Category Archives: Racial Equality

It’s Not Your Fault…

Heather Cox Richardson recently explored the success of Trump’s “sales pitch,” which she attributed to his ability to leverage a belief in the victimization of White folks that Republicans have increasingly embraced since the 1980s. As she put it, the message boiled down to “the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.”

I think this is exactly right.

After all, as a man and a candidate, Trump is repulsive. His “policies” are laughable when they aren’t appalling, raising the question why anyone would support him. Political scholarship has answered that question by linking his ability to generate votes to “racial resentment,” and that link becomes more obvious every time he talks about “shithole” countries, calls Black immigrants “garbage,” or attacks “woke-ism” or DEI. But it isn’t just race–Trump and MAGA have built their appeal on resentment of every American who isn’t a White Christian male: the “uppity” women who’ve forgotten their proper role, the LGBTQ+ folks who had the nerve to open the closet door, Jews and Muslims. Etc.

The base of the appeal, as the Richardson quote suggests, is the festering anger of victimhood. There are thousands of White “Christian” nationalists whose lives haven’t gone the way they wanted or intended. Perhaps it’s that they haven’t accumulated the wealth they once thought they’d enjoy, or generated the admiration or applause or familial love to which they felt entitled. Perhaps they’re among the self-described Incels. 

We have all encountered people nursing these grievances. Sometimes, their complaints are very understandable; other times,  disconnected from their public-facing financial or social positions. Whatever these White “Christian” men feel is missing, whatever the nature of the deeply-felt disappointment, their lives aren’t providing something to which they feel entitled. Not only do they resent the fact that their lives have failed to meet their expectations, they need to believe that–whatever it is–it simply cannot be their own fault. 

They need to see themselves as victims. 

Scholars who have explored the concept of “white victimhood” describe it as a belief that, in today’s America, white people–especially White Christian men– are being systematically disadvantaged, a belief that is then used to justify racial animus and extremist ideologies. It’s sometimes described as “competitive victimhood.” It isn’t related to actual discrimination or oppression; rather, it’s in reaction to a perceived threat: that women and minorities are eroding the historically dominant status accorded to White Christian men in American society. 
 
Weaponizing victimhood may be Trump’s one true talent. As an article from Medium put it,

In the history of American political speech, few phenomena have been as widespread (or as damaging) as Donald Trump’s systematic creation of victimhood stories. From his accusations of “witch hunts” to his depiction of America as a nation “raped” by foreign powers, Trump has turned the language of suffering into a powerful tool for political rallying and authoritarian control. Recent academic research shows that this is not just another example of political exaggeration, but a sophisticated tactic now known as “strategic victimhood”: a deliberate performance intended to justify retaliation, weaken democratic institutions, and strengthen his hold on power.

The bottom line: Trump’s victimhood rhetoric is more than just political theater. It is what researchers refer to as an “anti-democratic, coercive, and illiberal” strategy that both predicts and fosters authoritarian rule, with significant implications for American democracy and social cohesion.

An article in Salon traced the connection between “winning and whining.” 

The article began by questioning how a “once-proud party of masculine self-reliance and personal responsibility” had become “such a bunch of whiny snowflakes?” and reviewed the findings of an academic paper by Miles Armaly and Adam Enders, titled “‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics.”  The authors concluded that feelings of victimhood did explain various (otherwise unfounded) “views of government, society and the world. They found it was especially explanatory with regard to perceived corruption and conspiratorial thinking, and that it was linked to personality traits such as narcissism and a sense of entitlement.

As the article from Medium put it, Trump and MAGA weaponize the grievances by giving these “victims” people to blame– those “others” who are stealing the social status of White “Christian” men.

It explains a lot.

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The Real Identity Politics

One of the many things that exasperate me about what currently passes for political dialogue is the substitution of labels for efforts to communicate. (And yes, I find myself engaging in that practice from time to time–it’s easier to call the administration “fascist” than to carefully describe the behaviors that lead me to affix that label. Mea culpa.)

Although people on all sides of the political divide indulge in this dismissive exchange of epithets, there’s one particularly dishonest label that is increasingly employed by MAGA and the Right: Identity politics. The accusation is a companion to the “woke” label and the persistent attacks on DEI and similar efforts meant to erase the bigotries that have made life more difficult for women and minorities.

If there is one tactic that the MAGA movement has perfected, it is calling out its opponents for behaviors that are actually its own. A recent article from the New Republic pointed out that it is the Right, not the Left or Center Left, that is consistently engaged in “identity politics.”  The article was a conversation with Kimberle Crenshaw, a noted scholar of America’s various forms of bigotry and their interrelationship.

