Introduction to Souls: W.E.B Du Bois Reading Group

• • education, politics

 

(Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk)

As a Jewish child growing up in Israel, I was obsessed with the holocaust. Many nights I couldn’t sleep, afraid of nightmares. I vividly remember the repeating thought in my head: if I was born just a few decades ago, I would have been considered a problem. A problem so threatening that it must be killed or at least controlled.  As I grew up, I learned of Apartheid South Africa, of the conditions of those living in occupied Palestine, and about the ongoing segregation and oppression of people of color in the United States. I realized that although I could have potentially been a problem, many people are living their entire live as a problem. Of course as a kid lying awake at night in Tel Aviv I didn’t know to articulate the issue in these exact words. It was only when I finished the first paragraph of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk when the words “who does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word” made my fears connect to others’ struggles. It is this kind of connections that make political education, like this reading group about Du Bois so important to resistance today.

A few of us are gathering in Philadelphia to read Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk with Dr. Anthony Montiero. I think It is especially important that we read the revolutionary words of Du Bois to be able to criticize, and resist, and find our place in this moment in the movement. In all that, it is also important to remember that our fight is worth it, because “America has too much to teach the world” and perhaps, at this time, what we America needs to teach is resistance by example.

 

 

(Du Bois Reading Group in action)

 

There are few pieces of writing so packed with ideas and concepts as are the first few pages of The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B Du Bois’ communist manifesto, published in 1903.

The first phrase of Souls is revolutionary, “between me and the other world.” To this day the default in any racial binary is white. The non-white is the other, the minority, the different. However, Du Bois turns the paradigm on its head. Du Bois’ world, the black world, is the true world and whites live in another world.  Whites live in a world where Du Bois is a problem. He learns by the way whites look at him that he is a problem. He sees their racial gaze, but Du Bois finds time for irony, “being a problem is a strange experience.” From the concept of the problem, Du Bois moves to the concept that Dr. Anthony Monteiro calls “the most profound concept of race in the world,” the concept of the Veil.  There is a veil between Du Bois and the other world. Du Bois sees the world through the Veil, which like the veil of a bride on their wedding day, means that he sees through the Veil better than the person on the outside looking in at him. This is a strong statement for policymakers, social scientists, ethnographers, and any observer of Du Bois saying, “I see you. I see you better than you think I see you. I also see my fellow folk behind the Veil. It is me, not you, who should study my social condition, and perhaps yours.” After the Veil, Du Bois gets to the concept of Double Consciousness. He sees racism, he sees race, he sees blackness for its beauty, however, he also sees and hears the stereotypes. This “two-ness” makes Du Bois measure himself by the stereotypes of the white world. In another revolutionary statement, Du Bois wishes to be “both a Negro and an American.” Both a Black man and a Human, as Monteiro complements. All of this is happening before Du Bois reaches page three.

In an autobiography published in 1940, Du Bois calls the writing of Souls “a cry in the middle of the night.” Indeed, the 35-year-old scholar had reasons to be frustrated.

Du Bois was the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard. To achieve this feat he needed to complete not one but two  bachelor’s degrees and almost two doctorates degrees just to be counted among those worthy of a Harvard graduate education. Du Bois by 1903 would already have two publications: his doctoral thesis in history from Harvard which was published in 1896 and The Philadelphia Negro, the first empirical sociology study in the United States, published in 1899. Because of discrimination, Du Bois couldn’t teach in the institutions that he was affiliated with, such as Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, although he was more qualified than many of the faculty.  He went to teach at Wilberforce, an historically black college (for more on Du Bois’ career, see Alton Morris’ A Scholar Denied). 

The period of time when Du Bois was beginning his teaching career overlapped with a period of time some have called a “nadir of American race relations.”  The emancipation of enslaved people in 1863 and the end of the civil war in 1865 kindled hope and movement towards reconstruction. After only three years these hard fought bureaus and committees were disbanded and replaced with the 13th amendment, Jim Crow laws, and the ruling in the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, establishing black Americans as legally inferior to blacks. This may seem bleak; yet, at the beginning of that ‘cry into the night’ for Du Bois who (at this time) maintains hope that “America has too much to teach the world.”

 

 

~This is a part of a six-post series following a W.E.B Du Bois reading group in Philadelphia, moderated by Dr. Anthony Monteiro. Following each meeting of the group, we’ll post a reflection by one of the members. If you’re in the Philadelphia area and would like to join the group for the next session,  go to the Facebook group  and join us for the next meeting.  

This reflection was written by Abraham Gutman.  Abraham is originally from Tel Aviv and currently living in Philadelphia. He holds an MA in economics from Hunter College. He is an aspiring sociologist interested in race, policing, housing, and all types of football. You can contact him on Twitter @abgutman.

White Supremacy Isn’t a Fad, It’s a System

• • politics, racism

(image source)

With a newly, perhaps unlawfully, elected U.S. president gleefully endorsed by the KKK, we are going to have to get smarter about the way we talk about white supremacy.  I’ve been studying white supremacy for more than twenty-five years. Let me share with a few of the basics that I’ve learned from my research.

White Supremacy is not a “fad”

To begin, white supremacy is not a “fad.” The mannequin challenge is a fad. To suggest that white supremacy is a fad — as Kevin Drum recently did at Mother Jones — is to misunderstand the basic meaning of both “white supremacy” and “fad.”  

(updated 11/28 at 3:18pm) It seems that someone at Mother Jones changed the title of this insidious piece, but the URL still says “fad.”

And, no, Ta-Nehisi Coates did not “invent” the use of the term white supremacy. As even a cursory check of the Wikipedia entry would tell someone with an elementary-school level of intellectual curiosity, “white supremacy” has been used by academics as a term of critique for many decades by scholars writing in the tradition of critical race theory.

Coates did, however, eloquently point out why we have so much trouble with this particular issue:

The shame reflects an ugly and lethal trend in this country’s history—an ever-present impulse to ignore and minimize racism, an aversion to calling it by its name. For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary. Lynchings, pogroms, and plunder proceeded from this fiction. Writers, journalists, and educators embroidered a national lie, and thus a safe space for the violent tempers of those who needed to be white was preserved.

We have a particular gift for embroidering our national lie when it comes to race, but it’s not particularly new.

 

White supremacy is not new to the U.S.

Some have called there is a  “the new white supremacy,” or that it’s experiencing an “awakening,” but white supremacy is not new to the U.S.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the United States, owned and enslaved people. At least one of those, Sally Hemings, he also raped and forced to bear six his children. Jefferson, of course, was one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, and the worlds “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,”but this self-evident truth did not apply to the men and women that he owned. Jefferson pondered whether those currently enslaved should be set free in his Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he concluded that no, they shouldn’t be, when he wrote:

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

In this writing, Jefferson gave voice to what many liberal thinkers of the day believed about the inequality of the races: that white people were inherently superior to black people. That fact seemed obvious to Jefferson. Think this is all old news and no one is advocating for this kind of ideas? Think again.

