Category Archives: Racial Equality

The Essential Difference Between Red And Blue

As regular readers of this blog know, I spent twenty-plus years teaching university students law and public policy, and I can confidently assure you that the upcoming midterm elections are almost entirely devoid of policy arguments. That void–that absence of good-faith disputes over how and when government should act–explains why those pious pleas to partisans to “talk to each other” and “try to find middle ground” are so misplaced.

There is no “middle ground” between the virulent racism of MAGA adherents and the belief that all people are entitled to civic equality.

In the New York Times, Thomas Edsall explored that divide in an op-ed titled, “Trump Makes Republicans More Racist and Democrats Less So.” Edsall began by acknowledging that Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling and that his narcissism is even worse than his corruption–but instead focused his essay on what Trump “has done to the nation’s ability to deal with an issue that has plagued the United States since its founding and even before — race.”

Trump has not only halted the agonizingly slow accommodation of conservative whites to a multiracial nation, he has also legitimated and exacerbated the most toxic attitudes toward race and immigration held by Republican voters.

In the process, he has turned the party of Abraham Lincoln — founded in 1854 to oppose the expansion of slavery westward — into the home of those high in racial resentment, xenophobia and hostility to marginalized ethnic and religious minorities.

Edsall then refers to the growing number of academic studies that show marked differences in the responses of Republicans and Democrats to Trump’s blatant racism. One study–a survey of the same 1,000 Americans both before and after Trump’s 2016 election–found that people in Trump’s MAGA “became increasingly willing to declare their disdain toward minoritized ethnic, religious and cultural groups, both foreign groups and their fellow Americans.

Following Trump’s election and during his presidency, Trump supporters on average increased in their expressed prejudice toward Muslims, immigrants and African Americans.” Meanwhile, non-Trump voters, including progressives and “Never Trump” Republicans, either did not increase expression of such opinions, or decreased expressions of prejudice.

The researchers replicated these results in a study of over 7,700 nationally representative Americans.

The authors of another study concluded that Trump’s race-baiting strategy had been “profoundly consequential.” That research found that Trump had not simply attracted support from people who were already racially hostile, but that he had–with the support of the GOP–“catalyzed an unprecedented transformation of white partisans’ views on matters of race and immigration over the course of his presidency.” The research cited the effects of America’s changing demographics and the election of the nation’s first Black president for the increased salience of race and immigration, along with “the significant homogeneity of the Republican Party.”

It isn’t limited to racial hatred. As the research shows, race is only one element of MAGA’s white grievance politics. In today’s racially and ethnically diverse America, hostility is directed at “a wide range of out-groups, including Muslims and immigrants.” All of these hostilities were strongly linked to support for Trump.

Still other research confirms that causation goes both ways: Trump appeals to people who are already racist, and exposure to Trump’s prejudiced rhetoric prompts people to ramp up their expressions of prejudice, and weakens their commitment to American anti-prejudice norms. In one survey, subjects were “exposed to one of three tweets made by Trump: a control tweet about the economy, a tweet with an implicitly racist message, or a tweet with an explicitly racist message.” Both the implicitly and explicitly racist messages “increased participants’ propensity to describe African Americans in starkly stereotypical and negative language.”

Edsall cites several other studies that have found a strong correlation between racism and support for Trump. His conclusion?

Trump is turning the Republican Party into a dumping ground for Americans at their worst. He has nurtured racial hostility, blessed those who voice their disdain of minorities and immigrants and sought, in every way he could, to remake the U.S. government into an instrument of prejudice.

The next time you hear someone counseling “bridge-building” and the finding of “common ground,” consider the research that confirms what most of us can clearly see–and consider whether there is a common or middle ground between racial and ethnic hatreds and the common good.

We the People aren’t engaged in a political battle. We aren’t arguing for different policy perspectives. We are wrestling with America’s oldest sin– the same moral conflict that led to the Civil War. A loss would be catastrophic.

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About Those “Christian” Nationalists

A few days ago, I participated in an event sponsored by the Fort Wayne chapter of Hoosiers United for Separation of Church and State. The keynote speaker was Randall Balmer. Balmer is probably America’s pre-eminent scholar of religious history–and an ordained Episcopalian minister– and the local members were justifiably excited to have secured him for the event.

Balmer has written copiously about religious liberty and Christian nationalism; his most recent book is “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.” It follows such other titles as “Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.” I have previously cited an important part of Balmer’s research showing that abortion had nothing to do with the rise of the political Right–that the “pro-life” movement was “developed” some six years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade as a cover for the actual motive behind the encouragement of Evangelical political participation, the loss of tax-exemptions by the racist segregation academies that had sprung up in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.

