Randy Barnett’s unending trauma over a black man having been president

Here’s a tweet that Georgetown University law professor and OG bigwig in the whole Federalist Society-adjacent right wing racket to falsely imprison the entire American legal system Randy Barnett put up yesterday afternoon, that is, two full days after the nation began the difficult task of trying to recover from the trauma of learning that one of the millions of unhinged people with a gun in this country managing to get to within one hotel floor and several security checkpoints of where Donald Trump was having dinner:

When I first saw this tweet this morning, I completely missed that this was an attempt at humor, perhaps, because unlike Randy Barnett I don’t spend 73% of my waking life obsessing about the viscerally disgusting, deeply horrifying, and ultimately world-shattering fact that a man with a Kenyan father was twice elected president of the United States. Because I don’t do that it isn’t something anywhere near the top of my mind that Barack Obama once pointed out very poignantly that, if he had a son (he has two daughters), that son would look like Trayvon Martin, murdered for the crime of walking down a public sidewalk while black.

But for Randy Barnett, anything that reminds him that a black man was once president, and even very occasionally made very nuanced references to this nation’s very living living legacy of white supremacy — and pretty much everything reminds people like Barnett of this, given that 77 million of them voted for Donald Trump just 18 months ago — opens up a psychic wound that just won’t heal.

Adam Serwer says really all that needs to be said about this:

You really cannot overestimate the level of status trauma a lot of white Americans experienced at the election of Barack Obama and how much of our politics is still influenced by it.

Because Barnett’s attempt at comedy isn’t just racist. It’s the entire psychic boo boo of right-wing politics distilled into a Tweet. It’s always about having to watch a Black guy be powerful for 8 years. That’s the lens.

The funny part is that Barnett’s “joke” actually proves the point Obama was making about racism since the punchline is they’re both black and have absolutely nothing else in common

That indeed is the lens, and Randy Barnett’s “joke” is a product of pure, un-distilled racism, in exactly the same way that pure, un-distilled racism is absolutely central to the otherwise completely inexplicable fact that a cartoonish demented imbecile like Donald Trump is currently president of the United States.

Barnett isn’t some twenty-year old kid trying to get clicks on the internet. He’s Nick Fuentes with an endowed chair at a major university, and that’s a disgrace, and he’s a disgrace to his institution and his profession and his race as well if there were such a thing, which there isn’t, but people believe there is, so I suppose he’s that, too.