What Real America Helped Us Understand
“Talking New Orleans in the Age of Trump,” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, is a non-fiction piece about the writer’s lived experience as it relates to historical and current reality binaries that exist between white people and people of color in America. Ruffin mobilizes specific language used by black communities in New Orleans to explore these reality binaries and how white people have mystified the black experience. Ruffin argues that historically and into Trump’s America, these communities cannot claim authority of their own language and bodies.
Throughout the piece, Ruffin illustrates certain moments of dialogue in his New Orleans community to reflect his lived experience outside of the white political “inner city” perception. Ruffin will provide a phrase, for example he explains the use of “we making” in New Orleans, and describe how the use of the community-specific language implies humanity and empathy. However, Ruffin then contrasts these tender moments of dialogue with Trump’s highly misinformed, reductive language describing his view of the inner city. He describes how Trump mediates their reality through an almost robotic repetition of Trump’s words, using the pronoun “we,” for black communities, “we Criminal-Americans were supposed to be ashamed of ourselves. Because the inner city was hell, because we spent all our time killing each other, and because we had nothing to lose, we needed to once and for all understand that we were not great.” Ruffin uses these comparisons to highlight the disparate realities of his actual lived experience and what is being spoken for him. By repeating Trump’s words as though he is saying them himself, he merges the fictional reality with his lived experience so that these inauthentic concepts spoken by Trump gain a jarring authenticity.
Ruffin mobilizes “Trump” as an idea or fiction as Trump has done to communities of color throughout America. He begins the essay by introducing Trump as the “white man from TV,” which immediately places Trump in the sole form of mediation and myth. These mediations of Trump feed the argument that he is completely separate from Ruffin’s reality, therefore should not be able to speak for it. Yet, Ruffin makes it clear that Trump is still attempting to speak for communities of color, his whiteness allowing him to claim the authority to do so. Ruffin continues to highlight the immense separation between Trump and himself by likening him to symbolic American figures. He describes his relationship to an American monument, “We were fools to believe the Statue of Liberty welcomed tired huddled masses. She never welcomed us. She delivered us from the heart of darkness and demanded we work for free.” Here, Ruffin argues that this statue symbol that is supposed to encompass and represent America does not include his body and is, in fact, historically against his body. He relates this false symbol to Trump, equally representative of (unmarked white) America, and to his community more of an idea than a reality, but an idea that, somehow, is still problematically determining his reality.
Ruffin’s contrast of his own reality and lived experience in New Orleans and Trump’s assertion of what he thinks Ruffin’s experience might be moves Ruffin’s argument towards questions and claims of authority. He argues that in Trump’s America, he must continue to struggle for authority over his own language, body and feelings, because of the aforementioned state of constantly being spoken for by white politicians. Ruffin states,
“But Trump said he loved us more than anyone in history. He even owned one of us. ‘Look at my African-American over here,’ he said, pointing. This wasn’t shocking because everyone already knew America owned us. We were not Real Americans. We were hyphenated-Americans, and we needed a Real American to show us how to live as our forefather-owners intended.”
Ruffin makes it clear here that the struggle for people of color to claim authority in America is not a recent development. It is rooted in a deep history of colonialism and slavery that Ruffin references through his description of being a “hyphenated-American,” and not a part of “Real America” (a capitalization reminiscent of “Make America Great Again). Ruffin is illustrating his feelings of how “Real America,” or white America, into today, continue to feel the need to have authority over “hyphenated-America,” Americans of color, and Trump has become a symbol of this authoritative supremacy. Ruffin exhibits exhaustion about this laborious struggle for authority. Even the labor of explaining the phrases and common dialogue he and the black community in New Orleans use is one that reflects a knowledge of, perhaps, a predominantly white audience who still somehow have authority in reading the piece, requiring and being granted further explanation his black experience.
This piece is a form of creative non-fiction because of the necessary unpacking of language, myth and reality, and authority the reader must perform. It is not a simple projection of how, specifically, Trump’s authority has affected his New Orleans community, but more of a packed and nuanced meditation on such. By using common New Orleans dialogue, Ruffin illustrates his community’s humanity that Trump has stolen. Ruffin indirectly presents his struggle to claim authority through his comparison of Trump’s descriptions of the inner city to his own lived experience, and pushes this further by putting Trump’s false words into his own writing as though he were speaking the words. The piece itself becomes a reflection of the laborious search for authority people of color must perform living in America through history and into today. This struggle conveniently forgotten by “Real America” until mediated by a white man on TV.
Using language and dialogue to create discourse between the writers black experience and white mediation of that experience in the news