The American dream is white. There is no need to...

Donald Trump will forever be remembered as the president who set fire to American racial hatred.

Friday, January 20th In 2017, I was in Sacramento, California, where I was an exchange student in the early 1980s. It was one of the strangest days of my life.

That day we drove to the crematorium where my American host mother was to be buried. The drive took place at exactly the same time as Donald Trump gave his inaugural speech in Washington DC.

We heard it on the car radio. – I’m glad she does not have to experience this. Everything will be uglier from now on, said my American brother.

Today it is easy to see that the brother was right.

He justified the assumption with his own experiences the year before, when Donald Trump campaigned and became the new president of the United States. More and more often, my brother was shouted at as a “nigger”.

All my five American host brothers are descendants of slaves from Florida and workers in the Philadelphia ghetto. Everyone told similar stories when we drank briskly after the memorial service.

In a short time, it was as if someone had opened the locks for old grums many thought were buried in the 1970s.

My brothers had no doubt that Trump’s campaign helped legitimize ingrained racial hatred.

We know the status now. A red racist thread runs through Donald Trump’s presidency.

From the comment about “the good people on both sides” of the riots in Charlottesville, to the evasive answer to the question of whether he wants to condemn “white power” groups in American society.

Trump behaves this way because he is white and privileged himself. But also because he knows that skin color or ethnic origin are among the most important criteria his voters define their political position from.

Trumps periode has seemed like a manic hunt for revenge for eight years with Barack Obama, America’s first colored president.

To become president of the United States, you must be born there. In the summer of 2016, in the middle of the last election campaign, a majority of Republican voters still believed that Obama was not born in the United States, and thus had swindled the presidential title.

The conspiracy theory and the “birther” campaign were fronted by one man alone: ​​Donald Trump.

Implicit in it was the white supremacy’s notion that coloreds were unfit to lead, an idea with long roots, all the way back to the time of slavery. Clearly racist, in other words.

How could this happen, in a country where the words “all men are created equal” are hammered into the country’s own declaration of independence?

Many have tried to describe the revived racial hatred and hypocrisy of the last four years. One of those who does it most thoroughly is the African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

One year after that Trump was elected, Coates wrote the essay “The First White President” in the journal The Atlantic.

“It is often said that Trump has no ideology, which is not true. His ideology is white supremacy, in all its aggression and hypocrisy “, he writes.

This was published when the whole liberal United States and Europe tried to understand the white, poor working class, or “the curve of contempt,” as Hillary Clinton had called them.

Even radical Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, believed Trump’s surprising victory was all about the economy and political blind spots.

Coates thinks this the wave of class sympathy was misunderstood, because the racism that drove Trump’s election support was never addressed. It is still the case that people of color are the losers in most US statistics, from unemployment to imprisonment.

The misunderstanding lasted until most people discovered that it was not just poor and unemployed whites who voted for Trump.

He also received surprisingly large support among white women and men in the middle class.

A more recent measurement from the Pew Research Center shows that many Americans have been awakened. At least more Democratic voters now acknowledge that it has become much more difficult to be colored in the United States than it was before.

Police killings, demonstrations and riots have probably contributed to greater awareness of this. Black Lives Matter is not only a revolt, but could become one of the most important political movements in the United States for decades.

My American mother was tough, wise, generous and proud. She met Obama herself once, calling him “my sixth son.” She called me “my Norwegian son”. She never referred to my skin color.

She got out of the Philadelphia ghetto in the 1950s. She used the map book “Green Book” to get safely to the nursing school in Texas, when it was life-threatening for people of color to drive wrong in the southern states. And many decades before the film of the same name won the Oscar.

She got married, lost her husband in the Vietnam War, and raised five boys alone.

She always believed that skin color should have no bearing on where you were in society. Hard work, decency, humility and dignity were the most important values.

Today mixes the grief over her death stems from the despair that the ideals she fought for her whole life are torpedoed by a hateful and infantile narcissist who is unbelievably president of her own nation.

So yes. I’m also glad she did not experience Donald Trump’s presidency.

What’s left after Donald Trump, is a nation that is once again divided by color codes. America’s structural racism is now so apparent that it cannot be ignored, not even in the 51st state of the United States, Norway.

However, the American dream was not for everyone. Trump has painted it white again.