As I pointed out in Cyber Racism (2009), banner images in regular rotation on the white supremacist portal Stormfront, regularly feature quotes and image from Thomas Jefferson that herald white superiority and connect their political cause to the founding fathers of the U.S.

jefferson at stormfront

Jefferson’s ideas of white supremacy got woven into the very fabric of the nation’s founding documents.  For example, the U.S. Constitution includes something known as the “three-fifths compromise,” which was an agreement worked out between white northern and southern lawmakers about how to count the  enslaved population. The northerners regarded slaves as property who should receive no representation. Southerners demanded that Blacks be counted as people, because it would strengthen their power in the newly created Congress. The compromise  allowed a state to count three fifths of each black person in determining political representation in the House. The Three-fifths Compromise would not be challenged again until the Dred Scott decision (1857), which held that “held that a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves, whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court.”

So, yeah, white supremacy. It’s not new. It’s been part of the U.S. since the beginning.

White supremacy is a system.

White supremacy is a system that ensures some people, who are white, always end up with the lion’s share of resources. Here’s a more academic definition:

White supremacy is…a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”  (Frances Lee Ansley, “White supremacy (and what we should do about it”. In Richard Delgado; Jean Stefancic. Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Temple University Press, 1997, p. 592.

From here, you could investigate any number of areas – wealth, income, educational achievement, occupations, housing, health, incarceration, crime – and find evidence that white people “overwhelmingly control power and material resources.” Here’s just one example in the area of wealth:

(Source: CNN Money, 2016: Why the racial wealth gap won’t go away)

 

There are lots of other examples, too. On white supremacy in housing, read Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” about the very real, material impact of residential segregation and plunder in the form of subprime mortgages.  On the way white supremacy gets perpetuated in education, listen to the excellent reporting by Nikole Hannah Jones in “The Problem We All Live With.” For an account of the white supremacy in the criminal justice system is Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow.

These material aspects of white supremacy are justified by systems of thought. For understanding how science is implicated in white supremacy, read Dorothy Roberts’ Fatal Invention. And, for a broad understanding of how white supremacy frames our thinking, read Joe Feagin’s White Racial Frame.

 

But, calling the current system “white supremacy” makes me, as a white person, uncomfortable.

 

If you’re white, and talk of white supremacy makes you feel uncomfortable, you might want to do some self-reflection. Why is it that it makes you uneasy?

If you’re feeling especially defensive when talk turns to white supremacy, then you may be experiencing  “white fragility.” Robin D’Angelo coined this term to describe:

“an emotional state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress be- comes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”

If you don’t think this applies to you, then you may want to investigate “white identity politics.” There seems to be a lot of that going around.

Typically, when people speak about identity politics – and especially the need to “move beyond identity politics” — they mean the racial identity of those who are Black or Latino. Implied in this use of the term “identity politics” is that white people are exist in a space that is safely removed from the politics of racial identity.

But, as Laila Lalami wrote recently in The New York Times:

This year’s election has disturbed that silence. The president-elect earned the votes of a majority of white people while running a campaign that explicitly and consistently appealed to white identity and anxiety.

So, does this mean that all people who share a white racial identity are white supremacists? Not necessarily. Linda Martín Alcoff, in The Future of Whiteness, writes:

White identity poses almost unique problems for an account of social identity. Given its simultaneous invisibility and universality, whiteness has until recently enjoyed the unchallenged hegemony that any invisible contender in a ring full of visible bodies would experience. But is bringing whiteness into visibility the solution to this problem? Hasn’t the racist right done just that, whether it is the White Aryan Councils or theorists like Samuel Huntington who credit Anglo-Protestantism with the creation of universal values like freedom and democracy? In this [book], I show evidence of the increasing visibility of whiteness to whites themselves, and explore a variety of responses by white people as they struggle to understand the full political and historical meaning of white identity today. (read an excerpt here)

Alcoff holds out hope for that there will be more white people, like the ones she documents in her book, who have joined in common cause with people of color to fight slavery, racism, and imperialism, from the New York Conspiracy of 1741 to the John Brown uprising to white supporters of civil rights and white protesters against the racism of the Vietnam War.

Even so, those whites who have joined the resistance are still beneficiaries of a system of white supremacy. That’s the thing about systems. They keep on churning even when we wish they would stop.

What about the people in groups with the  _______  (funny outfits, tattoos, special symbols)? Aren’t they the real white supremacists?

 

There are people who form hate groups, or meet online to discuss the ideology of white supremacy. Sometimes, they wear outfits to signal group membership, like Klan robes or Nazi uniforms or Confederate flag symbols. Sometimes, they get tattoos that reflect their beliefs. According to research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 892 hate groups in the United States.

 

(Source: Southern Poverty Law Center)

 

The most common way to talk about white supremacy in the U.S. is to talk about those who identify, through clothing or tattoos, as members of these hate groups.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I did extensive research on five of these groups (KKK, David Duke’s NAAWP, the Church of the Creator, Christian Identity, and Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance). I analyzed hundreds of their newsletters and movement documents.

What I wrote in White Lies (1997) was that the white supremacist discourse produced by these extremist groups shared much in common with the kind of language that mainstream politicians used, that I saw in commercials created by Madison Avenue executives, in popular culture, and some of what was created by white academics.  I made this argument by comparing the text of extremist white supremacist documents with elements of mainstream culture, including images, like the ones below.

white men buildings men who built america

 

On the left, an image from the newsletter “White Aryan Resistance,” on the right, a recent image from The History Channel. Both carry with them a message of white supremacy – that white men built the nation, and therefore, are exclusively and especially entitled to it in some particular way. In that book, I argued that the extremist images are simply cruder versions of the same ideas that are slightly more polished in their mainstream political and popular culture versions.

Part of what has happened with the Trump campaign to “Make America Great Again,” has been a blending of the crudest possible white supremacist language (e.g., his claim that “Mexicans are rapists”) with a more mainstream appeals to white identity.

Certainly, people who swear allegiance to a Nazi flag or get white power tattoos should be a cause for concern, but so should politicians who threaten to deport millions of people who are not white Christians. Make no mistake, both are engaging in white supremacy.

But, they’re so dapper (or handsome or went to Harvard), they can’t possibly be white supremacists!

The rise of Trump and the far-right he has courted along his rise to power has created a new level of mainstream media interest in writing about white supremacy. Journalists, and their editors, want things that are “new.” That’s part of what makes something “news,” after all, is it’s newness.

So far, it’s not going very well.

 

There is a trend of think pieces on white supremacists that has declared one “dapper,” and another (retrospectively) “handsome,” comparing him to movie idol Robert Redford. This maddening trend has the effect, intentional or not, of normalizing white supremacy. It also reveals more about the white liberal reporters writing this story than it does about their subjects.

