Maybe you’ve been holding back from calling out that uncle who keeps flaming your Facebook wall with pro-Trump comments, under the guise that he’s really just pro-business and totally not a racist. But now you’ve been given permission to call him out as a racist by no lesser authority than the Republican speaker of the house.
We’ve known for some time now that Trump is as racist against black, Mexican and Muslim people as he is ableist and sexist. When Trump said to “look at my African American over here”, he might as well have said “look at my [n-word]”.
However, when Trump went on a rant about how American judges of Mexican heritage or the Muslim faith could not be fair to him, he achieved what would have seemed impossible just a couple weeks ago: he got journalists with access to him to call out this racism and even got Ryan to call it the “textbook definition of a racist comment”.
But if Trump deploys language that fulfils the textbook definition of racism, if he is racist, then that label extends to his supporters, too. And that’s why you must call them out for racism whenever they reveal themselves, be they your representatives in Congress, your frat brother or Facebook friend – or your mama’s baby brother at the family BBQ.
Racists for Trump include, unfortunately, Ryan himself. He says now that he is opposed to Trump’s racism, but he also isn’t withholding his support. When one is in a position as powerful as speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America, and one chooses to help install someone into the Oval Office who doles out racist comments – that, too, is racism.
Trump questioned the impartiality of US-born judge Curiel by calling him “a Mexican” on 27 May, and Ryan endorsed Trump on 2 June. If he was so opposed to Trump’s racism, he could have refused to endorse him. But out of political opportunism, Ryan was willing to sign on to Trump’s racism when he thought it was to his advantage. When the story didn’t die down, he thought better of it (but not enough to withhold his vote).
Below the level of the House speaker, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing for months about why Republicans were flocking to Trump. It’s really not that all that complicated. I argued that the rise of Trump was a racist blowback against the election of the first black president.
Anyone who has studied American history can tell you that every moment of civil rights progress is met with a reaction. Trump was the mean, angry, white id of America’s ruling past, enraged that America was governed by a black president and scared that the American public will be majority nonwhite by 2043.
And yet, social commenters have tried to find out what (other than racism) is going on with white people for Trump. Even Barack Obama provided a red herring when he exhorted the black graduates of Howard University to get inside the head of “the middle-aged white guy who you may think has all the advantages, but over the last several decades has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change, and feels powerless to stop it”.
But why such a middle aged white guy would feel “powerless to stop” the kind of “cultural” change isn’t so complicated. As the Washington Post Wonkblog reported on Monday: “Two new studies find racial anxiety is the biggest driver of support for Trump.” The article found that Trump supporters are likely to be voters “who expressed racial resentment”, who believe that “the growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens US values”, and who “express more resentment toward African Americans”.
This led the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery to tweet: “After all of pieces I’ve read about economic/anti-establishment voter sentiment can’t wait for all the deep dives into white American racism”. And yet, the headline of his colleagues’ article avoided naming racism outright, referring instead to “racial anxiety”.
Because the Washington Post – like the American media in general, Donald Trump, his supporters, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and most of American society – exists somewhere on the spectrum of racism. This can be a daunting thing to confront and it’s no fun calling your fellow Americans racist.
But if you care about ending racism, you can start by calling Trump a racist and condemning those who support him as racists, too. Because if we can’t ever name the demon of racism – lodged in what became the United States of America since at least 1492 – we won’t ever be able to exorcise it.
