: ‘Oh my god. What have we done?’ Because just the image of the Black man being in the White House and being in charge began to set off the anxiety of if we lose power, if the power equation changes and this… in the symbolic parlance of white supremacy speech, you don't want to be ‘caught behind the eight ball.’ But President Obama being in the White House makes the white mindset that is concerned subconsciously about white genetic survival begin to feel: ‘Wait a minute. We're being caught behind the eight ball.’ And that translates into white genetic annihilation. So then we have this massive attack. We can call this the 3rd reconstruction. Meaning the reconstruction of racism/white supremacy.”

Deviating from conventional narratives of U.S. history, Dr. Welsing identifies three periods where the white collective reconstructed the power equation of white over non-white. Governor Tillman and the KKK presided over the 19th century re-assertion of white domination. During the mid 20th century, countless Black citizens dedicated and lost their lives confronting the organized system of white terrorism that governed the United States. Fannie Lou Hamer, Robert F. Williams, Assata Shakur and countless Black warriors defied and destabilized white power. Dr. Welsing describes this period as the second reconstruction of white supremacy. This era of restoration includes state-sanctioned counter-intelligence programs designed to neutralize any efforts towards Black liberation, the political rhetoric of “law and order,” which authorized any means necessary to crush Black opposition to racism, and the 1968 election of President Richard Nixon, who instituted federal policies to achieve these objectives. This historical framework informs Dr. Welsing’s theory of why the third reconstruction – white retaliation to the Obama presidency – was an obligatory, to be expected occurrence. 

“In other words, if the system moves from establishment, maintenance, expansion, refinement – refinement is the emancipation of the slaves. Refinement is changing the laws so it looks like equality. But each time you have that kind of gain it has to be thrown back because the fundamental concern is white genetic survival by any means necessary. So you have a black man becomes president. He's intelligent, articulate, brilliant. Every single qualification that is needed to lead the nation, to lead the world. But then it hits subconsciously that this means white genetic annihilation or symbolically just because a black man is supposed to be in charge. And so we have to have the third reconstruction, and that is the annihilation of his power and showing him all this talk about the budget and the debt, but the articulation that came out once he was elected where you had spokespersons on the television saying our goal objective is to… see that he fails.” 

This is the decrypted White mentality responsible for an unprecedented number of death threats targeting a U.S. president, a nagging suspicion that Barack Obama is a Kenyan native (not “American”), and the climb of Donald J. Trump. A 1980 essay on Dr. Welsing’s interpretation of Nazi Germany and the Third Reich provides a chilling context for the Trump sensation. 

“The specific fear of white genetic annihilation, while always present in the global white collective, becomes more prominent and is more frequently acted upon in times when whites have lost a war and/or when there is serious economic uncertainty. At these times the white collective feels insecure because the major props for the sense of white invincibility and for fear of white genetic survival – their guns and money – seem to have failed. Thus, after the German’s loss of World War I (which was followed by political instability, high level inflation and high level unemployment), there appeared on the scene a dynamic spokesperson, articulating the need to destroy those perceived as capable of ultimate white destruction. In the United States we are in such a period.” 

The economic and demographic upheavals at the dawn of the 21st century have inflicted a tremendous injury to a sizable population of whites. A Princeton University tandem published a stunning report chronicling “financial despair, [drug] addiction and the rise of suicide in White America.” The researchers found that the system of white supremacy is failing to accommodate the great expectations of a growing number of white people; in response, they’re abusing narcotics and/or ending their own lives. 

In addition to the surge of self-destructive behavior, these disruptions to white power are re-focusing white proclivities to violence on black bodies. Unfortunately, an ambassador of white culture, Dylann Storm Roof, targeted members of the Charleston, South Carolina Mother Emanuel A.M.E. church. Before murdering nine unarmed black worshippers in June of 2015, Roof allegedly detailed his homicidal logic in a manifesto. He conveys much of the white frustration articulated by Trump supporters. 

“To take a saying from a film, ‘I see all this stuff going on, and I don’t see anyone doing anything about it. And it pisses me off.’ To take a saying from my favorite film, ‘Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.’ I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.” 

Roof didn’t “see anyone doing anything” to fortify white dominion. A substantial portion of Trump voters harbors an identical grievance. In “The Anti-P.C. Vote,” Thomas B. Edsall reveals, “Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed ‘to bring Americans to submission’ by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.” White rule is being impugned from the White House to the schoolhouse, and no one’s doing anything about it. 

No one, except Trump. During her final lecture at The Cress Welsing Institute of Psychiatry and Social Research on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C., Dr. Welsing foreshadowed why Trump would resonate with white voters. 

“Every single thing that we are concerned about, every single thing when you turn on the TV tomorrow morning that they will talk about will all be related to racism/white supremacy as a system. Donald Trump. I say meet your next president. See all kind of people from the time he started talking: ‘Oh, he's crazy... Oh, the American people won't accept...’ Donald Trump has pulled the hood off of, the sheet off of, the cover off of the system of racism/white supremacy. See he pulled it off, and he's talking with more clarity than anybody else. All the other candidates quietly, quietly are thinking about racism, but they're not talking overtly about it. But Donald Trump is talking. So like I said, Donald Trump's trump card is the race card in the system of racism/white supremacy.” 

In this climate, a dynamic spokesperson with an explicit appeal to white racial angst can become a political juggernaut. Dr. Welsing’s unparalleled comprehension of white culture allowed her to accurately forecast a presidential campaign that most found inconceivable. 

Sadly, Dr. Welsing became an ancestor before Trump’s domination of the Republican primaries, the numerous incidents of black onlookers being mauled at his rallies , and his campaign pledge to: “Make [white] America great again.” It’s doubtful she could conjure a more accurate, public illustration of her analysis of what racism and how it works.

(For footnotes, see Academia.edu)