In my most generous interpretation of this trend, editors and journalists are trying to offer some “new” angle on the story of white supremacists. If this is the case, then what that means is that they are playing off the idea that white supremacy is relegated to those who are unattractive, uneducated, toothless, and living in a trailer park.  Thus, the “fresh, new” angle they can offer is the opposite of that image. The problem is that it doesn’t serve the reader or the public sphere because, in so doing, it validates their views as legitimate.

In a less generous read, these are predominantly white editors and journalists who are hobbled by the blindness of their own white identity. What the philosopher Charles Mills refers to as “the epistemology of ignorance,” fostered by the system of white supremacy. As white people, immersed in a system of white supremacy, we are like the fish who cannot see or understand water because it is everywhere. I doubt seriously that a journalist and editor who were both people of color would have published pieces on a “dapper” white supreamcist or the “fad” of white supremacy.

Why does understanding white supremacy matter now?

I hope this is obvious, but in case it’s not, let me offer one other important reason that understanding white supremacy now is more important than ever.  In a recent study, researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education found that 82% of 203 students surveyed believed sponsored content was a real news story.

This is consistent with what I found in Cyber Racism (2009), when I asked young people (ages 15-19) if they could tell the difference between a “cloaked” white supremacist site, and an actual civil rights site. Most could not. So, one young person in my study, reading a white supremacist site that declared “slavery was good for some people,” responded: “well, maybe so, there’s two sides to everything.”

I hope you find this as chilling. We don’t want to go back to debating whether slavery was a moral evil or not, do we? If we don’t, then we have to get smarter about the way white supremacy operates, and how we fight against it.

Saying that white supremacy is a “fad” neither helps our understanding, nor the fight against it, but reveals the epistemology of ignorance that keeps white people from understanding the system we, ourselves, have built.

Calls for Respect Following the Election Misguided

• • politics

obama-trump-meeting

(image source)

A few days after the 2016 Election, I received statements from both my university and my church encouraging us to have “respect” for others with whom we “strongly disagree.”  Both messages for “unity” were clearly meant to be supportive, but they are misguided. Such messages ignore that the disagreements in question are not over petty partisan politics but are over the profound question of whether or not all people deserve equal human rights.

Differing opinions on the Dakota Access Pipe Line offers a ready example. Those who oppose the project  point to its construction as not only desecrating sacred Native American land but also potentially harming the Sioux reservation’s main water supply. The project has also been criticized for targeting Native lands seemingly to avoid endangering predominantly white towns such as Bismarck. As Time magazine, notes, however, supporters of the project “have shown little interest in accommodating the project’s critics, particularly the protesters on the ground.”

Thus, if it is your opinion that companies should be able to forcibly destroy Native American land and endanger Native American lives for financial gain, and I disagree, that is no ordinary difference of opinion. That is a disagreement, as during the 1830s, over whether or not Native Americans’ land and lives are worth more or less than white Americans’ desire for lucrative business development.

(image source)

 

Differences of opinion regarding gender and sexuality are similarly often less about partisan politics and more about differing beliefs in who deserves human rights. After the release of tapes revealing that Donald Trump bragged about conduct toward women that is legally defined as sexual assault, for example, it was some people’s opinion that his statements were unequivocally unacceptable  and others’ opinion that they were insignificant “locker room talk.”

(image source)

Given that sociological research on the use such language in the performance of masculinity has demonstrated that these utterances are “not without consequence; rather they are part of, and indeed central to, persistent gendered inequality and violence,” the difference of opinion on this issue is fundamentally over whether or not one considers the perpetuation of inequality and violence against women to be acceptable or not.

 

From police brutality to immigration to bathrooms to protests over these and other issues, the disagreements in our government, classrooms, and on social media are decreasingly over topics like those that Reagan and O’Neil debated and are increasingly more like those that characterized Brooks versus Sumner. In other words, as one writer puts it, “This isn’t a political contest – it’s a moral crisis.”

The secular and religious institutions to which I belong both refused to condemn hetero-patriarchal Christian white supremacist viewpoints as wrong. Their calls for “appreciation of individual differences,” encouragement to “try to understand” people with whom we disagree, and above all their admonishment to be “respectful” all combine to reveal that they accept – as equally legitimate – both the view that all people are created equal / a child of God and the view that some people are not. Their language of respect rather than justice continues a long history of prioritizing being “more cautious than courageous” and in so doing demonstrates both institutions’ failure to live up to the standards of integrity, equality, and “respect” for all that they claim to promote.

 

~ Jennifer Patrice Sims, PhD, is an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Her work examines racial perception, mixed race identity and the sociology of fictional societies, in particular Harry Potter. A life-long Roman Catholic, she also engages in dialogues analyzing the ways that organized religions are complacent in and/or contribute to social inequality.  

Understanding the Trump Moment: Reality TV, Birtherism, the Alt Right and the White Women’s Vote

• • politics

Many of us are waking up to a November 9 that we never could have imagined. Donald J. Trump, real estate developer and reality TV celebrity, is president-elect of the United States. Over the last 18 months of his campaign, he has engaged in explicitly racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim language that has both shocked and frightened people. The implications of what a Trump presidency could mean for ginning up racial and ethnic hatred are chilling.

 

 

But first, it’s important to understand the Trump moment, and what led to it. This is an election that will be spawn a thousand hot-takes and reams of academic papers, but here’s a first draft on making sense of this victory.

Reality TV

Donald Trump is not a successful businessman, but he played one on TV.  “The Apprentice,” gave Donald Trump a powerful platform over fourteen seasons (2004-2014).

Since about 2000, and the premiere of “Big Brother,”  the media landscape has been transformed by the proliferation of non-fiction television, so-called “reality TV.” Driven by low production costs and drawing large audiences for advertisers, reality TV shows have proven reliable media products.

Trump’s “Apprentice,” is one of many within the genre of reality TV based around work. From “Project Runway,” to “Top Chef,” viewers tune in to watch people compete to keep their jobs, or get cut. Heidi Klum tells aspiring fashion designers, “auf Wiedersehen,”  Padma Lakshmi, sends hopeful chefs away with, “please pack your knives,” and Donald, of course, told would-be entrepreneurs, “You’re fired!”

The success of “The Apprentice,” and shows like it – where we watch people do a difficult job, typically for little money, under grueling conditions (or, “challenges,”) only to see them voted off or “fired,” speaks to the triumph of neoliberalism. We don’t just work at difficult jobs for little money under grueling conditions with the constant threat of being fired, we can also enjoy that as a form of entertainment.

