Golfing and exercising White male privilege

Few images capture the position of privilege from which Donald Trump operates better than the ones that depict him at his golf club in Virginia. In several of the pictures, he isn’t playing the game — or even holding a club — but rather simply tooling around the course like a feudal lord in a golf cart with his personalized campaign baseball cap pulled low.

These aren’t depictions of a sportsman or a statesman. For Donald Trump, who has recently turned golfing into his prime presidential duty second only to tweeting, they are portraits of a reckless man in full — specifically a man full of himself.

Trump is the unmasked duffer clutching the wheel of a golf cart, zipping over knolls while his caddie — also unmasked — hangs off the back. Trump has noted that these outings are an efficient form of exercise — practically medicinal, which is about as accurate as saying that being borne up the side of a mountain on a donkey is a form of good-for-you cardio.

The picture of a well-fed White man in a golf cart at a private club is a familiar trope in film and literature that has long been used to telegraph a narrative about fat-cat economics, stifling social hierarchies and inherited advantages. The golf course is the ground on which business is conducted by those on the inside track. It’s a place of backslapping, trash-talking and — in pre-pandemic days — handshaking.

It’s a classic metaphor for privilege and disregard — and sometimes establishment ineptness — and one that is also terribly apt for Trump.

While a pandemic rages across the country, the president works on his swing.
​

While images of unemployed Americans in seemingly endless food lines sear painful scars into our national psyche, the president is a man at leisure, rolling across the lush, manicured greenery of his private playground while his supporters cheer him on from outside the secure perimeter — and his critics protest.

In truth, Trump doesn’t even look like he’s having a particularly good time golfing. He simply appears to be avoiding the dreadfulness of his responsibilities.

Such is his privilege.​

In these long days since Joe Biden became president-elect, Trump’s refusal to concede or at least stop obstructing a peaceful transition of power can be described as many things — delusional, childish, unpatriotic, dangerous — but above all else it has been a tremendous display of the deference afforded to this man. As a man, who also happens to be White and wealthy, he has been able to muster the breathless support of both men and women — from Rudolph W. Giuliani in Pennsylvania court to Kayleigh McEnany in a full-throated media assault — because he lays claim to the benefit of the doubt even where there isn’t even a shadow of it.

White male privilege is powerful. It overrides facts. It excuses horrendous behavior.
It exalts the unqualified. It drew thousands of Trump supporters to the streets of the
nation’s capital in their “Make America Great Again” gear and with their flags hoisted
high, rubbing shoulders with members of hate groups because they believed the current
president — the birther president was righteous in his denial of his loss at the polls.
They came to enable the illogic of a man who repaid their fervor with a drive-by appearance on his way to the golf course.​

Others who might well have liked to choose fantasy over fact didn’t have that privilege. Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote but lost the electoral count to Trump in 2016, was barely given 24 hours to nurse her wounds before much of the country was tapping its toes anxious for her concession. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams lost her 2018 gubernatorial race to Republican Brian Kemp, a man who was also serving as secretary of state, which is to say he was overseeing the election in which he was a candidate.

Abrams spoke up about voter suppression. Protesters converged on the state capitol to demand that all legal votes be counted. Abrams took her concerns to court. She took her time. But then, 10 days after voters had gone to the polls, she accepted the reality of her circumstances.

“I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election. But to watch an elected official — who claims to represent the people of this state, baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote — has been truly appalling. So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession,” Abrams said.

“Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede. But my assessment is that the law currently allows no further viable remedy.”

It has been two weeks since Election Day. Trump has neither conceded nor formally and finally acknowledged Biden’s victory. He simply golfs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...t-is-golfing-exercising-white-male-privilege/