Crenshaw began by discussing the anti-Black animus that is the core of Trump’s agenda and appeal–an animus that has become too obvious for the rest of us to ignore–and the way in which anti-Black and anti-woman bias worked to defeat Kamala Harris.

I found one observation especially “on target,” because it gets to the root of the way labeling often deflects reality. Crenshaw points out that when the Right screams “identity politics” it defines identity politics in “terms of women, queer people, and Black folks.”

When Trump and MAGA world say things like, If you want to get anything done, you have to put white men in charge, they don’t call that identity politics. When they take all the books off the shelves that they think are about identity politics and leave Mein Kampf on the shelves at the Naval Academy, that’s identity politics that they don’t talk about. So the identity politics that is at the core of the anxiety that MAGA builds itself into is never named.

So it’s clear that there’s a particular kind of identity politics that they are willing to wrap themselves in. And that’s an old-school, long part of the American faction that wanted to think about the United States as a white, male, Christian country, which has now shown up in white Christian nationalism. That is the identity politics of the moment.

It is in pursuit of protecting the prerogatives of that identity–White Christian male identity–that MAGA and the Trump administration are attacking any and all efforts to promote equity in what is, despite their hysterical denials, a multiracial society.

That is their identity politics now. It’s called the assault on improper ideology. And if you want to see what it looks like in real time, look at their assault on DEI. The assault on DEI is basically if people of color, if women, if any people who don’t look like us, are in any way involved in something that is bad, we can say that they are the fault of it.

And what does that mean? If you happen to be the mayor of Baltimore when a ship collides into your bridge, because you’re Black and you are there, we can pin the responsibility on you. If there’s an air disaster over Washington, D.C., we can pin it on DEI. No proof, no nothing. All we have to do is claim it.

When I read this, my first thought was “of course! Why didn’t I see this before?” When I thought about that question–why I hadn’t recognized the real identity politics–I had to (grudgingly) give the Right credit for learning the lessons taught years ago by Frank Luntz and first employed by Newt Gingrich.

Luntz advocated using vocabulary that was carefully crafted to produce a desired political effect (an effect that didn’t include descriptive accuracy). He counseled GOP strategists to use the term death tax instead of estate tax, for example. Luntz has described his specialty as “finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”

I don’t know whether Luntz was personally involved in the (mis)use of the term “identity politics,” but that tactic–accusing opponents of something you yourself are doing–certainly bears his hallmark.

And that hallmark is misdirection, not communication. 

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The Kids Are All Right

Complaining about the younger generation has been a part of human discourse since Athenians were bemoaning Socrates’  “corruption” of that city’s youth, and it has been a consistent theme ever since. Young folks these days are routinely accused of lack of seriousness, addiction to technology, and a wide variety of other behaviors considered deficits by their cranky elders.

Admittedly, when it has come to their participation in electoral politics, the criticisms have been more legitimate. And recently, evidence of the neo-Nazi tendencies of younger Republican males has been disquieting, to say the least–its hard to avoid wondering just how widespread those very unAmerican sentiments are. My own experience with young Americans over some 21 years in a college classroom was overwhelmingly positive, but as the saying goes, anecdotes are not data, so it was refreshing to come across credible data that supported my own observations.

The New Republic recently published an article headlined “The Shocking Truth About Gen Z Voters Is That They’re Pretty Great.” The subhead was “Stop panicking: They are the most progressive generation ever, especially on race. If that surprises you, you’ve been listening to the wrong story.”

The article led with acknowledgement that the reigning story is far more negative: Democratic pundits are convinced that young Americans, especially white men, are being “red-pilled,” especially on matters of race, and that their increasing bigotry jeopardizes not just racial progress but also Democratic Party gains among young people.

The data doesn’t support that gloomy conviction. As the linked article reported, Gen Z voted overwhelmingly for Zohran Mamdani in New York, and for Democrats like Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.

These Gen Z landslides for Democrats may have been a surprise to some, but not for us. Well before the election, the data was already telling a different—and far more hopeful—story about the politics of Gen Z. In surveys from over 60,000 Americans in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study, the gold standard for political research, a clear pattern emerges: Racial resentment is collapsing among young people.

Scholars differ on the question whether “racial resentment” is equivalent to full-blown racism, although most observers would have trouble distinguishing between the two. In any event, there is broad agreement that an individual’s level of racial resentment is predictive of how that individual will vote.

