Trump Dumps His Garbage in the Public Sphere: The Demolition of Hush Harbors
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published (and sometime in the next few months we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with the author).
When did the practice of saying and writing every prejudice, feelings of bitterness, and list of grievances go public? When did political communication descend to the bottom of a murky swamp filled with buffoonery, lies, conspiracy theories, deep hatreds, and total disrespect? Some scholars of communication argue social media unleashed the flood of inappropriate conversations. Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson attribute the explosion in vitriolic words to Twitter: impulsive, simplistic, and uncivil. Jonathan Haidt, in an article for The Atlantic, argues that social media has made “American life uniquely stupid in the past ten years.”
How did this happen? When did we decide to say in public what previous generations only said in private or in like-minded or racially inclusive communities? There is a historical communication space that once kept our worst secrets. This space was known as hush harbors. I argue that one politician has demolished the hush harbors of white males to the detriment of our nation’s politics and struggles with issues of race.
A story from my family history is the best metaphor I have found for what has happened to America in the past nine years and for the open hostility of our communication. There was a gas fire in the kitchen of Shep Kennedy’s home. His wife cried “Fire.” Shep, thinking the house was burning to the ground, started throwing his wife’s china out of the kitchen window. Later, he moaned, “I was only trying to help.”
Something akin to my grandfather’s overreaction has been going on in America at least since 2015. Someone has been screaming “Fire” in the media, the social media, and at political rallies. We are told the country is burning to the ground. And the response has been to throw the family china out the window.
Allow your imagination to expand the metaphor to include democracy as the family china. We are breaking the bonds that have long tied us together even in our differences. Something has gone wrong as we speak obscenities and nastiness into the air. Rhetorically, we have destroyed good manners with vulgarity and perverseness.
Hush Harbor Origins
During slavery, African Americans invented the rhetorical space of hush harbors for intimate and private conversations. Historically, a hush harbor suggests the whispering of an oppressed people scarred by their experiences at the hands of white men. James C. Scott, in Weapons of the Weak, calls these conversations, “hidden scripts.” Scott says, “Most subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity. Or, better stated, such activity was dangerous, if not suicidal.”
“The struggle between rich and poor is not merely a struggle over work, property rights, grain, and cash. It is also a struggle over the appropriation of symbols, a struggle over how the past and present shall be understood and labeled, a struggle to identify causes and assess blame, a contentious effort to give partisan meaning to local history.” Rhetorically, the struggle was carried out in “hush harbors.”
Hush Harbors Are An Emotional Necessity
A people without voice becomes invisible. In Exodus 2, the voicelessness of the Hebrew slaves condemned them to oppression for four hundred years. Then, without emotion, the text announces, “After a long time the king of Egypt died.” Then and only then was a voice heard down in Egypt: “The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning.” The Hebrew slaves had been whispering in “hush harbors” for centuries, but no one noticed. Now, God enters the scene, and the groaning turned into, “Let my people go.” Oppressed people must have a voice, even if they are the only ones who hear what they are saying, singing, and playing.
John Pearson, the itinerate preacher in Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934/1990), refuses to call witnesses and refuses to speak in his own behalf. When Hambo inquires about his silence, Jonah’s response illustrates what I will argue is a primary strand of an African American rhetorical tradition: “‘Ali didn’t want de White folks tuh hear ’bout nothin’ lak that. Dey knows too much ’bout us as it is, but dey some things they ain’t tuh know. Dey’s some strings on our harp fuh us to play on an sing all tuh ourselves.’”
Hush harbors have enabled African Americans to survive from slavery through Jim Crow segregation, racism, and oppression. They, according to Vorris L. Nunley, in “From the Harbor to Da Academic Hood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition, “have used camouflaged locations, hidden den sites, and enclosed places as emancipatory cells where they can come in from the wilderness, untie their tongues, speak the unspoken, and sing their own songs to their own selves in their own communities.”
Vaclav Havel in The Power of the Powerless calls this the power of dissent. Havel says, “There are thousands of nameless people who try to live within the truth and millions who want to but cannot, perhaps only because to do so in the circumstances in which they live, they would need ten times the courage of those who have already taken the first step.”
