Trump said some racist things and probably holds some racist opinions but I am skeptical that racism is the dominant force behind his politics. Rather it is a bizarre combination of nationalism and egotism: the US is getting screwed by other countries and only he, the great dealmaker, can set it right. He has been spouting this for literally 30 years with remarkably consistency. Incidentally this is an interesting videowhere Trump talks about Obama in 2008. Does he sound like someone who is enraged at a black man becoming President?
What that means is that for all of her supporters, the environment was the most important thing. That it came before all other considerations. They were the single issue voters.
The people that voted for DD are the same. White supremacism is the most important thing. They are single issue voters.
Now THAT is bullshit.
Of course the remedy depends on the answer. Lets say arguendo, that your story of residential segregation is correct. How should we remedy the situation, should we fight white supremacy or should we attempt to get black people to buy more houses in white neighborhoods? If the problem is current white supremacy we fight that and when we win the problem goes away. If the problem is past white supremacy and we fight current white supremacy and it goes away the problem stays the same.
If you read the article I linked to about anti-murderism that is the point it makes. The problem with seeing racism as an all powerful cause is that it simplifies complex situations and gives everything one solution.
If you are familiar with Coates’ oeuvre, that is his stock in trade. Why do black women feel insecure about their hair? white supremacy
Why do taxi drivers not want to pick him up?white supremacy
Why did a white lady bump his son coming off an escalator?white supremacy
Why did his great grandmother beat his grandmother? white supremacy
Why did his fellow black kids think he was a nerd for reading comic books? white supremacy
Why did a black cop mistake his his friend for a drug dealer which caused a confrontation that led to his friend being shot? white supremacy
Why did a white guy beat a white lady in a presidential contest? white supremacy
As a republican I would be thrilled if the Democrats took his advice and wrote off all white people who think differently than Coates as irredeemable racists but as an american I want to see problems solved and blaming all of them on some phantom is not going to help.
As far as I can tell, this is a response to some fantasy version of Coates (and Coates’ arguments), with little to do with the real-world versions. Same goes for the “anti-murderism” link – I couldn’t tell what that was responding to. It wasn’t Coates’ article or his arguments.
Duke got 3% in what twitter claims is the most racist state in the country, where he has been running for office for 30 years. If you extrapolate to the country the white supremacist vote might be 1-2% of the electorate. That is why any analysis that says the election was about white supremacy makes as much since as claiming it was all about hardcore environmentalism and its impossible to understand Hillary Clinton’s voters without understanding the Earth Liberation Front.
That you think that the solution to racism is simple is part of the problem.
It is not simplifying complex problems into simple solutions, it is analyzing complex problems and identifying that in many of them, some level of past or present racism has shaped the problem that needs to be tackled. Is dealing with white supremacism the only thing that needs to be done to address these problems? No, but it is part of what is necessary to address if we are going to solve them.
It is a simplification of a complex problem to try to claim that racism has no part in these issues.
That is a gross simplification of his thesis. A simplification to the point of being pretty close to diametrically opposite to his thesis. If that is what you think he is saying, then no wonder you disagree, because that is not even close.
He shows that in these cases, when a simple observation may not see that there is racism inherent in the reason behind them, that there is some level of racial bias that makes those things more likely to happen.
He never claims that they are caused entirely by racism, in fact, he points out a few times very specifically that these things are not caused entirely by racism. That you think that he claims that these are caused solely by racism means that you have not paid attention to what he was saying, not at all, but have instead come up with your own flawed interpretation with which to disagree.
As that is not his advice, it would be foolish for anyone to take the advice that you very incorrectly claim he gives. But the advice that he actually gives, that there is nuance, there is complexity, and that there are many systemic problems that can be traced to being affected by not just past, but current racism, and that that should be realized and acknowledged by policy makers, and those who vote for policy makers would in fact make america a better place. He is not blaming them on a phantom, you are arguing against a phantom of your own creation.
In other words, it is you that is simplifying the problem, not him. You can argue over whether or not his argument is correct, but try to get at least a cursory grasp of what it is first.
It was responding to Coates’ arguments. I used to be a subscriber to the Atlantic where he writes and all of those scenarios I listed are problems he has written about and he claims they are all caused by white supremacy.
I’ve never seen him claim that white supremacy is the sole explanation for any of these phenomena, nor that there’s any simple or easy solution for white supremacism or anything related to racism.
These are extremely complex issues, and require a lot of complexity and nuance just to talk about, much less to address and try to solve.
That is 3% of people who favored him over every other candidate, and the only thing that DD was running on was white supremacism. That means that 3% find maintaining racism to be the single most important issue to them.
That’s not a cap, that’s a bottom. That there are another some percentage of people who put racism as priority #2, and vote for a somewhat less racist candidate that actually can achieve political goals does not mean that those people do not find racism to be important, just not as important as schools and bridges.
That 3% means that there are 3% of voters who would like to see black people in this country stripped of their civil rights, and removed from the soil as freemen one way or another. There are more white supremacists that do not go quite so far, and simply wish for blacks to “know their place”.