In predicting who votes for or against Trump, racial resentment is one of the most powerful variables out there—more predictive than income, gender, education, geography, or attitudes about economic policy, gender, or religious traditionalism. In short, scoring high on racial resentment means you’re virtually certain to vote for Trump, whereas scoring low means you’re basically certain to vote against him. And among young Americans, racial resentment is at historic lows.

Indeed, the data shows that Gen Z has the lowest level of racial resentment of any generation ever studied.

That said, the evidence of young Republicans’ bigotry isn’t wrong. The data also shows that young Republicans “remain nearly as racially resentful as older Republicans.”  The massive shifts researchers have found are seen among Democrats and independents–and those young independents “now look more like Democrats than like older independents, or Republicans, for that matter.”

The Republican Party maintains its base through consistent racial attitudes across generations, but that base is shrinking. Meanwhile, everyone else is moving left on race. The center isn’t drifting right; young people are redefining where the center sits.

Why is there so much misunderstanding of Gen Z?

There’s motivated reasoning everywhere. Conservatives want to believe they’re winning the youth. Centrist Democrats want to believe the party needs to move right. Pessimistic progressives want to believe we’re doomed. Political consultants want a reason to sell their clients on new, expensive advertising markets. Everyone finds anecdotes that confirm their assumptions while ignoring mountains of contradictory data.

What about democratic participation? Attitudes don’t mean much without electoral turnout. Happily, the news there is equally promising. In the wake of the off-year elections, Newsweek reported on what it characterized as “a growing generational realignment: voters under 30 — who turned out in unusually high numbers — overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates.”

Trump and MAGA have placed their bets on Americans’ continuing racism. The data shows that is a losing bet, because the kids are all right.

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The “Welcome Nazis” Administration

It’s no longer possible for any sentient American to deny the virulent racism at the heart of MAGA and the Trump administration. The efforts to characterize DEI as “anti-White,” the dismissal of credentialed and competent Black officials and their replacement with buffoons whose only visible “credential” is White skin, the privileging of White South African immigrants…

Those well-publicized efforts have been joined by other, more covert moves to diminish recognition of the important roles played by minorities in our society–exemplified, most recently, by the removal of memorials to Black WW II soldiers in a Netherlands graveyard.

Two display panels in a cemetery in the village of Margraten commemorating African American soldiers were “quietly removed.”

The move has sparked shock in the Netherlands, with critics of the removal, including a community that cares for the graves, demanding answers about why the black American soldiers have all but vanished from displays.

MAGA’s embrace of bigotry is currently playing out more publicly in debates about Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with “out” neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. But even while those internal MAGA battles rage, there’s growing evidence that the Trump administration’s racism and anti-Semitism isn’t simply grist for domestic politics. It’s internationally recognized.

My oldest son recently sent me a link to a story I’d missed.

A prominent far-right German activist has applied for political asylum in the United States, citing fears for her safety, as the Trump administration has signaled plans to prioritize protections for White refugees and Europeans who claim they are being targeted for their populist views.

The activist, Naomi Seibt, is a social media influencer and supporter of the nationalist, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which German authorities have labeled extremist.

Seibt is currently living in Washington, D.C., while her application is being processed.

That application is unusual–most candidates for asylum are people fleeing war or repressive regimes. The article notes that this “rare application from a citizen of a wealthy Western democracy” is evidence of the increasingly close ties between Germany’s far right and Trump’s MAGA movement. Seibt is close to Elon Musk and to several Republican lawmakers.

Seibt met on Oct. 30 with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), who said in a statement that she is “personally assisting” with Seibt’s asylum application and making her case to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

In 2020, Seibt was the subject of a Washington Post profile highlighting her paid work for a think tank allied with the Trump administration casting doubt on the scientific consensus around climate change.

Seibt asserts that she feels unsafe in Germany, a country that has made speech that incites hatred, threatens public order or attacks human dignity illegal. She contends that police in Germany refused to act on her complaint that she had received death threats. (The German police declined to comment, noting they don’t speak about individual cases.)

The Trump administration is actively positioning itself to be a refuge for racists and neo-Nazis. According to the linked report,

The Trump administration has already granted refuge to dozens of White South Africans who claimed to be persecuted at home.

 The administration is contemplating a broader overhaul of the refugee resettlement process to prioritize such Afrikaners at the expense of groups traditionally seen as fleeing danger and persecution. A draft proposal from the State Department also would give consideration to “free speech advocates in Europe,” according to a former U.S. official who had seen the document.

The article quoted Michael Kagan, a professor of immigration law, who observed that It will be interesting to see whether Seibt’s application is scrutinized as rigorously as others, given that the status Seibt seeks is a difficult one to win.

