That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery.    Charles M. Blow, Oct. 13, 2019

[Dear Reader:  While this is not a short essay, there is a 90-second version embedded in it.  For that version, just follow the bold-faced portions of the essay. –PCY]

Told by a new friend, several weeks after I had entered a new public high school in a new state my junior year, that the first friend I had made there was Jewish, I was shocked.  He couldn’t be Jewish, I said.  Then an even more shocking thought occurred to me:  Where did the first thought come from?  To that point in my life, I had never, to my knowledge, met a Jew, having attended only Catholic schools and lived only among Christians before our family moved to the new state.  Yet I clearly had imported into my subconscious some ugly stereotypes against which I had unwittingly measured the normalcy of my friend Alan.

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When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many Americans believed the election signaled the end of racism in the U.S.  Even a professional sociologist inexplicably got well out over his skis and told a major American newspaper that Obama’s election demonstrated that the U.S. was no longer a racist society.  Whether from naivete or wishful thinking, this narrative was, of course, entirely wrong.

Bigotry is a built-in feature of our lives.  It is built into our psyches and into our society.  Our nation maintains racial structures that police boundaries between groups–in neighborhoods, schools, occupations, and faith communities–and that sort them into hierarchies of wealth, power and opportunity.  And as individuals–whether native-born or immigrants–we have all been marinated in a culture of beliefs that supports and justifies these hierarchies, imparting prejudices that reinforce our senses of racial, religious and gender belonging, and of separation from the “Other.”  Almost all of us have inherited fears and stereotypes of other races, religions or gender roles.  These dispositions rest at least in our subconscious minds, where we are blind to them until they are activated by specific experiences.  It takes personal work to recognize and overcome these biases.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, the African-American civil rights leader, once strikingly spoke to the power of implicit racial bias.  He observed that “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”  How many of us can imagine experiencing that scenario on a lonely street?

Contrary to the post-election self-congratulations about the end of racism, Obama’s election unleashed American society’s racial animus on the right in a social parallel to the uncovering of my personal animus those years ago in high school.  In his new book, American Carnage, the politics writer Tim Alberta indicates that Obama’s former GOP Senate colleagues criticized him for exploiting racial identity politics.  In fact, Obama’s pigmentation itself had drawn out the nation’s thinly suppressed bigotry for which the post-racism congratulations served only as a short-term, hypocritical cover.   Alberta points out that this congratulatory view “became a trendy crutch for Republicans as bad actors in the party systematically targeted minority communities with racial gerrymanders and voter-suppression measures” (p. 129).

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If Obama’s presidency helped to rip the bandaid off America’s racism, Donald Trump has weaponized it.  But his presidency tells us rather less about his racist character than it does about the nation.

Trump did not need Obama’s election to unearth his own racism.  It has been an active theme throughout his adulthood, from the time he settled a Department of Justice lawsuit in the 1970s for discrimination against minorities by refusing to rent them apartments in his New York housing developments.  In the early 1990s, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City paid a $200,000 fine for transferring black and female employees off gaming tables to satisfy the prejudices of a major gambler.

Neither did the national Republican Party need Trump to spur race-baiting electoral politics.  The GOP developed its ‘Southern Strategy’ in the wake of the Civil Rights legal successes in the 1960s, an approach that stimulated racial fears and resentments to get Southern white voters to switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.  The strategy’s first national success was the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.

What Trump has accomplished is the mainstreaming of this approach, using it openly and often to stir the racial fears and resentments of white voters.  He has not only built upon the nation’s racial divisions.  He has deepened and legitimized them.

After all, he built his candidacy for president–and his base of political support–by suggesting falsely for years that Obama was born outside the U.S., and hence that the nation’s first black president was an illegitimate president.  He then launched his campaign in 2015 when he cruised down the escalator at Trump Tower and vilified Mexican immigrants as criminals, rapists and drug dealers.  Since he took office in 2017, Trump has labeled as “shithole countries” some nations of people of color and pined for more immigrants to the U.S. from countries like predominantly white Norway.  Following the political violence in Charlottesville, VA in 2017, he insisted that there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the conflict, including among the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. 

