Tag Archives: racism

What This Campaign Has Unleashed…

Over the past few months, I have seen increasing numbers of news reports like this one about a man who stabbed an interracial couple after seeing them kiss in a bar.

“He tells them, ‘Yeah, I stabbed them. I’m a white supremacist,’” Lower said. “He begins talking about Donald Trump rallies and attacking people at the Black Lives Matter protest.”

And this one:

Wichita State University student body president Khondoker Usama, a 23-year-old Muslim student from Bangladesh, and a Hispanic friend stopped at a local Kwik Shop late on a Friday in March. In an interview with the Washington Post, Usama says he noticed a white motorcyclist verbally harassing a black man, “calling him a lazy ass, saying, ‘You guys don’t work.’ He was using racial slurs.”

He says when the man took note of Usama and his friend, he began shouting, “Hey, you brown trash, you better go home.” Usama’s friend insisted, “It’s my country. Who the hell are you to tell me, ‘Go home?’”

“He seemed to be looking for a fight,” Usama told the Post. “The man started punching my friend. My friend dodged the first punch. I got in the middle of them—I told my friend to get back in the car. [The man] pushed me and he hit me over.” He began “kicking [my friend] in the stomach, indiscriminately punching him.”

Usama called the cops and the motorcyclist took off, but not before endorsing Trump.

“He was chanting, ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’” Usama told the Post. “‘Make America great again! You guys are the losers! You guys, we’ll throw you over the wall!’”

And stories like this one.

Tracey Iglehart, a teacher at Rosa Parks elementary school in Berkeley, California, did not expect Donald Trump to show up on the playground.

This was, after all, a school named after a civil rights hero in a progressive California enclave, with a melting pot of white, African American, Latino and Muslim students.

That has not stopped some children from channeling and adopting the Republican presumptive nominee’s xenophobic rhetoric in playground spats and classroom exchanges.

“They said things like ‘you’ll get deported’, ‘you weren’t born here’ and ‘you were born in a Taco Bell’,” said Iglehart, 49. “They may not know exactly what it means, but they know it’s powerful language.”

As Nicholas Kristof recently wrote in the New York Times, 

This community of Forest Grove, near the farm where I grew up in western Oregon, has historically been a charming, friendly and welcoming community. But in the middle of a physics class at the high school one day this spring, a group of white students suddenly began jeering at their Latino classmates and chanting: “Build a wall! Build a wall!”

The same white students had earlier chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Soon afterward, a student hung a homemade banner in the school reading, “Build a Wall,” prompting Latinos at area schools to stage a walkout.

Hillary Clinton recently accused Trump’s campaign of taking racism mainstream. Given the daily drumbeat of articles like those referenced above, Trump’s continued rhetoric, and his clear reluctance to distance himself from the white nationalists who enthusiastically support him, it’s hard to argue with that accusation.

Most political observers expect Trump to lose the election, and many expect the margin to be substantial. That’s well and good–but this is a genie that will be very hard to put back in the bottle.

I believe that most Americans–including most Republicans–reject the racism, misogyny  and xenophobia that have formed the basis of Trump’s campaign, but the sudden prominance of a politically significant white nationalist movement in the U.S. will challenge us for the foreseeable future.

Americans who have shuddered when considering Le Pen’s National Front in France and similar hard right movements elsewhere in Europe can no longer comfort ourselves with the fiction that we are less susceptible to that particular kind of ugliness.

For that disquieting epiphany, we have Trump to thank.

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The Party of Cultural Resentment

Among all of the thousands of words being penned and posted by observers of the GOP’s convention, the phrase that may have most aptly summed up the current character of the Grand Old Party was an observation that it had devolved into the “party of cultural resentment.” (I wish I remembered where I read that, so that I could properly recognize the author.)

Trump began this political cycle with his embrace of birtherism–a stance firmly grounded in the conviction that an African-American could not possibly be a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office.

Trump’s Presidential campaign has been upfront and unembarrassed about its anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim positions; it has been somewhat more covert in its appeal to white supremacists and anti-Semites, but not much. David Duke remains positively euphoric about Trump’s candidacy, as are a number of other avowed racists. The campaign has regularly tweeted out quotations and symbols first posted to white supremacist websites.

At the Convention, on day one, the party had to close down its online chat feature after it was swamped with what was characterized as an “anti-Jewish hatefest.”

You can live stream the Republican National Convention on the RNC’s official YouTube page, but you can’t chat about it live anymore.

Why, you ask? Because the Republicans have now disabled the live chat window on the page after it got overrun by anti-Semitic Trump supporters.

It is hard to avoid the impression that the major source of Trump’s support is cultural grievance–resentment at the perceived displacement of WASP Americans from their formerly privileged social status. That sense of displacement hits particularly hard in people who are otherwise dissatisfied with their lives or economic prospects; it is noteworthy that Trump currently trails Clinton in polls of college-educated whites, a demographic that has previously been a reliably Republican voting bloc.