In his lecture, Balmer took special aim at the intentional dishonesty of today’s so-called “originalists” who claim that the U.S. was intended to be a Christian nation. Because church-state separation has been a focus of my own scholarship, I was familiar with many of the examples he used to demolish that ahistorical belief–Notes on the State of Virginia, and other quotations from Jefferson, the unanimously endorsed Treaty of Tripoli (which began with the phrase that ” as the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,”) and several other examples that rather clearly show otherwise. But I was unfamiliar with several others: Isaac Backus, the Separatist Baptists of Massachusetts, and the Presbyterian Party of New York were all new to me.

Balmer also traced the origins of today’s Christian nationalists, and spent considerable time explaining the threat that politicized and unChristian movement poses to genuinely religious Americans–very much including authentic Christians.

I thought about that presentation a couple of days later, when I read a report from Talking Points Memo about a Hoosier (!) named Charles Haywood and a secretive, far-Right organization called the Society for American Civic Renewal, a men’s only, Christian-only group with “members that include the head of the Claremont Institute, venture capitalists, and GOP donors. It describes itself as aiming to place its members in influential positions in government and business.”

TPM cites to a piece by Eric Erickson that describes the organization as a group of white men (several in the “orbit” of Vice President JD Vance) who are “covertly inserting themselves into the conservative movement in order to propagate their white nationalist, anti-semitic, and Nazi sympathies.”

It’s hard not to wonder how many other secretive organizations exist–orginalizations not yet uncovered that may be working alongside the Society for American Civic Renewal (and the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front and several others) to redefine America and reject the clear language and philosophy of the country’s founding documents and the equally clear intent of the Founders who drafted those documents.

One of the important observations made by scholars like Balmer is the inextricable connection of White Christian nationalism with racism and other other assorted bigotries. Christian nationalists promote White supremacy in a variety of ways– not just by openly attacking minorities, but by insisting that White Americans are the “prototypical” Americans, and attributing positive traits like intelligence and hard work specifically to White Americans compared to other racial groups. (We can see how well that’s working out at Hegseth’s “Department of War.”)

Christian nationalists (mis)use religious language to drive partisan and racial solidarity among White Americans, and to promote White supremacy.

Among the groups identified by Wikipedia as White Supremacy organizations operating within the U.S. are several explicitly “Christian” ones, including the Christian Defense League, the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the Christian Patriot movement…(I hadn’t heard of these organizations, but somehow, I have the feeling that Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s Christian nationalist Lieutenant Governor, is intimately familiar with them…)

I think that ordinary Americans are beginning to awaken to the multiple dangers of White Christian nationalism. The robust turnout in Fort Wayne –and the frequent applause interrupting Balmer’s lecture and our subsequent “conversation”–are signs that real Americans, religious and not, are coming to recognize how profoundly unAmerican this movement is.

There’s a reason so many of these White “Christian” nationalist groups are secret.

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It’s All About “The Other”

Give credit to Donald Trump for one (unintended) honesty: his own racism has made it acceptable for his supporters to express  bigotries that “politically correct” social norms had suppressed. MAGA and Trump have made it impossible to think–as I naively did when we elected Obama–that America was emerging from our original sin, the fear and hatred of “the other.”

Blatantly racist rhetoric has re-emerged with a vengeance. A recent New York Times article quoted white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a prominent Right influencer, explaining that the war on immigrants was a lost cause, that the “Country’s over. We’re already a non-white country.”

For a substantial portion of the American population–and let’s be honest here, it is the portion that still supports Trump–“real” America is a straight, male-dominated White “Christian” nation. Equal status for women, gays ,non-Christians and/or people of color is unthinkable in the country of their fond imagination.

It really is impossible to ignore the virulent racism at the heart of the MAGA movement. In states like Florida and Texas, where governing bodies are controlled by today’s MAGA GOP, the effort to root out “woke” instruction at state universities has accompanied the widespread attacks on that hated DEI. Another Times article has reported on a recent effort at Texas Tech, where officials are using A.I. to identify books and other materials that include topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. The former state lawmaker who heads the five-university system, is spearheading the effort to eliminate what he has called “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” and has called diversity concerns “leftist loyalty oaths.” (He also says that universities should focus “on degrees that employers want,” equating education with job training.)

ABC news recently reported that Trump wants to remove the tax exemption for private colleges with policies the administration believes are DEI. That proposal would strip private schools and colleges of their tax-exempt status if they provide any sort of targeted help to students based on their race.

The evidence that racism and other assorted bigotries are the heart and soul of MAGA and the Trump administration is too long-lasting and too widespread to ignore.

