Trump Channels America's Deepest Racism

 

By David K. Shipler 

              If you spread out on a table all the categories of stereotyping inflicted upon Blacks and other people of color throughout the history of the United States, you’ll see how some of the ugliest are being chosen and brandished by Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. Like crude weapons of mass destruction, these instruments of bigotry cannot be precisely targeted. They wound both their intended victims and mere bystanders—and perhaps, in the end, the perpetrators themselves.

              The latest example is the poisonous lie that Haitian immigrants, who came to this country in the naïve belief that it would be a refuge of safety and opportunity, are stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. That Trump and Vance would repeat and inflate this toxic nonsense after the city’s officials denied its truth exposes, first, their own hatred toward “others,” and second, their faith that the hatred is harbored by millions of American voters.

              The concocted story fits the longstanding American narrative of Blacks as primitive, violent, immoral, and unclean. Those supposed traits helped feed the rationalizations of slavery, persisted through the Jim Crow era of legal segregation, and continue in the barely concealed warrens of today’s right-wing electorate.

Trump has proved dangerously skillful in tapping this base bigotry. Whether by instinct or calculation, he locates and gives voice to the worst characteristics of his society. He garners broad support by his vicious fabrication that immigrants are invading as hordes of disease-ridden criminals released from prisons and mental institutions abroad. It doesn’t matter that official statistics show lower crime rates among immigrants than native-born Americans. It doesn’t matter that most are fleeing persecution and danger to the ideal that they imagine America to be. It doesn’t matter that the two would-be assassins who have targeted Trump were white Americans.

He doesn’t have to say explicitly that the hordes are swarthy; the picture in his voters’ minds is clear enough. Evidently, he says what many people think. And what they think, about Blacks in particular, has deep roots in American culture.

The stereotypes fall into five basic categories, as I saw during five years of research for my book A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. Others may find different patterns, but in my interviewing across the country, negative images of Blacks seemed to organize themselves around these themes: Body, Mind, Morality, Violence, and Power.

The body is the first encounter: the color of the skin, the shape of the nose and lips, the style of the hair—the most superficial attributes that are taken to suggest the most profound qualities. Here is where bigotry begins in its likening of Black people to primates. In social media, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were widely portrayed as apes, including by some local Republican officials. The implication of Blacks as subhuman is a longstanding caricature, which Trump plays on in spreading the pet-eating claim. He seems to think it resonates with his supporters.

Uncleanliness has also been a long-term stereotype in the body category. It generated the Jim Crow laws in the South that kept swimming pools, lunch counters, and drinking fountains segregated. Vance summoned it up recently in smearing immigrants as disease-ridden. Trump has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” an echo of Nazi antisemitic ideology. The fanciful notion that some pure blood exists and the fear of its being tainted underlay state laws banning racial intermarriage until 1967, when the prohibitions were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  

The mind is the area where Blacks are stereotyped as less intelligent and less capable, a belief reinforced when Trump speaks of “Black jobs,” meaning those requiring lower skills. The smear of mental inferiority is also intrinsic to Republican arguments that affirmative action has advanced unqualified Blacks. But affirmative action if done properly does no such thing; it should actively recruit, accept, and promote equally qualified Blacks and other minorities who have historically suffered discrimination. The goal is to broaden the pool of qualified people.  Until the Republican-dominated Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, for example, elite universities insisted that Blacks they were accepting were highly capable, a small segment of the outstanding applicants who number many more than the colleges can admit. Yet polls show whites embracing that stereotype of Blacks’ mental inferiority.

Negative assumptions about Blacks’ morality has fed Trump’s insistent repetition of the lie about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets. It’s his way of saying: They are primitive, subhuman, and criminal. He also labels them “illegal,” although most are here legally under the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows them to work. The permission, with time limits, is offered to residents of certain countries in crisis, including Ukraine.

Violence is a constant theme of Trump’s vitriole against immigrants—again, immigrants of color, not whites from Norway. His portrait of the United States as awash in disorder and wallowing in crime—whose incidence has actually declined—contradicts what most Americans see with their own eyes. Yet it strikes a chord when he links the specter of violence with nonwhite immigrants, who bear the burden of the violent stereotype.

Power relationships across racial lines can be emotionally fraught. As more and more Blacks gain authority in workplaces, the military, and government, some whites chafe at the reversal of old, expected hierachies. Obama’s election as the first Black president was both inspirational and disorienting for whites, depending on their upbringing, assumptions, and expectations about where Black should fit in the country’s power structure. His very presence in the White House triggered a backlash among right-wing whites, and Trump is capitaliziing on it.

Much of his support comes from the white working class experiencing alienation, marginalization, and economic insecurity—and anxiety about the nonwhite population gaining ground at their expense. Trump’s rants against immigrants taking over the country doesn’t have to be taken literally to be effective in animating many whites’ resentment over what they believe to be the inversion of the racial power structure.

Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, can’t win those votes. Trump need only remind people of her race, albeit awkwardly, which he’s done by asserting falsely (“falsely” is the requisite adverb modifying verbs associated with Trump’s statements) that she only belatedly decided that she was Black. Whites who are worried about a Black/Indian woman in power can see their worries on their TV screens every day. Trump just has to keep their flame of fear alive.

Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance bigotry, their weapon of mass destruction, is causing collateral damage to the society as a whole, demolishing the inhibitions to expressing racial prejudice. Perhaps enough voters will see this to deny them a victory in November. But even so, rebuilding a civil society will be a long project.