Trump’s rise to prominence through “The Apprentice,” and the proliferation of shows like it, says something  about the transformation of the media landscape. Scholars such as Laurie Ouellette (and others) argue that reality-based TV has become a mechanism that meets the increasing demand for self-governance in the post-welfare state. Ouellette writes that reality-based TV shows like “Judge Judy” drive home the message that everyone must “take responsibility for yourself.”  In other words, to be good neoliberal citizens — “productive citizens” — requires a lot of work on the self, and a lot of work on work. What better evidence of the way that we’ve thoroughly internalized the lessons of neoliberalism than through our voracious consumption of reality-TV shows of people working (and getting fired)? And, now, we’ve affirmed this once again through the election of a reality TV star as president.

Of course, the imagined neoliberal citizen on these shows is white by default (the contestants of color are often the earliest to go), as is Trump’s vision of America and what will “make it great again.”

Birtherism

Remarkably for someone elected to the presidency, Donald Trump has no previous political experience. His emergence on the political landscape is due to his early, loud, racist denunciation of President Obama as “not born in this country,” and his crackpot call to “show the birth certificate.” Obama eventually relented to this request, and Trump counts this as one of his proudest achievements.

While most of us on the left rolled our eyes at the preposterousness of birtherism and decried the obvious racism of it, it resonated deeply with wide swaths of the populace. They, too, felt that there just wasn’t something right about a Black president with a funny sounding name in the White House.

Meanwhile, those on the right denied the clear racism of Trump’s birtherism. Although Colin Powell said “birtherism is racism” and Michael Steele, former RNC chair did call it “bullshit racism,” few on the right joined them in denouncing Trump or his tirades about Obama’s birth certificate.

Instead of disqualifying him presidential politics, Trump’s birtherism helped him build a base of otherwise disaffected white voters, whites who felt that there was something deeply wrong about a Black president. Pollsters missed these voters in the run-up to the election. And, like Nixon, Trump says that he speaks for this “silent majority.”  These are also the white voters who are listening to Alex Jones’ “Infowars” , a daily talk show that airs on 63 stations nationwide, with a bigger audience online than Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck combined. Jones schtick is to connect unrelated dots into vast conspiracy theories, which often feature the Clintons or other establishment politicians as the villains. There is a short leap, some would say no leap at all, from Jones’ brand of conspiracy theories and the anti-Semitism in Trump’s last campaign ad.

The Alt-RIght

Trump found willing allies for his brand of racism in the alt-right.  In case you’ve missed the dozens or so articles and puff pieces about them, they alt-right is the latest iteration of white nationalism. They are recognized as a hate group by the SPLC, which offers the following definition:

The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew “establishment” conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.

While some are speculating that “the GOP was primed for a white nationalist takeover,”  this gets the direction of the relationship wrong. It’s not that the alt-right launched a takeover of the Republican party, it’s that Trump found common cause in the alt-right. And, he did it through Twitter.

As J.M. Berger notes in his carefully reported piece, white nationalists were initially hostile to Trump because they thought he was Jewish or was, their terms, “a White man who wishes he were born a Jew.” During Trump’s birther campaign, white supremacists at Stormfront were debating the sincerity of Trump, “some said he was a Jewish plant, intended to deceive gullible white nationalists into supporting him, or just to make them look like idiots by association,” according to Berger.

In June 2015, Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer a popular neo-Nazi site, wrote:

“I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President. If The Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.”

As Berger tells it, Anglin was the first white supremacist to voice support for Trump. And, the following month, Trump doubled-down on his anti-Mexican racism. This gained him even more supporters among the far-right.  From Berger, again:

Trump was surging in the polls “because he is not on his knees before Mexico and Mexican immigrants,” said Jared Taylor of the influential white nationalist website American Renaissance, which under the guise of “race realism” attempts to put an intellectual face on white nationalism. “Americans, real Americans, have been dreaming of a candidate who says the obvious, that illegal immigrants from Mexico are a low-rent bunch that includes rapists and murderers.”

Over the summer of 2015, the alt-right began to accept Trump as someone who shared their views on race, as evidenced by discussions online. But this sort of thing is not new, white supremacists have talked about mainstream candidates’ views online (and before that, in printed newsletters) for decades now. What happened next was different.

In July 2015, a tweet appeared from Trump’s account showing a stock photo of Nazi S.S. soldiers where American soldiers should have been. The Trump campaign blamed an intern for the mistake, and the incident faded from the news cycle. But at the white nationalist site Daily Stormer, Anglin wrote,

“Obviously, most people will be like ‘obvious accident, no harm done, Meanwhile, we here at the Daily Stormer will be all like ‘wink wink wink wink wink.’”

It’s this media circulation that came to define the Trump relationship with the alt-right and part of what helped him win. He would say something, in a speech or on Twitter or calling into one of the television talk shows, then deny or disavow the racism (if called on it), while the white nationalists dutifully perked up and heard in those messages a like-mind.  So, for example, when Trump tweeted a graphic showing false statistics vastly exaggerating black crime, white nationalists responded enthusiastically. The graphic was later traced back to a white nationalist on Twitter. Trump deflected criticism from Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly by arguing, essentially, that retweets are not endorsements. “I retweeted somebody who was supposedly an expert,” Trump said. “Am I going to check every statistic?”

 

In late 2015, the Trump and alt-right Twitter game changed. A white nationalist meme maker named Bob Whitaker, has worked for years to popularize the phrase “white genocide” as a meme online. Whitaker started trying to goad Trump into re-tweeting the something with “white genocide” in it.  In late January 2016, Trump took the bait, retweeting a message that had been directed to him from a user with the handle “@WhiteGenocideTM.” While the content of the tweet was relatively innocuous (a light jab at an opponent), the user’s account was filled with anti-Semitic content and linked to a revisionist biography of Adolf Hitler. More importantly, white nationalists saw this as a much more overt nod from Trump to justify their enthusiasm.

From there, Trump and the alt-right engaged in a nodding and winking relationship that suggested a closeness, even as Trump occasionally and mildly “disavowed” white nationalists like David Duke. (Duke was a relative latecomer to endorsing Trump among white nationalists, but has been an ardent supporter once on board.) The close relationship between Trump and the alt-right has been so widely acknowledged that it even made it into the spoof for SNL.

The relationship was cemented when Trump chose Stephen Bannon, of Breitbart Meida, to run his campaign. Unlike a mainstream GOP operative or campaign strategist who might have suggested a more “presidential tone,” Bannon assured Trump he should stick to his overtly racist messaging. The alt-right rejoiced when Bannon joined the Trump campaign. And, Bannon turned out to be correct about what appealed to voters. Trump’s campaign, from start (Mexicans “are rapists,”) to finish (the anti-Semitic last ad) has used overtly and sometimes not-thinly veiled racist language to appeal to voters. And, white people showed up by the millions to vote for him and his message.

More White Women Voted for Trump than Clinton

Over the next weeks and months, there will be a lot written about the angry white male voter, and deservedly so. But white women voted for Donald Trump, too.