Trump’s campaign has drawn comparisons to Nixon’s southern strategy, but his appeal to the dark side has actually been far more blatant. The question is: how will the American public respond?

The frightening possibility is that, win or lose, this campaign will normalize an ugly underside of American culture, an underside that “political correctness”–aka civility and humanity–had kept mostly contained.

The hopeful possibility is that voters will reject Trump et al by a margin crushing enough to send the clear message that he, his campaign, and increasingly, his party, are the antithesis of what America stands for.

At the end of the day, the Republican “team players”– the ones who Rick Wilson (a longtime GOP operative) calls “Vichy Republicans”–  will have been responsible for one of two results: furthering national division and tribalism, making the country even more ungovernable; or the destruction of the current iteration of the Republican party.

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The “I’m Not a Racist!” Vote….

As of today, the presidential primaries are over. Our choice in November is between Hillary Clinton and the unthinkable. So it may be instructive to look closely at those who are thinking the unthinkable.

Trump’s recent attack on Judge Curiel is doing more than simply underlining The Donald’s utter ignorance of separation of powers–the bedrock of America’s constitutional architecture. It is driving a wedge between the unapologetic racists who back him–the KKK and white supremacists whose support he has pointedly refused to reject–and the much larger number of voters who deny racist attitudes and tell pollsters they like Trump because “he tells it like it is.”

These are the people who harbor “racial resentments” but are unwilling to admit (probably even to themselves) that they are responding to Trump’s way-beyond-dog-whistle rhetoric.

Recent data is bringing the drivers of Trumpism into sharper focus, and what we’re seeing is striking: Racial attitudes may play a larger role in opinions toward Trump than once thought. Economic concerns, on the other hand, don’t seem to have as much of an impact on support for Trump.

Two recent studies bear this out. In the first, Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner analyzed data from the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) survey (a representative sample of 1,200 Americans) to compare feelings and attitudes toward Donald Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. He explored how economic opinions, racial attitudes and demographic variables predicted an individual’s feelings toward Trump and Clinton. He found that one factor was much stronger than the other:

“My analysis indicates that economic status and attitudes do little to explain support for Donald Trump,” he wrote for Vox last week. More to the point, “those who express more resentment toward African Americans, those who think the word ‘violent’ describes Muslims well, and those who believe President Obama is a Muslim have much more positive views of Trump compared with Clinton,” Klinkner found.

In March, The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a similar survey, using data from a national poll, and came to similar conclusions. So did the Pew Research Center–pretty much the gold standard for survey research.

Those of us who have been watching Trump’s electoral successes with disbelief–who have been appalled by his boorishness, astonished by his ignorance of governance and both foreign and domestic policy, and repulsed by his consistent willingness to “go there”–to utter the sorts of racist, sexist, xenophobic invective generally considered inconsistent with civil society–apparently have an answer to the question “who could possibly vote to put this narcissistic buffoon in the Oval Office?”

Racists, sexists and xenophobes.

As Trump initially doubled down on his insistence that being Latino, Muslim or female is an “inherent conflict of interest” that should disqualify judges from ruling on cases that involve him, it was interesting to see the reaction of his supporters in the second category–those in denial about their racial attitudes.

We expected the KKK to applaud, but as these “second-category” voters experience discomfort in confronting the real reason Trump appeals to them, defense of the indefensible may come at a cost.

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There it is In Black and White

Since I’ve been on the subject of bigotry of various kinds…..

Recent news reports have highlighted academic research that confirms the degree to which animus toward President Obama is based on simple racism. I know that many readers will file this research under “duh,” but the fact that it merely confirms something we felt we knew, rather than telling us something we didn’t know, doesn’t make it any less valid or valuable.

The first study looked specifically at Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party.

Researchers at Stanford University found that when they showed white subjects photos of President Barack Obama with darkened skin, those people became more likely to support right-wing political organizations like the Tea Party.

According to the Washington Post, sociologist Robb Willer and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments from 2011 to 2015 in which they demonstrated that some white voters may be driven by unconscious racial biases against people with darker skin.

The study came about when Willard found himself pondering why racist hysteria has ratcheted up in this country since the election of President Obama in 2008. The ranks of white supremacist groups swelled after Obama entered the White House and watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center report that hate groups have become more active in recent years.

Willard’s study group published their work a few weeks ago on the Social Science Research Network. This research joins previous studies confirming  that racism has been an essential factor in Republican electoral victories.

In another study reported by the Washington Post, researchers from Harvard and Stanford found that racist attitudes remain stronger in areas of the South where slavery was most prominent. Not only was racism harder to eradicate in the counties where slavery had been most integral to the economy, but white Southerners who live today where cotton was king are substantially less likely to identify as Democrats.