In his speech, “A More Perfect Union,” given in Philadelphia during his first campaign for president, Barack Obama issued a prophetic call for blacks and whites to acknowledge the other. He brought up the concept of “hush harbors” as places where blacks were free to speak outside the presence of white people.
Obama also noted that white people had their own “hush harbors.” Here white rage could be expressed without attracting public shame. After the Civil Rights movement, white racism went undercover. For decades, a portion of the white population expressed anger at being considered privileged. They cried, “No one’s given us anything. We had to work hard for every dollar.” White men felt like they were being victimized by a diverse and liberal culture. They were being shamed for their racism. Resentment built over time.
I argue the destruction of hush harbors, for blacks and whites, damages society, undermines democracy, and puts at risk the power of a demagogue to use race as a framing metaphor for gaining power.
Trump has demolished white hush harbors to the point that what was once said in private is now said in public to everyone’s detriment. The demolition of “hush harbors” has released expressions of lament not meant for public consumption. Now, the secret and unspeakable has gone public. Trump says whatever crosses his mind. At times the shock is not in Trump’s words but that he would say such things at all.
Donald Trump has thrown open the doors of white hush harbors and released all the toxins and poisons into the streets of our country. He has drenched the country in a flood of lies. He has promoted racism, sexism, and Islamophobia daily. Trump has destroyed the hush harbors and he and his entire movement have gone public. Having burst open the doors of the white hush harbors, the tongues of MAGA have been unleashed to spew poison everywhere in our nation.
Trump has released white males from feeling shame and given them not only dignity but permission to publicly express their sense of white superiority and racism while denying they are racists. Trump deconstructed decorum, politeness, empathy and replaced them with the vices of ugliness, division, and resentment.
Prior to Trump, rich and powerful white males carried their whiteness like a talisman. They didn’t need to brag about being rich. They didn’t need to flaunt their power and their sense of superiority. Trump, however, is a horse of a different color. Coates suggests, “Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”
Like a dam that for decades held back raging waters, Trump has burst open the dam and released the raging dark waters of open racism into the towns and cities and countryside. Instead of engaging in productive discussions about America’s racial legacy, Trump has made racial warfare his dominant metaphor. White resentments are proving counterproductive to democracy. As white males vote with their feelings, they end up voting against their own interests. They are squeezed by a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and an enormous greed; a political system dominated by lobbyists, special interests; and economic policies that favor the one percent over the many.
Trump has thrown everything out of balance. Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman analyzed the words of Trump in “95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, from Donald Trump’s Tongue.” They discovered his language was peppered with “constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use.”
Trump is the political equivalent of Flannery O’Connor’s “Misfit” in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The haunting words of the Misfit to the grandmother are words fitting for Trump: “Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course,” he said, “they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”
As Robert L. Ivie pinpoints with clarity: “Racial warfare is the framing metaphor of Trumpian demagoguery, regardless of whether the designated enemy is a Chinese virus, illegal immigration, economic displacement, the great replacement theory, Black urban violence, gun-control legislation, critical race theory, [political correctness, wokeness], a stolen election, or reverse racism.”
Trump, instead of being a famous builder, has become the demolisher of “hush harbors.” His own unfiltered, unfit rhetoric has slowly poisoned the American democracy with a demolition project designed to destroy all the progress our nation has made in diversity, pluralism, racial and gender equality, and scientific knowledge. And he hasn’t done this to benefit white males but to create what historian David Blight labels a “hopeless white utopia for the rich and the aggrieved.”
Everyone needs somewhere to dump the mud. “Hush harbors,” in our dangerous world, still provide a safe refuge for private expressions of grievance and anger for all persons. Doing so in private serves as a release valve, a way of handling the resentment and rage as we all work toward solutions that are mutually beneficial.
We should resist the siren call of Trumpism with his rage emanating from a perspective of embattlement taking the form of a call to arms to defend whiteness from the colored horde. Trump’s public declarations of exclusion, domination, hatred, resentment, rage, and authoritarianism need to return to the locked doors of “hush harbors.” Otherwise, we risk the existence of our democracy.