There was the 2017 travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries. The 2018 family separation policy focused disproportionately on Latino migrant families. Trump’s trademark, childish insults include his characterization of Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries, and his discontinuation of protected status for Haitian immigrants in a shocking contrast to his invitation to and favorable treatment of White South Africans.

A jaunt down memory lane adds to the evidence.

Who can forget his response to the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, where participants carrying tiki torches chanted “Jews shall not replace us.” Trump insisted that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

How can we miss the racism prompting his persistent attacks on “the Squad,” four Democratic congresswomen of color, especially his telling them to “go back’ to their own countries? Three of the four were born in the U.S. and the other is a naturalized citizen. (Evidently, in Trumpworld, only White folks are really citizens.) 

Trump rose to political prominence with his racist “birtherism” attacks on Obama. He accused a Judge who ruled against Trump University of bias because of his Mexican heritage. He renamed COVID a “Chinese Virus”–an accusation that led to a surge in anti-Asian harassment.  

His anti-immigration campaign has been a constant effort to dehumanize immigrants of color: he has called immigrants vermin and animals, referred to them as aliens and “people with bad genes.” His rhetoric is increasingly compared to  language employed by Hitler in the run-up to the Holocaust.

And perhaps worst–and most telling–of all, the Trump administration has unleashed a lawless assault by masked ICE goons  disproportionately targeting Black and Latino communities, and–despite insisting that they were focusing on “the worst of the worst”– arresting and deporting thousands of immigrants with absolutely no criminal record.

There’s more, of course. Every day it becomes clearer that racism–by which I mean hatred of anyone considered “other”– is the very core of this administration and the MAGA movement. Those of us who continue to wonder how any sane American can support this monumentally corrupt (and increasingly insane) President and his administration of incompetents, grifters and cranks are overlooking the obvious.

My youngest son said it best, after the 2016 election. There are only two kinds of Trump supporters: those for whom the racism resonates, and those for whom it isn’t disqualifying.

 
 
 
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Food For Thought…

As regular readers of this blog know, one of my sons lives in Amsterdam, and works at a company that (forgive me) does “internet stuff.” (My son has explained his job to me multiple times, but I am the product of a pre-internet age, and couldn’t describe what he does if my life depended upon it…)

Thanks to that same mysterious Internet, we can and do Face Time frequently, and we recently had a conversation that I have subsequently been mulling over. He had just returned from Kigali, Rwanda, where he had made a presentation at a conference, and while he was there, he’d visited a museum dedicated to the history of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. The remains of over 250,000 people are interred in that memorial, which is dedicated to telling the story of the events leading up to the genocide against the Tutsi.

That genocide took place over a span of around 100 days, during which members of the Tutsi ethnic group were systematically killed by Hutu militias. Most scholars estimate that somewhere between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsi died. Wikipedia notes that the genocide was “marked by extreme violence, with victims often murdered by neighbours, and widespread sexual violence, with between 250,000 and 500,000 cases of rape.”

Reports note that the horrific violence was rooted in “long-standing ethnic tensions.” My son reported that the museum had focused on those tensions, and especially upon the longtime dehumanization of the Tutsis, and that exhibits emphasized that the same process of dehumanization has preceded and characterized virtually all other genocides, including–but by no means limited to–the Nazi holocaust.

Our conversation then–understandably– pivoted to the reality of America’s long history of racism and the Trump administration and MAGA’s increasing use of, and effort to normalize, similarly dehumanizing language.

The administration has repeatedly used the phrase “Poisoning the blood of our country” to describe non-White undocumented immigrants. Trump himself has called migrants “animals,” accused them of spreading “bad genes,” and described undocumented families as “infesting” the nation–language that echoes Nazi rhetoric against the Jews. He has called political opponents “vermin” and people who crossed the border illegally “animals.” The use of such dehumanizing language has steadily moved from Trump’s early rally speeches into DHS/White House institutional accounts, where White supremacist tropes and viral memes increasingly posted on official government social media accounts appear to be an effort to redefine who “belongs” in the United States and who should be considered an “invader.” Other.

After that conversation, I visited several internet sites devoted to analyses of genocides and the conditions that produce them. One of them, Genocide Watch, listed the ten stages leading up to bloodshed: Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial.

The site explains that

Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear. Stages occur simultaneously. Each stage is itself a process. Their logic is similar to a nested Russian matryoshka doll. Classification is at the center. Without it the processes around it could not occur. As societies develop more and more genocidal processes, they get nearer to genocide.  But all stages continue to operate throughout the process.