Among otherwise similar counties, a difference of 20 percentage points in the enslaved population in 1860 was correlated with a difference of 2.3 percentage points in the share of white Democrats…

Polls consistently show that Republicans are more likely to hold racial prejudices, and not just in the South. Nationally, almost one in five Republicans opposes interracial dating, compared to just one in 20 Democrats, according to the Pew Research Center. While 79 percent of Republicans agree with negative statements about blacks such as the one about slavery and discrimination, just 32 percent of Democrats do, the Associated Press has found.

Other researchers have reached similar conclusions about the present-day composition of the party of Lincoln.

Sears of the University of California has found that even among white voters with equally conservative views on issues unrelated to race, those with more negative views about African Americans are more likely to vote Republican. He and Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, showed that there were many racially conservative white voters who supported John Kerry and President Clinton when they were candidates, but who voted against President Obama.

It is worth emphasizing that–just as all chairs are furniture, but not all furniture items are chairs–the fact that people with racist attitudes are more likely to be Republican is not the same thing as saying all or most Republicans are racists.

But these research findings–which tend to corroborate anecdotal observations–do help explain why Donald Trump’s attacks on “political correctness” and “those people” found enough fertile ground among the GOP base to make him the Republican nominee.

And the research also reminds us why America’s effort to eradicate the legacy of its slave-owning past is such a hard slog.

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Off the Rails

Excuse this rant, but I’ve had it.

According to my husband, his father hated FDR. But when some of the people watching newsreels in a theater booed the President, he was appalled, because “back in the day,” whatever your opinion of the person, Americans believed in showing respect for the office.

People serving in Congress in times past were undoubtedly just as political, just as self-dealing, as those who are there now, but for most of American history, it was understood that disagreements with the Commander-in-Chief stopped at the water’s edge.

What we are seeing during the Obama Presidency isn’t “loyal opposition.” We are seeing shameful, childish and above all, profoundly unAmerican behavior.

Various commenters have suggested that the disrespect and hostility shown to this president are little different than the partisan attacks on Clinton and Bush. That simply isn’t true: while both of those individuals aroused intense feelings (and often boorish behaviors), the animus pales in comparison to what Obama has faced. Furthermore, much of the opposition those Presidents faced was triggered by their own actions; in Clinton’s case, his inability to keep his pants zipped, and in Bush’s, his decision to engage in a costly war of choice.

Obama has faced implacable hatred from Day One.

Political Animal listed just a few of the ongoing, unprecedented expressions of disdain for this President:

* Shouting “You lie!” in a speech to a Joint Session of Congress,
* Refusing to accept the date for a speech about job creation to a Joint Session of Congress.
* Negotiating a speech to Congress from a foreign head of state behind the President’s back.
* Seeking to undermine U.S. negotiations with a foreign country by writing a letter to their head of state. (This, in my view, was close to treasonous.)
* Refusing to even hold a hearing on the President’s proposed budget.
* Tossing the President’s proposal to shut down Guantanamo Bay Prison in the trash (and videotaping the process).
* Refusing to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee before the President has even named one.

Yesterday, a couple of commenters suggested that the refusal to consider Obama’s Supreme Court nominee was no different from previous posturing by Democrats–just “politics as usual.” But verbal posturing by a couple of Senators who subsequently discharged their constitutional duty is significantly different from the united refusal of GOP Senators to uphold the Constitution and do their jobs.

At Political Animal, Nancy LeTourneau posted a sentiment with which I entirely agree:

As Josh Marshall says about the latest example of refusing to hold hearings on the President’s Supreme Court nominee, it is “a culmination of Republican efforts not simply to block Obama’s policies but to delegitimize, degrade and denigrate his presidency and the man himself.” That was essentially my reaction when I first heard of their plans.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, Congressional Republicans have adamantly refused to support programs that would have been uncontroversial during any other administration–including initiatives that they themselves originally developed–simply because this President proposed them.

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, represents the Republican party I once knew–a party that no longer exists. He recently wrote that despite disagreements with the President, he would miss him: 

Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.

To that, I would add dignity and grace in the face of constant efforts to diminish and degrade him.

One final point before I conclude this rant: to those who deny that racism motivates much of this despicable treatment of the President, who insist it’s just partisan politics as usual, I suggest you open your eyes and ears. Obama has been demonized as “other” since he took office. Birthers have questioned his citizenship, and anti-Muslim Republicans still insist he’s Muslim.  The current crop of GOP Presidential candidates has channeled the racism and xenophobia, enthusiastically accepting endorsements from white supremacists and unapologetic racists. A recent New York Times Poll found that 20% of Trump supporters believe that Lincoln should never have freed the slaves.

The GOP is off the rails, and its behavior is inexcusable, racist and detrimental to America.

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