Put it this way, did any of DD’s voters vote for Clinton? No, I don’t think so. Did DD endorses Clinton? No, he endorsed Trump.
And that’s really what it comes down to. Which candidate was endorsed by the white supremacists? Trump was. Trump did not distance himself from that endorsement, he was courting that vote.
The solution to racism is simple. People need to stop being racist. If we do that problems that are caused by racism will vanish. If the problem is not racism but another problem that is only subtly connected to racism then the focus on racism will not help. Focusing on racism will only poison the well and make a solution less likely.
An example is the Eric Garner case. He was the black man who was killed during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes. Some people said that he was killed because he was black, others say that it was because he resisted arrest. Very few people said he was killed because he was placed in a position after where his size and poor health made it so he couldn’t breathe and he could have been saved by being moved to a sitting position. It could have been a great opportunity for police across the country to make sure they are all trained in safe positions for arrested people, instead it was just another example of how racist America hates black bodies and the police are the modern day paddy rollers.
The fact that police throughout the country didn’t take this opportunity could be related to the influence of white supremacism in our society – the fact (as I see it, anyway) that unjust deaths of black men are not seen as horrors in our society at large, but rather as mundane details or even as appropriate events.
You don’t know how many of Duke’s voters voted for Hillary. Maybe racists are also environmentalists or pro-abortion. Who knows.
It is a lie that Trump did not distance himself from the endorsement. From CNN: “David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years,” Trump said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK,” Trump added. “Do you want me to do it again for the 12th time? I disavowed him in the past, I disavow him now.”
Trump said way, way worse things about Clinton, Obama, and many other non white-supremacists. Why didn’t he bring himself to use the same, or worse, extremely negative language about such a horrible and harmful person as David Duke? And before he said that about Duke, why did he pretend not to know who Duke was?
Racists and gun nuts are single issue voters.
I have a gunnut friend, who is pro-abortion, and pro-environment. Still votes 100% totally GOP , uses terms like “Killary”, calls her a criminal, etc.
This article is pretty long, but makes the argument thateducation level was a better predictor of votes.
After looking a bit, there isn’t a concise place that has teh voting demographic broken down by income and race, combined. Most do either income, or race, but not both together and what I’m trying to tease out is the 2012 vs. 2016 results. Because if Coates’s argument is correct, then there should be an impact as Trump was WHITE, rather than just white.
Silver looks at county level data, and tries to isolate education level comparing how Trump did, how Clinton did, and how Clinton did compared to how Obama did.
When looking at counties with lower education, but also majority non-white, he says this:
I believe doing the analysis here is tough and there’s probably lots of competing explanations. Silver presents education level as a driving factor. The data does seem to paint that picture. Coates says instead it’s white supremacy, or maybe, in addition to. Silver isn’t doing an historical analysis on how past and current racist practices impact the results, but at the same time Coates isn’t supporting his thesis with a lot of good data.
I don’t want to delve into the question what defines racism right now, but let’s just say this is not really correct. A lot of white people with non-liberal views on race voted for Obama twice, and for Kerry, and for Clinton the first time, and so forth. Among people who voted for Obama in 2012, about a third supported a ban on Muslim immigration, and about a third though African Americans are, on the whole, genetically predisposed to lower IQ than white people, and many of these people switched to trump last year. Views about race and ethnicity weren’t politically polarized (between, say, 1970 and 2012) as they became in 2016.
There’s no serious doubt that Trump won the election because of white identity politics. The more interesting questions to me are whether white identity politics is always a bad thing, whether it all boils down to questions of ‘supremacy’ and oppressing African Americans, and so forth. I would disagree with most liberals on those questions, though I’d certainly agree that Trump himself embodies a noxious and dangerous kind of white identity politics. But I don’t think there can be a serious question that Trump won because of white identity politics.
You can be scared of Muslim terrorists without being a racist.
I’d like to see a cite on: "and about a third though African Americans are, on the whole, genetically predisposed to lower IQ than white people,"
And yes indeed, there is serious doubt. Just you saying there isn’t doesn’t make it so. “*Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
*
Those voters dont vote Democrat anyway. (well, not anymore).
I explicitly didn’t say “racist”, I said “didn’t share liberal ideas about race”.
I think most of the concern over Muslim immigration boils down to ethnic, racial, cultural and religious issues, not concerns about safety. Again, that’s not at all meant as a criticism: I entirely sympathize with the desire of people to live in a country inhabited by people who share a certain culture, physical appearance, genetic heritage, religion, language, etc. Most people are, by nature, tribal. (America is somewhat unusual in that it was deliberately conceived as a country in civic rather than ethnic terms, and I think we should put in some more effort to see if we can make that work, but I’m not at all denying the costs of that approach). I think we should be honest about what the real issues around immigration are though, and not make up fictions about Muslim terrorists and Mexican rapists. (There are countries which really do have a problem with particular ethnic minority communities having high sex crime rates, like England. America isn’t really one of them).
Bone:
You might appreciate this one: Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat