The conclusion of Dr. Stacey Patton’s Substack piece “Trump Ain’t the First Person to be Accused of Pedophilia.”

In my forthcoming book on child lynchings, I argue that white communities routinely externalized their own intra-familial sexual vulnerabilities by imagining Black male sexuality as the primary danger to white girlhood, even as instances of incest and child abuse within white families were widespread and often unaddressed. The spectacle of lynching thus became a ritual performance of racial purification and an attempt to stabilize white domestic order by violently policing an invented threat while refusing to confront the pedophilia, incest, and rape occurring within white homes.

In this sense, the period’s child-protection reforms and racial terror were mutually reinforcing as both served to preserve white reproductive futures, fortify racial boundaries, and obscure the extent to which the true crisis of pedophilia was rooted not in Black communities but within white patriarchal households themselves.

Mandatory reporting laws, introduced in the 1960s, were the first attempt to treat child abuse systematically, but even these were born from medical rather than child-centered frameworks. Sexual abuse was added almost incidentally and remained inconsistently enforced for decades.

Institutions, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts, responded to allegations of abuse by protecting predators and silencing victims. Elite men benefitted from networks of judges, bishops, lawyers, donors, and editors who saw institutional reputation as more valuable than children’s lives. Media organizations, universities, athletic programs, and political parties have followed the same pattern: delay, deny, discredit, and disappear the victims. These patterns did not occur accidentally. They are the logical extension of centuries-old norms that viewed children, especially nonwhite children, as expendable, and elite white men as pillars of national stability.

The American project has long depended on believing that powerful white men must not fall, because their fall would expose the fragility of the entire system. This is why every revelation about Trump’s involvement with Epstein feels anticlimactic, even predictable.

And Trump keeps surviving because his profile matches the oldest protected category in American life: the powerful white man whose predation must never destabilize the nation’s myth of itself. Until this country confronts the historical foundations of that protection, from the colonial household to the modern political machine, every “new” revelation will feel like déjà vu.

We are not learning anything new about Donald J. Trump. We are learning, again, what America has always chosen to be. A nation that does not simply fail children, a nation that fundamentally hates children.

From Dr. Stacey Patton, a journalist and professor at Howard University. Re-posted from social media.

Deep sigh.

So there’s chatter over a genealogist’s discovery of the new Pope’s Black relatives. The sudden excitement over a drop of Black ancestry in his bloodline is… weird.

As if that one ancestral thread is going to cleanse centuries of colonization, genocide, child abuse, and anti-Blackness woven into the very fabric of the Catholic Church. This institution literally weaponized Christianity to justify slavery, declared entire continents heathen wastelands, and baptized the whip before it struck the backs of Africans.

Do people think that a sprinkle of melanin in the papal family tree is some kind of moral redemption arc?

The Catholic Church has always been a war-mongering, imperialist machine. It funded conquest. It erased Indigenous cultures. It turned confession into control.

And it’s not like Black Catholics haven’t been sitting in pews for centuries, watching themselves be erased from religious iconography, leadership, and liturgy, all while being told to forgive white supremacy in the name of Jesus. But suddenly, because this Pope’s great-great-great somebody might have been Black, people think the Vatican might finally be about justice?

This is racial symbolism theater at its worst. Ancestry ain’t activism.

Unless that Black ancestry shows up as radical disruption, reparations, reformed doctrine, and full-throated repentance this is meaningless. Symbolic Blackness in a sea of institutional whiteness is just seasoning for white supremacy.

By Dr. Stacey Patton, re-posted from social media with permission. Dr. Patton is research associate professor at Morgan State University and teaches journalism at Howard University. She is posting these brilliant Black History Month mini-lectures on her Facebook account. Follow her here.

Black History Month 2025 Mini-Lecture #3

I really need Y’all to stop getting upset over the dismantling of DEI initiatives. I need Y’all to shift your thinking about what’s really behind the backlash.

The dismantling isn’t just a political move. Hold your drink . . . The dismantling of DEI is a BIOLOGICAL, EPIGENETICALLY-DRIVEN response to a perceived existential threat among conservatives and rabid white supremacists. This is why DEI isn’t just being resisted, it’s being attacked with a SURVIVAL-LEVEL intensity.

First, let’s start with Donald Trump, how he embodies this moment, and why the MAJORITY of white people in America voted for him.

Trump is the living embodiment of white supremacy’s epigenetic survival response. He is a man whose every action reflects the deep, inherited panic of a system that senses its own decline. His obsession with dominance, his pathological need for control, his paranoia about “replacement,” and his compulsive, irrational aggression are not just deviant personality traits. No, they are the INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIORS of a power structure in BIOLOGICAL DISTRESS.

Let the church say, BIOLOGICAL DISTRESS.

Continue reading “White Supremacy’s Epigenetic Survival Response” →