As Genocide Watch notes, all cultures have categories to distinguish between “us and them.” Some of those distinctions are racial, some ethnic or religious. (Examples were Germans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis.) One of most important classifications used to differentiate “us” from “them” in what the site identified as “our current nation-state system” is citizenship–and as the site emphasizes, “Removal or denial of a group’s citizenship is a legal way to deny the group’s civil and human rights.”

It starts with “Us versus Them” and “Those people.” It devolves into “vermin” and “animals” and  “invaders” and other epithets that effectively remove the “people” descriptor, which is what “dehumanization” does.

Ever since that conversation with my son, I have wondered where America is in that process, and whether a country founded on the (unrealized) principle that all people are equal will allow the worst among us to redefine who counts as “people.”

I am very much afraid we’re farther down that road than most of us want to recognize.

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Today’s Unwelcome Klan

Hoosiers For Democracy recently reminded readers of a shameful portion of the state’s history– the time in the not-all-that-distant past when Indiana was the epicenter of KKK activity. Interestingly, a contemporaneous essay from noted historian James Madison, published by the Indiana Citizen, also focused on that history.

In both cases, the reminders of our state’s inglorious past were triggered by emergence of a contemporary version of Klan activity, a rally planned for an undisclosed, secret location somewhere in Fishers, Indiana by an organization called Save Heritage Indiana, featuring former Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita.

Madison wrote The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, a definitive history of the Klan in Indiana, and focused on Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, who Madison describes as “evilest man who ever walked the soil of the Hoosier State.” He sees deep similarities between Stephenson and Beckwith, writing

Connecting these two men across time is their hatred of others. Catholics were Stephenson’s primary enemy. For Beckwith it seems to be Muslims. Both despised immigrants. Both claimed the privilege of deciding for all of us who was a 100 percent American. Both had no use for the Constitution or the rule of law, certainly not the separation of church and state so important to our Founders. And, sadly, despite their desecration of fundamental democratic values, both found allies in the Republican Party and in the churches.

Hoosiers for Democracy also connected the dots between past and present, reminding readers that between 1922-1925, Indiana was the center of the national Klan movement. In 1924, Indiana voters even elected a Klansman–Edward Jackson– as Governor. During that era, one out of three Hoosier men were members of the KKK, with wives in Klan women’s auxiliaries and children who “wore masks and marched in parades as the Ku Klux Kiddies.”

The Klan proudly advertised what it stood for: “the absolute superiority of one race and one religion and the inferiority of all others—Catholics, Eastern European Jews, Polish, Greeks, Asians and Blacks.” The Klan insisted that ‘real’ Americans were losing their country, and that only the Klan could save the nation.

Echoing that rhetoric, Save Heritage Indiana warns that “our world is being destroyed.” The organization’s webpage asserts  that “our home will be erased” by those “others”–the immigrants they insist must be driven from American shores. Like the Klan, they claim that America is being invaded by immigrants who will destroy our culture and way of life.

As I pointed out yesterday, changes to American society have had little or nothing to do with immigration. What I find truly ironic is the reality that those harboring anti-immigrant fear and hatred ignore:  the economic consequences of repelling that “invasion.” Nursing homes and hospitals need aides. Farms and factories need workers. And the “real Americans” willing to fill those jobs are increasingly hard to find. These racist attitudes aren’t just unAmerican, inhumane and immoral, they’re ultimately self-defeating–something Indiana’s born-again Klan figures seem unable to comprehend.

Other Hoosiers, however, get it.

In dramatic and heartening contrast with Indiana’s past embrace of the Klan, Hoosiers in Fishers confronted the bigotry. As the Indianapolis Star reported the next day, hundreds of people braved rain and thunder to march against the mass deportation rally. (The linked article notes that although the event was advertised as a rally, it was invitation-only; men were expected to wear suits and ties, and women told to wear dresses. Attendees were also asked to provide references attesting to their “conservative bona fides” and were required to purchase $50 tickets. A separate “VIP experience” had a price tag of $500.)

The contrast between the very public affirmations of the marchers and the secrecy of the anti-immigrant “conservatives” was telling, and those organizing the mass deportation event evidently got the message that they were not welcome in Fishers. According to political observer Abdul Shabazz, the rally was moved from Fishers to a pole tent in a Boone County field. Photographs smuggled from the event suggested fewer than 100 people were in attendance–in stark contrast to the estimated one thousand Hoosiers who showed up to protest.

Save Heritage Indiana had advertised the Aug. 1 rally for Fishers since mid-July. The group never disclosed the venue publicly, saying on X that it was withholding the location because of harassment and threats. Ticket-holders were instead emailed staging instructions the day of the event, directing them to a Thorntown parking area by 6 p.m., where they would show identification and walk to the site in small groups.

It’s been said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

Good people in Fishers did something. Emphatically. It bodes well for November.

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