by David Winner
The election of a black president in 2008 invoked a groundswell of rage among white American racists that led to Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016.
The rage was so intense, the MAGA storyline so compelling, that many white folks (along with increasing numbers of non-white folks) believed Trump’s false story that the election was stolen. Then January 6, and January 6 denialism joined Biden’s stolen election among the many false stories being told across the nation.
More and more of them started to circulate as the 2024 election approached. The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio was accused of barbecuing cats by J.D. Vance, Donald Trump and others. A blurry video from something called Red States News depicted black people (not necessarily Haitian), barbecuing, and cats with zero inference or evidence of any connection between these things.
Which brings me back to what seems like a more innocent time and a more innocent racist urban folk legend, variations of which appeared to be moving up the eastern seaboard during the early days of covid.
Spring 2020
I’m in Virginia in an Air B&B near my elderly father’s house waiting to test negative for covid in order to move in with him. After the test, I walk over to the house in which I grew up and ring the bell. I’ll talk to him from outside. My eyes tear. This is the longest I’ve gone without seeing him since my mother got really sick from Parkinson’s over a decade before.
He wants me to come inside, but I tell him that I can’t. But he is upset. He has hurt his foot and wants me to look at it. He just wants care, and I don’t have it in me to refuse him. Holding my breath to avoid breathing on him through my mask, I inspect his foot. We sit on the front porch, a locus of pre-dinner cocktails in the seventies and eighties that has fallen into disuse.
But he remains perplexed. The foot problem, my reluctance to enter the house weigh on him. He tells me that he just wants to live long enough to vote against Trump. He’s not in great shape (diabetes etc.) but he’s not yet dying. Then he perks up a bit and starts talking about the two people he sees regularly:
Gail: A white lady in her sixties who cleans the house.
Rick. A white man in his fifties who drives him around.
Rick’s racism, he tells me, really bothers him.
But “you know,” begins a story that Rick has told my father that my father apparently believes about an elderly white lady, another client of Rick’s.
The lady in question goes by herself to the gas station. Seven or eight teenage Black girls are playing music really loudly. The old lady, a little deaf, asks them politely (She’s an old southern lady, my father opines; of course, she’d be polite) to turn down the music. After which, they vulgarly curse her out. My father tells me that he had wanted to point out that white people can also behave badly but kept his tongue as he didn’t want to get into an argument with Rick.
“That just doesn’t sound right,” I interject. I’m not referring to the Black girls’ treatment of the white lady but the spreading of an apocryphal-sounding story.
Thankfully, no person of color is listening to my father’s and my conversation. On YouTube “Reaction Videos,” young Black people respond very sweetly to weird old white music, but they might not be so kind if they were forced to listen to white people talking about race.
About twenty years earlier when my parents started to age, they hired Gail, a pretty young white woman with strawberry blond hair to clean their house. She sobbed for days after my mother died and really loves my father despite his extreme irascibility.
After testing negative for covid, I move into my father’s house. That morning I see Gail for the first time in years. It’s strange to meet a familiar person without seeing their face. Her hair is grey now, but her voice sounds the same. Once my father is safely out of earshot, she reminds me (as well she should) of his behavior in the past. Twice, she ran away in tears. I try to apologize to her on behalf of my father.
“We,” Gail tells me, kindly including me under her umbrella, “are sensitive people. We get our feelings hurt.”
She asks me how I’m doing. I start going off on the bodies left in freezer trucks near where I live in Brooklyn because I fear she might be a Trump supporter and, therefore, careless about covid but stop when I see her formidable mask, gloves and the distance she’s carefully keeping from me.
As our conversation is drawing to a close, she tells me to be careful. I am, I assure her, grabbing my mask as proof. But that’s not what she means.
“The Blacks,” she says, “the Blacks are going crazy.”
“There was a terrible riot downtown, but maybe that was the gays.”
“I don’t have anything against them” she says, “Blacks.”
Then she tells me Rick’s story but with two additions.
The sounds coming from the boom box (undefined in my father’s version of Rick’s iteration) have become “jungle music.” And after the poor old white lady had been so insulted, she (in Gail’s version) calls the police, but the police won’t help. Probably the false notion that after the BLM movement law enforcement had been somehow rendered powerless.
After several days with my father, I return to Kensington, the Brooklyn neighborhood to which my wife and I moved several years ago. The afternoon of my arrival back in Brooklyn, a convoluted story is spreading on my block that had originated on Facebook or maybe New York Channel 12 that appears to be a variation upon Rick’s story from Charlottesville.
Apparently, urban folk tales about black people being mean to old white ladies had been living like covid on a surface in my bag. I had become a Typhoid Mary of racist urban folk tales.
The Brooklyn story was both different and the same as the Virginia one. At a produce market in Bensonhurst, another elderly white lady had been approached by man wearing a strange cap. He shoved her down, stole her sneakers and put them on himself. Then she or someone else called the cops, but they didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t learn the race of the cap-wearing crook, but you could hear the dog whistles from a mile off.
An hour of searching on-line for verification of the New York incident exhumed all sorts of alarming stories. In Gramercy Park, a Black man had apparently knocked over an old white lady. “Why doesn’t it say Black man pushed white woman? Is this a one-way street?” someone had commented though the newspaper article had clearly delineated the races involved.
Specific conditions in Wuhan created covid 19. And the explicit video of George Floyd’s brutal murder and the ensuing eye-opening of some white people to racial injustice gave birth to spurious stories of police handling black and brown criminals with kid gloves.
A few years after telling me the Jungle Music story and a few months after my father’s death, Rick was at it again. This same poor old southern white lady was apparently being harassed by Black homeless people on Charlottesville’s downtown mall. The homeless people downtown are of several races, and it’s hard to imagine the Black ones behaving differently from the white ones. It’s not that elderly white ladies are never harassed by Black people. Everything happens under the sun, to quote that old cliché, but the more old white lady racial misadventures got told, the more apocryphal they seemed.
I don’t want to reach spurious conclusions from these stories that came out of the early days of the pandemic, but when we think of the Trump base, late summer 2025, there may not only be wider, global conspiracy theories involving Hunter Biden’s laptop or Epstein or false stories about vaccines, there may be quieter micro stories circulating among us, stories that we tell ourselves to justify our belief systems.
That old white lady must be over a hundred by now, but surely, she’s still being victimized by Black people wherever she goes, the police too woke or emasculated to help her.
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