In fact, more white women voted for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton. Here’s how white women voted:

(Image source)

That’s 53% of white women who voted for Trump. There is an official “Women for Trump” website. And, drawing on that as evidence, it doesn’t seem that most of the women who support Trump are concerned with what he has said about (or done to) women. One white woman who supports Trump, Jane Biddick, reportedly said: “Groping is a healthy thing to do. When you’re heterosexual, you grope, okay? It’s a good thing,” (New York Magazine).

White women voted for Trump for the same reasons as white men.  As the Washington Post reported in April 2016. Trump’s rhetoric of “taking back the country” and “banning immigrants” appealed to the white women of the Tea Party. And, a poll from January 2016, found that white women are the angriest voters, angrier even than their male counterparts.

For the most part, mainstream journalists (and documentary filmmakers) miss the reality of the angry white woman who votes GOP because of silly, wrong-headed notions about “womanhood.”   In a related mistake, people often make in thinking about “women voters” is that women are going to vote as a block. It’s a mistake the suffragists made in the early 20th century. They thought once women got the vote, they would all vote the same. Because…. women, you know, shared interests.

But research has shown again and again that class and race are more reliable predictors of voting behavior than gender. In other words, women respond to economic and racial issues in much the same ways as men do. And, if you’re surprised that more white women voted for Trump than for Hillary Clinton, then you haven’t been keeping track of the trouble that white women are in (here’s a guide to the trouble, in case you want to catch up).

Shocking, Frightening… but Not Surprising

The election of Donald Trump is shocking. It is a deep jolt to the soul to realize that a man with no qualifications, no human decency, no compassion, no moral center, is going to be the next president of the U.S.

The election results are also frightening. I fear for all my friends, my chosen family, the people I love, the students I teach, who are among those that Donald Trump wants to stop-and-frisk, deport, exile, ban, and keep out with a wall. I feel the need for better, more practical, skills to enlist in the resistance to a Trump regime. I want MacGyver-like skills to be able to bust my friends out of the camps.  But there is no re-tooling my way out of this fear. It is set to run for four years.

As shocked and frightened as I am, I can’t say that I’m surprised.  I’ve written about the overlap between extremist white supremacy and mainstream politicians for over twenty years (White Lies, 1997). As the groups I studied in the early 1990s moved online, I followed their transition there (Cyber Racism, 2009). So for me, the emergence of an alt-right that’s cleverly used the Internet, or a candidate that’s made deft use of Twitter isn’t surprising.

Trump’s victory should remind us that white supremacy is not new and it is not an aberration. It’s a consistent feature of our political landscape. Yet, there’s a kind of naïveté among some (white) writers covering Trump who are shocked at his success. But we should not be surprised. In the U.S., we cling to an illusion about our inevitable progress away from a past of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and overt racism. Some of us even hoped that electing the first African American president would mean a post-racial era, but the fact that Stormfront’s servers crashed the night Obama was elected should have made us more circumspect about how transformative that was for us as a nation, and who felt left out of those celebrations.

This election, white people — including a majority of white women — voted for a candidate endorsed by the KKK.  This is a mirror.

Trump’s Speech: Emoting White Supremacy

• • politics

I just watched Donald J.Trump accept the GOP nomination and his speech was a delivery device for white supremacist rhetoric. Trump’s speech proved popular with that audience, as David Duke, noted white supremacist, tweeted his congratulations:

The language Trump used, terms like “too politically correct,” “law and order,” “war on police,” the “illegal immigrants spilling over” borders, murdering “innocent young girls,” and, of course, the repeated use of “our country” in an auditorium filled with whiter-shade-of-pale white people, are all dog whistles that signal a core white supremacist message: White people built this nation, white people are this nation.

Don’t believe me? Check this is line drawing:

white men buildings

The drawing originally appeared in Tom Metzger’s newsletter, W.A.R. (White Aryan Resistance), and I included it in my book, White Lies (Routledge, 1997).

Part of the argument I made in that book is that white supremacist rhetoric is gendered. That is, white men are viewed differently than white women. The second part is that the language used by extremists is actually echoed in the mainstream. So, for example, that image from Metzger is uncannily similar to this (recent) ad for a series on the History Channel:

men who built america

The message is the same in the extremist publication as in the television ad. Both put white people at the center of the narrative about the country’s history. (updated 9:10am to add:) This is also the same message that Steve King (R-IA) was making when he asked the (rhetorical) question: “where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”  And, Trump himself is a frequent re-tweeter of white supremacist accounts. One analysis estimates that a whopping 62% of Trump’s re-tweets are of accounts that have white supremacist connections.

Steve King on white people

 

It’s too easy to point and laugh at the white supremacists in the funny outfits (like Trump’s dad), while we fail to pay attention to the way white supremacy operates in our own institutions and families.

I called the book ‘white lies’ because such narratives distort the truth about whose labor actually built the wealth in this country: African, Latinx, Asian and Native people. That labor, and the wealth and products created by it, were routinely plundered by white people.

This is the lie of Trump’s speech, too.

As he would have it, white people (those in included in “our”) are somehow more entitled, deserving or worthy of being here than anyone else. It’s the idea at the heart of white supremacy. But, fact checking Trump doesn’t seem to be working..

One of the examples I used to make my case about the connection between extremist and more mainstream rhetoric was Pat Buchanan’s 1992 convention speech, which declared that there was a ‘culture war’ for the ‘soul of America.’

Pat Buchanan was once considered on the far-right of the Republican party, but in the past few years, the party – not to mention the country as a whole – has tilted far to the right. Buchanan’s once extreme views, are now regarded as mainstream. And, tonight, Trump delivered what amounted to a ‘dumbed down’ version of Buchanan’s 1992 speech.

What Trump is better at doing than most is emoting white supremacy. He’s galvanizing people based on feelings, not facts.

Trump wearing a hat

He ended his speech tonight with the repetition and variation on “Make America Great Again,” replacing great with Strong, Proud, and Safe. The fact that Trump’s message has been so effective with 14 million people suggests that there are lots of people who are feeling weak, ashamed, and afraid.

Sociologist Thomas Scheff, who studies emotions, argues that the emotion of ‘shame’ is perhaps the most powerful feeling and that it runs underneath many social problems. Most violence, he argues, is caused by a response to shame. It’s my guess that this undergirds much of Trump’s appeal, particularly around race. The line about “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore,” is a way of saying, “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of the offensive things I say or do.”

Is there a political strategy to galvanize a set of emotions that run counter to the fear that he is spinning into political gold? I don’t know, but desperately wish I did.

“Making America Great Again”: Race, Resentment and Donald Trump

• • politics

As I wrote in my 2011 book, At this Defining Moment, the dominant narrative to emerge from the American media concerning the 2008 U.S. presidential election was that with Barack Obama’s victory, the U.S. had finally turned the page on its dark history of racial strife, and was well on its way to definitively vanquishing the problem of race. The clear evidence of the past 8 years, however, is that this sentiment was woefully premature. The U.S. is a deeply polarized nation at this time with regard to issues of race and social justice, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the startling and disturbing presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

The Man, in His Own Words

Donald Trump’s rise and fervent populist appeal initially baffled, astounded, and flummoxed political observers from all sides of the political spectrum. For months, he grabbed headline after headline with his noxious, racially tingled rhetoric, flagrant anti-immigrant nativism, “frat-boy” masculine bravado, sexual boasting, general aura of crudeness and total disregard for the accepted rules of political discourse. Surely, it was at first believed, Trump’s campaign would be a short-lived farce.

A real-estate tycoon and reality television show star, Trump had never held political office and demonstrated very little knowledge of foreign or domestic policy; and his “exceeding flexible positions on different hot-button issues” meant that he would never pass muster as a true “conservative” with a capital C. In response to the major challenges facing the U.S., Trump had offered only a string of exceedingly vague, boastful proposals, to include ending illegal immigration by building a “big, fat beautiful wall” along the entire U.S./Mexico border, and turning the country around by “hav[ing] so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning.”

Trump has largely built his 2016 presidential bid around a series of inflammatory statements articulated around the axes of race, nation and immigration. He has advocated establishing a database to register American Muslims, killing the extended family members of suspected terrorists, torturing military enemies and overturning the 14th amendment to end birthright citizenship. Following the June 2016 mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, he went as far as to propose “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Much of Trump’s rhetoric has also centered in on “Mexicans.” “When Mexico sends its people,” he told an enthusiastic crowd gathered at his campaign kick-off in June 2015,

they’re not sending their best. . . . .They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

The candidate caused an uproar in early June 2016 with his repeated insistence that the U.S.-born federal judge Gonzalo Curiel was unfit to preside over a lawsuit against him because the judge’s parents had immigrated from Mexico. And though Trump claims to “have a great relationship with the blacks,” in February 2016 he gave a wink and a nod to the American white supremacist movement, by repeatedly refusing to disavow the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, saying that he needed to do some “research” before he could distance himself from any group that might be “totally fine.” The day after the interview, Trump issued a brief disavowal, blaming “a bad earpiece” for his earlier failure to disown the KKK.

The Clear Choice

The Trump campaign, however, was not a farce. And it soon became clear that Trump succeeded not in spite of his inflammatory speech, but because of it. In the Republican primary, Trump easily defeated more than 15 declared rivals, including 9 state governors and 5 U.S. senators. Desperate, organized efforts on the part of GOP leaders in early 2016 to thwart Trump’s pursuit of the nomination met with utter failure. His campaign boasted in early June that Trump had won more primary votes than any other Republican candidate in history, a claim that several media outlets subsequently verified as true.

Trump is reviled by the American left, which views him as pompous, uninformed, racist, nativist, misogynistic and anti-American, or some combination of the above. In an interesting twist, Trump has come to be perhaps equally reviled by much of the conservative intellectual class. A wide swath of prominent thinkers to the right-of-center have condemned Trump, describing him as a crude “megalomaniac” with no actual allegiance to the conservative cause, “epically unprepared” to be president, and likely to destroy the Republican party. In the words of one conservative journalist,

Donald Trump has risen to become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee over the strenuous objections of just about every rightist who’s ever lifted a pen.

Members of the Republican establishment, for their part, have been bitterly divided over the candidate. While some openly support him, others, such as former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have vigorously denounced him. For the majority of Republican elected officials, however, Trump appears to be an albatross wrapped around their necks; the clear, if inexplicable, choice of their base, a man that they must hold their noses to accept and endorse through gritted teeth.

Making America Great Again

Trump is now one of two people that will become the next president of the United States. His run-away success in the race thus far comes despite condemnation from the American left and the conservative media and the limited, grudging support of GOP insiders. Trump’s rise cannot, therefore, be explained on the basis of conventional political allegiances and the normal workings of the two-party system. The key to his ascendency lies, instead, in his ability to appeal directly to the rage and aggrievement of a powerful key demographic- working and middle-class white American men, and his concomitant promise to elevate white American manhood again to its rightful place of dominance and superiority.

There are clear parallels, in my reading, between Obama’s first race for the White House and Trump’s current bid. In the 2008 campaign, Obama figured as a kind of black “messiah” or “savior” figure among white liberals, endowed with “superhuman powers” to “redeem” white Americans and to heal the nation’s racial wounds (Logan 2011).

Trump occupies a similar role in this race among his supporters on the right. He figures in the election as a populist superhero, a crusader and champion of the cause of a right-wing white masculinity that perceives itself to be profoundly imperiled and deeply aggrieved. Brash, braggadocios, and unapologetic, Trump’s racialized, patriarchal rhetoric articulates a rage rooted in a deeply felt loss of racial and gendered entitlement. For an angry, dying brand of white American masculinity, he stands as validation, spokesman, and belligerent defender.

Trump’s candidacy can be described as a response to Obama’s presidencies (race) to Hillary Clinton’s rise (gender)—both made him more possible, more likely at this time. He is also a response to the “dog-whistle politics” of racial and gendered resentment and the blatant obstructionism of President Obama’s policies practiced by Republican leaders during the last 8 years. But the anger and aggrievement fueling Trump’s rise have much deeper roots as well; grounded in a decades-long resentment of those- “minorities,” immigrants, feminists, gays and liberals – who have usurped “our” country and taken away “our” freedoms. Whereas white males have been the losers in American culture for decades now, Trump boldly declares that he is a “winner,” “always” winning. Whereas the U.S. has for too long been going down the drain, Trump proclaims that he will “Make America Great Again,” restoring to prominence the powerful triumvirate of whiteness, masculinity, and American global dominance.

The election thus, has come to reframe the broader culture war in the United States. What is at stake is a definition of who and what America is, who is a person, who has rights, who is fully entitled, and who is a pariah. Just how far should we take this “equality” thing anyway. As one journalist writes,

This election is a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men — as voters, as citizens, as workers, as members of the military, as presidents.

However haltingly and painfully, change is coming to America. But a core of white American men- many of them Trump supporters- are in open revolt. Railing against the cultural and demographic shifts taking place in the U.S., they have pledged allegiance to the demagogue and authoritarian that gives voice to their rage. Trump now elevates and legitimizes the most base instincts and bigotry of certain portions of the electorate. Thus it is assured that, even given his likely electoral defeat, there are many more years of ugliness and conflict around race, immigration and a host of other issues, to come.

Dr. Enid Logan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.

Latino Voters Have Had Enough

• • Latinos, politics

 

Woman Holds Latino Eligible Voter Sign

 

Politicians have conveniently vilified Latinos for political gain for far too long. Coming of political age in California where Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who was described as too “wonkish” and “underwhelming” successfully won a second term as governor largely because of his anti-immigrant campaign tactics, I have heard racist commentary to prop up politicians for as long as I can remember. According to law professor Ian Haney López, politicians have been using coded language to disguise racist messages to win electoral support among whites in what he refers to as “dog whistle politics.”

