How,
in 2015, can anyone running on a racist, xenophobic platform find any support at
all?
By
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| This bald eagle, symbol of America, has the right idea |
I’m white. So is Donald Trump.
I work as a teaching assistant in a sociology course on race
while I pursue a PhD. Trump alone provides enough material to supply half my
curriculum.
Over the years, he’s said he thinks he’d be better off if he
were “a well-educated black,” and that “laziness is a trait in blacks.”
Nonetheless, he clarified a few years back, “I have a great
relationship with the blacks.” He repeated that assertion more recently, but
refined his terminology to call them “African Americans.”
That’s right. Trump thinks the problem with those statements is
the term he used for black people — and not that he called them lazy and
entitled, and then claimed they love him.
For the record, to correct The Donald, a well-educated black
person is not better off than a well-educated white
person. As of 2009, a black person working full time with an
advanced degree made $14,000 less per year than a similarly
situated white person.
And that’s just income, not wealth.
Wealth is accumulated over generations, and African Americans
have been historically robbed of wealth through generations of discriminatory
policies that continue to echo today.
That means that middle class whites have a safety net that
middle class blacks lack.
For example, one study found that twice as many people in
black neighborhoods had their wages garnished to pay off debts than those in
white neighborhoods.
Why? Because when illness or disaster strikes, whites are far
more likely to be able to call on friends or family to loan them money to help
them get by, whereas blacks are not. That goes directly back to centuries of
discrimination and violence against blacks, both legal and otherwise.
Then there’s what Trump says about Latinos (that “when Mexico sends its people,
they’re not sending their best”) and Muslims (that there should be a “total and
complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”).
Mexican-Americans run the socio-economic gamut from doctors to
farmworkers. They include the sweet girl who watches my cat when I go out of
town — a studious ninth grader whose mother came here from Mexico — as well as
numerous professors at my university.
America got lucky the day these folks came across the border,
and it’s an insult to count them alongside drug dealers and rapists.
Every time I open Facebook, moreover, I see posts by Muslim
friends denouncing terrorism, showing mosques fundraising to help victims of
terror attacks, or even thanking a little boy who donated his savings
to help a vandalized mosque by giving him an iPad.
Obviously, these are all good things, but it makes me sad and
outraged that my Muslim friends need to go to such lengths to prove to the
world they aren’t terrorists. They are no more terrorists than I am. Most of
them hold advanced degrees, and several are doctors.
In the end, I think Trump’s own words apply best to himself: “It is obvious
to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension.”
Yes. Exactly. And what’s truly inexplicable is why, in 2015,
anyone running on a racist, xenophobic ticket finds any support at all.
To the media: Why do you continue to run snippets of Trump’s
most hateful rhetoric, when you would fire any employee who said a fraction of
what he’s said on TV?
And to America, it’s time we shout Trump’s own tagline at him.
Let’s join together and tell the reality TV star and real estate mogul who
wants to be our president, “You’re fired.”
OtherWords
columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our
Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org.