Seibt, however, says she’s optimistic “because my beliefs strongly align with the Trump administration’s.” She’s right–and that observation should ring the alarm bells of every American who believes in human equality. Although the State Department declined to comment on Seibt’s case, a spokesperson for the department was quoted for the statement that the U.S. “supports all Europeans working to defend our common civilizational heritage.”

I’m pretty sure that MAGA’s definition of “our common civilization heritage” would be a good deal more restrictive than mine…

And there we are.

The difference between the Trump/MAGA vision of America and that held by the rest of us is the essential fault-line between today’s GOP cult of White Christian nationalists and the majority of Americans who accept (and even celebrate) the diversity of our multi-ethnic, multi-racial society.

The Trump administration wants to remake America into a fascist haven for neo-Nazis. We absolutely cannot allow that to happen.

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The Equal Protection Of The Laws

From day one, the Trump administration has made its disregard for the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and its deep-seated racism too clear to ignore. Just a few examples will suffice: the recently-announced intent to limit the number of refugees the country will accept to 7500, while giving priority to White South Africans; directing ICE to stop and harass people based on nothing but skin color; the constant and ferocious attacks on DEI; the ongoing efforts to disenfranchise Black voters…the list goes on. And on. 

The best response to MAGA protests that the racist label is unfair was in a recent headline from The Hill. It read “If MAGA doesn’t want to be labeled racist, it should stop elevating racists.”

Memo to President Trump’s backers: If you want people to stop calling you racist, stop saying and doing racist things. And stop excusing racist posts and rants by leading voices in the MAGA media.

When Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson recently ranked among the top five on Spotify’s list of top trending podcasts, it screamed out that racism and antisemitism are not a problem for their MAGA-world fan base.

None of this, of course, surprises those of us who have understood since 2016 where Trump’s support lies. MAGA’s racism has been too glaringly obvious to ignore. But more recently, it seems that MAGA’s animus goes beyond race, gender and religion; the administration is evidently determined to undermine the very concept of Equal Protection–the belief that all citizens are entitled to the equal application of the laws. (For that matter, Trump clearly wants the effective repeal of the entire 14th Amendment–beginning with birthright citizenship, but definitely not ending there.)

The Washington Post has reported on the administration’s most recent assault on the very concept of Equal Protection of the Laws. The administration now wants to deny people who hold different political beliefs a benefit to which they are legally entitled.

Employees of nonprofit organizations that work with undocumented immigrants, provide gender transition care for minors or engage in public protests will have a hard time getting their federal student loans forgiven under regulations advanced Thursday by the Education Department.

The 185-page rule revises eligibility requirements for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which cancels the education debt of government and nonprofit employees after 10 years of service and 120 monthly loan payments. It will allow the education secretary to disqualify employers — not individuals — who engage in activities the department deems to have a “substantial illegal purpose” on or after July 1 — when the rule takes effect

Current law makes those holding student loans eligible for a federal program offering loan forgiveness if they focus on areas that serve the public good. The law has defined those categories as including careers in education, public health or public interest law. The proposed rule would dramatically change a program that has offered debt relief “to more than 1 million student loan borrowers across more than 20 sectors of the economy.”

The proposed rule was prompted by a Trump Executive Order that designated disfavored nonprofits that should no longer be eligible for government benefits. 

A partial list of those the administration wants to deem ineligible is telling:

Aiding and abetting violations of federal immigration laws.
Supporting terrorism or engaging in violence for the purpose of obstructing or influencing federal government policy.
Engaging in the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children in violation of federal or state law.
Engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination.

The subjectivity is obvious–and the point. We’ve seen how ICE defines the obstruction of government “policy.” We’ve seen what the administration considers “aiding and abetting” (i.e. offering opinions that are protected free speech). The administration defines medical treatment of transgender children to be “mutilation.”

And of course, the administration takes the position that any effort to level the playing field for minorities amounts to “illegal discrimination” against White Christians.

You can almost hear the mob boss. “Want your student loan forgiven, so you can afford a house or a new car? It would be a shame if all those payments you’ve already made didn’t count…maybe you should change jobs.” 

I doubt that Trump can spell, pronounce or define “arbitrary and capricious” but those terms describe what would result from his efforts to ignore the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment–and for that matter, the rest of the Bill of Rights.  Citizens would no longer have an automatic right to equal treatment–their access to government programs would depend upon the degree to which they are willing to bend the knee.

Like it works in a monarchy…..
 

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