Haney López demonstrates how this tactic has successfully been used by both political parties since at least George Wallace and the Republicans regained control of the South; however, it is about to implode this presidential election. The dog whistle fell into the wrong hands with Trump this time. Consequently, it will have disastrous results on the Republican Party during this presidential election cycle—some of which we are seeing already as Republican donors are not giving their money and long-time Republicans, such as George Will, are leaving the party.

Why aren’t dog whistle politics going to work during this presidential election? Two simple reasons: changing racial and ethnic demographics and immigration politics.

Demographics. According to a PEW Research Center finding, eligible voters from ethnic and racial groups will comprise 31% of the electorate making this the most racially diverse electorate in U.S. history. Furthermore, the largest number of Latinos will be eligible to vote in U.S. history at 27.3 million – up from 23.3 million in the 2012 presidential election. Of these Latino voters, PEW researchers point out: “Hispanic millennials will account for nearly half (44%) of the record 27.3 million Hispanic eligible voters projected for 2016—a share greater than any other racial or ethnic group of voters.”  This brings me to my next point.

Woman Holds Latino Voters: Making History Sign Aloft

 

Immigration politics. The recent Supreme Courts 4-4 ruling that halts President Obama’s executive actions protecting undocumented immigrants will matter even before the issue is addressed by the Court again. This is because an estimated 4 million undocumented immigrants have children who are U.S. citizens. As my co-authors and I detail in our study of undocumented Latino youth, Living the Dream, the racializing effects generated by our broken immigration system have had a permanent impact on their lives. These young Latinos have missed out on countless opportunities growing up—from participation in extracurricular activities and attendance at elite colleges where they have been accepted to being separated from their parents who have been deported. For most of these Latino youth, the U.S. is the only country they have ever known and it has attacked them and their families yet again with this Supreme Court decision. Most of these Latinos have grown up in mixed-status families and a majority of all Latinos voters have personal connections with someone who is undocumented.

Clearly, immigration matters to Latino voters. This presidential election will remind Republicans—who are supposedly all about family values and personal responsibility—that the personal is political for Latino voters and their families, as I’ve noted at NBC Latino News.

While the Republican Party falls apart before our eyes—in large part because of the racist messages by Trump—one can assume this will impact the other branches of government as well. With a Democratically controlled Senate and a new Democratic president that is sympathetic to immigration reform a new liberal Supreme Court majority will soon follow. All this will prove to be a window of opportunity to finally pass comprehensive immigration reform and may eventually threaten the race-based gerrymandering that has contributed to building today’s Republican advantage in the House.

Of course, all this will only happen if Latinos and other people of color turnout out in record numbers. I am hopeful that the results of this election show us all that the days of dog whistle politics are numbered.

~ Maria Chavez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pacific Lutheran University and a regular contributor to Racism Review.

Protestors Force Cancelation of Trump Rally in Chicago

• • politics

The activists at University of Illinois-Chicago, where Trump had scheduled a rally, effectively shut it down yesterday. When the rally was abruptly canceled at the last minute, Trump supporters and protestors clashed. Several people were injured.

This brief video puts the events of last night into some context of Trump’s escalating remarks at recent rallies (12:50 with a :30 advertisement at the beginning):

As this timeline created by Maddow’s production team illustrates, the rhetoric of Donald Trump is escalating and is now, pretty plainly, inciting violence among his supporters. Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric reaches beyond his rallies. Just two weeks ago, white high school students attending their school’s basketball game chanted “Trump, Trump, Trump” as way to intimidate their mostly Latino opponents on the other team.

What the clip by Maddow doesn’t mention is the way that mainstream news outlets, including MSNBC which airs her show, are complicit in this. The television news outlets give Trump free air time because it is good for their ratings. And, of course, it benefits Trump’s campaign. According to one estimate from January this year, Fox News alone has given Trump the equivalent of more than $30 million in free air time.

Because these events happened in Chicago at an event related to a presidential campaign, many people in the US were reminded of the violence against protestors at the 1968 Democratic Chicago convention. While this became a turning point in American politics, I don’t think this is the most apt comparison.

I think that Trump’s candidacy, and the appeal to his supporters, speaks to a much more sinister comparison. As Brent Staples, writing at the New York Times, recently pointed out, Trump’s rhetoric harkens back to reconstruction era politics. Here is Staples, and it’s worth quoting him at length:

Antigovernment and militia groups have grown rapidly since 2008. Shortly after Mr. Obama’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, reported that the antigovernment militia movement had undergone a resurgence, fueled partly “by fears of a black man in the White House.” And for proof of violence like that of the Reconstruction era, look no further than the young white supremacist who is charged with murdering nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston, S.C., last summer.

This is the backdrop against which Donald Trump blew a kiss to the white supremacist movement during a television interview by refusing to disavow the support of the white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Republican Party leaders in Congress wagged their fingers and delivered pro forma denunciations. What they need to understand is this: Racial hatred is a threat to the country and their party’s leading candidate is doing everything he can to profit from it.

That’s what Donald Trump is doing with this increasingly violent and hate-filled rhetoric, he’s “blowing a kiss to the white supremacist movement.” This is the GOP frontrunner and presumptive nominee for president of the US. These are dire times.

What the protests at the rally last night in Chicago showed is that it is possible for people to stand up against the bigotry and hatred of Trump and his supporters. It’s not just possible, it’s necessary.

Trump and White Nativism

• • politics, racism

(image source)

Thanks to the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the 2016 presidential election has become a national referendum on racism. When Americans elected Barack Obama in 2008 many hoped that it signaled the long-promised denouement of white supremacy. But for many others, Obama’s presidency represented their worst nightmares realized. Now, as Mychal Denzel Smith observed recently about Trump: “He is the backlash.” Or, as comedian Larry Wilmore frames it, the Unblackening of the White House has begun.

But Trump’s appeal is not really new. In fact, it’s as old as the United States.

Beginning in 1790, the US made white skin a prerequisite for citizenship. This hateful pigment bias established white skin as the norm for US citizens. By making whiteness the norm, the founders categorized non-white skin as a type of deviance. This is not just history. In 2015, a federal judge reaffirmed as recently as 2015.

This means that, for people of color, even the simple act of appearing in public constitutes a form of anti-normative criminality. The fact that people of color are vastly overrepresented in US prisons in large part because they are more likely to be perceived by law enforcement as “incorrigible recidivists.”

How could a nation that touts itself as “the world’s greatest democracy” equate non-white skin with criminal deviance?

Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, argued that every society constructs its own definitions of deviance. Deviance functions as a type of social glue. It works by lionizing those who comply with social norms and stigmatizing those who don’t. The US’s European settler-colonialists incorporated an ethnocentric preference for white skin into the political substrate of American democracy and designated everyone else ‘deviant.’

