Category Archives: Racial Equality

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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Our Diverse History

There’s a reason the Trump administration and its White Christian nationalist base are so intent upon replacing education–especially classes in history–with a wildly inaccurate, “White-washed” version. The substitution of their fanciful and phony nostalgia for the inconvenient facts of America’s history supports their fond belief that only White Christians are real Americans.

Today’s historical revisionists like to insist that those who can trace their ancestry to the people they want to believe settled the country and/or who fought in the Revolutionary War are the “real” Americans. Since the country’s actual history is rather different from that version, they are working to subvert accurate historical instruction.

A recent guest essay in the New York Times focused on the history of this country’s diversity–a diversity that has existed from the nation’s beginnings. Titled “The Right Wing Myth of American Heritage,” the essay began by recounting a fight–in 1764 Pennsylvania–between Irish settlers and English Quakers. When Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy averted an all-out conflict, the battle devolved to a “war” of pamphlets giving voice to what the author called “the toxic stew of grievances held by the wide mix of ethnic and religious groups in the middle colonies.”

There were pamphlets that accused the Quakers of taking secret satisfaction in the slaughter of Irish and German settler families at the hands of the Indians, and that called for Quakerism to be “extirpated from the face of the whole earth.” In the reverse direction, Irish Ulster Presbyterians were described as “Ulceration” “Piss-brute-tarians.” Franklin himself referred to the Irish settlers as “Christian white savages” and Germans as “Palatine boors” who refused to assimilate or learn English.

This was the state of relations among European settlers on the brink of the American Revolution. It’s a history that is inconvenient to the latest ideological project of the nativist right.

Those nativists insist that to be a “true American,” one must be descended from a group of founders who–they imagine– were united by a shared system of values and folkways, founders who (in their fevered imaginations) were all English-speaking Protestants from Northwest Europe. Those with bloodlines going back to those settlers–considered by nativists to be America’s “founding ethnicity”– are more American than those who lack such bloodlines, and they argue that immigration has “diluted” that “pure” American stock.

The MAGA bigots who embrace this ahistorical story are thrilled by Trump’s efforts to favor White asylum seekers over non-white ones, and his proposal to counteract growing diversity in America, which the Trump administration regards as a destabilizing cultural force. “The documents submitted in connection with the proposals assert that increasing diversity, “has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity.”

The Times essay quoted Vice-President J.D. Vance’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which Vance disavowed the belief that the United States is a country built on a creed, and insisted that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” As the author notes, that mythology is historically delusional.

Americans have never been “a group of people with a shared history.” The founders were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely — because they didn’t have any other choice but to do so. This was true even within the British majority; Puritans and Quakers alike were banished from Anglican Virginia, Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, and English colonists in New England and the Tidewater region sided with and in some cases fought for opposing sides of the English Civil War. America was a nation that emerged in spite of itself…

Mr. Vance, like other nativists, refuses to acknowledge that cultural diversity, with all of its prejudices and conflicts, is in fact the through line of American history. The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.

As the essayist concludes, the achievement of the founders would have been far less remarkable had the colonists been a monoculture. It is the very rejection of the pretense that any one group deserves some kind of privileged status that has made us  American.

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Forget Dog Whistles

In the ten-plus months of this horrific excuse for a federal administration, the racism that powers the MAGA movement has become impossible to ignore or minimize. Trump and his sycophants aren’t even trying to mask their hatreds–they have withdrawn funding from universities and other organizations that engage in even the most modest efforts to level the playing field for minorities; waged war against (their version of) DEI; fired competent Black officials and replaced them with manifestly unqualified White ones; sent masked goons into Blue cities to kidnap Brown people…the list goes on.

Now, several media outlets report that the FBI has officially abandoned what has for years been its top domestic terrorism concern: White nationalism. The agency has cut its ties with two major civil rights watchdogs, yielding to pressure from MAGA influencers and Donald Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel.

The FBI has abruptly ended long-standing partnerships with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), organizations that for years have provided the agency with significant assistance in tracking hate groups. Not only has the FBI ended its relationship with those organizations, figures in the administration have libeled them. Kash Patel called the SPLC a “partisan smear machine,” and Elon Musk labeled it an “evil” source of “hate propaganda.”

The animus aimed at SPLC was evidently prompted by that organization’s Hate Map, which identifies White Nationalist, anti-government, and other extremist groups, and which includes Turning Point USA as one of  those anti-democratic, hard-right groups.

The FBI also ended its partnership with the ADL, which for years has trained agents to recognize antisemitism and hate crimes. (Patel mocked former FBI Director James Comey for praising the ADL, sneering: “That era is OVER.”) As one media source reported (link unavailable),

In 2017, then–FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress the agency had about 1,000 open domestic terrorism investigations, many linked to white nationalism. A 2021 GAO report backed that up: domestic terrorism cases surged 357% since 2013, with white supremacists responsible for the majority of deadly attacks.

But under Trump and Patel, the FBI is turning its back on civil rights, and walking away from groups that helped prevent homegrown hate.

It isn’t just the FBI. And it goes further than an administration that is “turning its back on civil rights.” This is an administration that absolutely revels in parading its bigotries. Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised by the degree to which its hatreds are being openly expressed–as the Brookings Institution, among others, has documented, racism has always been Trump’s not-so-secret sauce. In 2019, the Institution reported (emphases mine),

Donald Trump’s support in the 2016 campaign was clearly driven by racism, sexism, and xenophobia. While some observers have explained Trump’s success as a result of economic anxiety, the data demonstrate that anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and sexism are much more strongly related to support for Trump. Trump’s much-discussed vote advantage with non-college-educated whites is misleading; when accounting for racism and sexism, the education gap among whites in the 2016 election returns to the typical levels of previous elections since 2000. Trump did not do especially well with non-college-educated whites, compared to other Republicans. He did especially well with white people who express sexist views about women and who deny racism exists.

Even more alarmingly, there is a clear correlation between Trump campaign events and incidents of prejudiced violence. FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001. Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked in the fourth quarter (October-December). This new, higher rate of hate crimes continued throughout 2017.

What is so depressing is the “in your face” evidence that Americans haven’t come very far since the Civil War, that a significant percentage of White Americans continue to hate and fear people who are different. White Christian Nationalism is, in a number of ways, a continuation of the worst of the Confederacy, and it is still as fundamentally unAmerican as it was then.

Trump and MAGA are tearing down more than the East Wing of the White House. That destruction is symbolic of the arrogance with which they are trying to destroy the very fabric of a nation trying to live up to the principle that all people are created equal. 

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