Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
i agree trump is weak.
that doesn’t support your demonstrably ludicrous claim, that if one chooses to act like a non racist, that he won’t get called a racist. this has nothing o do with trump, he’s one of many people
labeled as racist after beating the left.
george w bush has done far more for africa than any human being who has ever lived, saved the lives of more than a million africans thanks to his work with aids and malaria. but he was a racist.
McCains thanks for telling people
not to be afraid of obama, was being labeled a racist.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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A columnist, Jane Coaston, recently wrote this about just this subject.
I’ve been writing on conservatism and the right for several years. As part of that work, I spend most of my time reading right-leaning news outlets and opinion journals and talking to conservatives — fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, Trump-supportive, Trump-adjacent, and Trump-skeptical.
And in those travels, there’s an argument I hear a lot, particularly in the past week — that had liberals not been so quick to call some on the right, or some ideas on the right, racist, perhaps the right would not have resorted to uniting behind Donald Trump.
What if, in truth, the conservative movement’s inability to self-police itself against racism and establish firm guardrails against racists in the movement has resulted in an American right increasingly beholden to racism and racist arguments?
And what if, in truth, it’s the left that has seen this most clearly and that has been pointing it out again and again? Perhaps, if your movement has ultimately rallied around a racist, allegedly in response to being called racist, that’s evidence that the people who saw the power racist arguments held in your movement, and the frequency with which those views were referenced, were onto something all along.
Viewed in this light, the popularity of this excuse — the idea that if the left hadn’t been pointing out racism on the right, the right never would have embraced a racist as its leader — is the same denial that got conservatives into this mess perpetuating itself.
Right-leaning racism, weaponized
To begin with, the term “racism” includes ideas, policies, and actions that are based in prejudicial attitudes against people based on their real or perceived racial or ethnic identity and qualities associated with that background.
And it should be clear by now that racism, like any form of prejudice, has gradations. Not all racism is the racism of the men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Sometimes it’s the racism of middle-class white liberals who fervently oppose school desegregation efforts in major cities under the belief that the presence of black children would result in plummeting school quality. Sometimes it is the racism of the benighted “racial realists” who arrived at the conclusion that nonwhite people are inferior and have spent the past several centuries working to backfill an explanation. And sometimes it’s the racism of a Donald Trump, who, as I wrote last year, was shocked that members of the Congressional Black Caucus didn’t already know Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.
And very rarely do racists think of themselves as racist. As former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, the man who once said, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” said in an interview in 1968, “No, sir, I don’t regard myself as a racist, and I think the biggest racists in the world are those who call other folks racist. I think the biggest bigots in the world are those who call other folks bigots.”
But the kind of racism that’s most common in movement conservatism — by which I mean the political project of conservatism, with the intent of winning elections and changing policy and law — is what I call “instrumentalized” racism, the deliberate use of racism and racist tropes for the sole purpose of winning votes and elections.
People who engage in instrumentalized racism do so not necessarily because they themselves are “racist” on an individual level, but because they believe that voters will respond — and perhaps only respond — to racism. (After losing an election in 1958 to John Patterson, who had a devoted Klan following, Wallace allegedly said that he would never let a political adversary “out-ni**er” him again.) They can thus brag about the great work they’ve done on behalf of minority communities and their lack of racist bones while simultaneously wielding racism as a political cudgel — a cudgel they argue is necessary.
After all, even Patterson said in 2008 of his past racist invective, “When I became governor, there were 14 of us running for governor that time and all 14 of us were outspoken for segregation in the public schools. And if you had been perceived not to have been strong for that, you would not have won. I regret that, but there was not anything I could do about it but to live with it.” And Wallace famously said of his own campaigns, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about ni**ers, and they stomped the floor.”
But instrumentalized racism, of course, continued long after the fall of de jure Jim Crow. The 2000 Republican primary gave a tremendous (and considerably more recent) example of the genre:
In the 2000 Republican presidential primary then-Governor George Bush of Texas was running against Senator John McCain of Arizona. McCain won the New Hampshire primary and the race went on to South Carolina where the Bush campaign knew they had to stop McCain. Using a tried and true strategy, the phony poll, opponents of McCain spread a complete falsehood. Phone calls to South Carolina Republican voters asked “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain … if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” McCain and his wife Cindy had adopted a dark-skinned girl from Bangladesh in 1991 and that child, Bridget, was campaigning with them in South Carolina.