These European settler-colonialists wanted to claim ownership of an entire continent that was already occupied. If Europeans were going to make a home for themselves in North America, they would either have to share the continent with its original inhabitants, or they would have to murder millions of indigenous people and steal their land.

(image source)

Although Native Americans may have been willing to co-exist, Europeans weren’t keen on the idea of sharing. They were keen on the idea of plunder. So, Europeans invented the ludicrous fiction of white nativism. White nativism is the notion that light-skinned Europeans are North America’s true natives. As the true natives, whites are deserving of all that plunder. Or, so the fiction goes.

White nativists have constructed a range of prejudices for different groups of people in the US. White nativists enacted genocide against Native Americans, instituted slavery, established Jim Crow, and devised mass incarceration for African Americans. White Nativists have also excluded Chinese immigrants from the US, interned Japanese Americans and have treated Latinos as if they were all illegal immigrants. More recently, white nativists have openly contemplated a national ban on Muslims. Through these mechanism the US has celebrated whiteness and denigrated those with relatively more skin pigment.

Donald Trump takes pleasure in fomenting racism for his own political gain. Given Trump’s nauseating popularity as a 2016 presidential candidate, it is also obvious that many Americans share Trump’s white nativist tendencies. Since entering the 2016 presidential race, each time Trump has uttered a despicably racist comment his popularity with the American public has increased.

Donald Trump wants to take America back to the days when privileged white racists got their jollies by terrorizing people of color. Sadly, a passionate cadre of fellow racists want to help Donald Trump set civil rights back a century. It doesn’t have to be like this.

If Americans really love democracy, then they — and by that I mean we — can and must dismantle white supremacist racism. And we need to start dismantling racism today.

In our book, A Formula for Eradicating Racism, Earl Smith and I argue that Americans can terminate the climate of sadism that inspires white supremacist racism by erasing the Three-Fifths Compromise from the US Constitution and replacing it with a universal declaration of human equality.

We could, as a nation, choose to do this. Other countries, including South Africa, have embraced human rights as part of their foundational tenets.

Or, we could elect Donald Trump. If America elects Trump, a candidate now endorsed by the likes of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

Register. Vote. And tell your non-Trump-voting friends and family to do likewise.

~ Professor Tim McGettigan teaches sociology at Colorado State University-Pueblo and he writes books about social change. Most recently, he is the co-author, with Earl Smith, of A Formula for Eradicating Racism: Debunking White Supremacy. 

Trump-adas

• • Latinos, politics

Note to readers: This post is written by Rubén Blades and is translated from Spanish. This title, Trump-ada, is a play on the Spanish word “trompada,“ which means “punch” or “blow with the fist” and the suffix “ada” which can indicate “series” or “collection,” as in series or collection of Trump’s statements. 

 

TheDonalds - Trump and Duck

(The Donalds, Trump and Duck – image source)

Many decades ago Walt Disney created a character that initially attracted more hostility than affection: Donald Duck. Irascibility was his dominant trait; When things did not go his way, Donald blew up in a paroxysm yelling at the top of his lungs in a language that normal people could not understand.

Donald Duck reminds me of Donald Trump. They share much beyond a common first name, with one exception: While Donald Duck has never worn pants (clothing), the human Donald boasts of his pants’ (masculinity’s) prowess and as proof he rants against anyone who has the audacity to contradict his opinions, that are just that, opinions instead of governmental programs or concrete proposals aimed at dealing responsibly with the complexities of public leadership. I have some knowledge about these matters. I ran in a national election as a candidate for Panama’s presidency, and served for five years in an official capacity, where I was exposed to public scrutiny from all sides. I believe that such experience qualifies me to offer my opinion on the views of Mr. Trump, a very rich bragger whose ego surpasses his country’s GNP. His latest shenanigan was to have journalist Jorge Ramos removed from one of his soliloquies that he disguises as a press conferences.

Like his namesake, Donald (Duck), Mr. Trump reacted irritably to Mr. Ramos’s questions and Mr. Ramos’s position within Univisión, which was one of the first members of the media to respond to Mr. Trump’s racist insults. Although some believe that Mr. Ramos provoked the incident by asking questions out of turn or to attract attention I believe that he wanted Trump to face what Trump does so frequently: bullying. In other words, Trump faced some of his own music and reacted with his habitual arrogance.

Later he allowed Jorge Ramos to return to the press conference, as if it were a safe-conduct or dispensation so that Jorge could do his job. Of course, that didn’t alter Mr. Trump’s ugly political image. Today the United States has one of the most intelligent and well-meaning Presidents in the last forty years. It bears mentioning that many of Mr. Obama’s programs,, what he wanted or attempted to bring to fruition, have been destroyed by the Republican Party and its exponents such as Mr. Trump. I don’t believe that these problems faced by Mr. Obama are the exclusive products of racism, which, by the way exists not only in the United States but in Latin America as well. This is something we all need to be aware of.

The obstacle to Mr. Obama’s plans is the opposition of certain sectors to changes that would bring a better and fairer society. Mr. Trump’s contrary approach to politics, “Speak whatever comes to mind and worry about a reason later,” attracts a growing number of followers which is scary The struggle in the United States, not quite a war yet, is not only over money but also over ideas. What he slyly discusses is the kind of society he wants the United States to be in twenty years. Trump’s attitude, wild generalizations and a paternalism that conveys a false message of solidarity constitute some of the worst that this noble nation has to offer.

The followers who put up with his nonsense are not just Anglos. He has some Latino backers who are captivated by Trump’s material accomplishments and conclude falsely that he is rich and therefore does not have to “steal.”

To criticize Trump makes as much sense as striking a drunkard because of the idiotic things he says. Let us just deny him the credibility he is after. He is satisfying his ego with his actions. I don’t see him as a dedicated, serious candidate. When the time comes for him to change his furor and vague generalities into serious and concise arguments, his manifest incompetence will end his campaign. He will blame others but he will not be able to get out of his predicament.

In the meantime he is having fun and gaining the fame he obsesses about and that makes him think that his pronouncements or actions actually matter. More upsetting than Trump himself is to see how many people find hope in his political stand without realizing that their hope is tantamount to expecting a well-thought out, rational and productive dialogue. Donald Duck was created to make us laugh. The other Donald is programmed to cause harm. This is nothing to laugh about.

 

~ Rubén Blades is a Panamanian actor and singer who has won several Grammy awards. He holds a Master’s degree in International Law from Harvard University. In 1998 he ran for Panama’s presidency and won 18% of the vote. Here he gives us in the United States a view of how the world sees us and our racialized politics, especially in regard to Latinos and Latino issues. The original appeared, in Spanish, on Rubén Blades’ website, and it has been translated and reposted here with permission of the author, by José Cobas, with the assistance of Stephania Myers Irizarry. There were only minor changes from the original.