This past summer the American president again ramped up his bigoted rhetoric.  And he has used a particularly odious technique of division and domination: insisting that the racial or religious “Other” is–at best–disloyal to the nation.  He attacked four minority first-year Congresswomen by suggesting (1) that they hate America and (2) that they should go back to the crime-ridden nations from which they came.  Then he attacked the African-American Congressman Elijah Cummings (since deceased) and his Baltimore district, which the President described as a “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess (and a) very dangerous & filthy place . . . No human being would want to live there.”  And in a twist on the matter of national devotion, he has turned his divisiveness against American Jews, suggesting the anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalties in criticizing Jews who vote for Democrats.

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It is a commonplace in social science research that correlation is not causation.  Just because two things change together in human behavior does not necessarily mean that one caused the other to change.  But when a good number of human behaviors change or come together with each other, it is likely that there are important causes that join them.

One can imagine racist views and behaviors as existing in the form of a social pyramid.  At the large base of the pyramid are the racial dispositions and beliefs of a group of people, including the fervor with which they are held.  The greater the number of people with racist beliefs and dispositions, and the greater the strength with which they are held, the broader the base of the pyramid and the more actions taken by the believers.  In the pyramid’s middle level we find the ‘standard’ actions people take based on attitudes rooted in its base.  In the case of attitudes and fears, for example, we find racist statements, avoidance behaviors, and voting patterns.  At the narrow top of the pyramid, we find the much less frequent, more extreme actions taken by relatively few people based on their beliefs and personalities, the hate crimes of digital and physical assault.  At the pyramid’s tip are the small minority of people who will commit the most heinous crimes, including murder.

The larger and more heated the racist views of the population in the base of the pyramid, the more ‘standard’ actions they will take, and the more people taking such actions–normalizing them–the more violent actors and actions this population will incentivize at the top of the pyramid, including murders.  We see evidence of these growing social dynamics in recent developments in racist attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. and their connection to Trump’s actions.

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Following the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant strain of American racism evolved from overt discrimination in law and violent behavior (lynchings, bombings) to a less overt form.  This new ‘free market’ white racism expressed itself in blaming African Americans for their lower-class positions and in resisting affirmative action policies designed to help them by expanding their educational and economic opportunities.  But increasingly since the 1980s, two developments shifted the expression of white racism back toward more overt forms of hostility based on growing anger and fear:  the loss of manufacturing jobs especially among whites, and the perceived loss of political power with the national population shift toward a white minority nation–no more strongly symbolized than by the election of the nation’s first African American president.

We can see this recent evolution displayed around the 2016 presidential election and since.  In the political arena, white voters’ attitudes toward minorities played a large role in Trump’s surprise election victory.  One study by political scientists of more than 40,000 white voters in the 2016 primary elections found that, compared to those voting for other Republican candidates, Trump voters were ‘less empathetic (angered by racism), they were more likely to deny Whites have an advantage in America and expressed far more fear of other racial groups.’

The President’s racist rhetoric during the campaign and in office not only reflects white racial anxiety.  It also appears to increase its intensity and to give permission to its more hateful expressions.  For example, the Anti-Defamation League reported this year that incidents of spreading white supremacist propaganda in the U.S. (e.g., distributing leaflets in neighborhoods and on college campuses) rose 182 percent in 2018 (as compared to 2017), to 1187 such incidents, ‘far exceeding any previous annual distribution.’  White supremacist rallies and other public events increased by 20 percent in 2018, to at least 91 events.  Other research has found that the Trump campaign spurred the growth of on-line racist activities, and in particular white nationalist organizing, harassment and trolling on social media, including the celebration of racist mass killers such as those at the New Zealand mosque, the Poway synagogue, and the shooter at the El Paso Walmart.  In some of the cases, the mass killers have aped Trump’s racist rhetoric, as in El Paso and in the Pittsburgh synagogue killings, or even praised him as a ‘renewed symbol of white identity’ (New Zealand).

A new study by three political scientists suggests that Trump’s rallies, which commonly feature his racist comments, may also help to stimulate violence against minorities.  These researchers examined reported hate crimes in counties that hosted one of Trump’s 275 campaign rallies in 2016, and compared them to hate crimes in comparable counties that had no such rallies.  They found that in the months following the rallies, the rally counties had 226 percent more hate crimes than were reported in counties without the Trump rallies.  An ABC News investigation in 2019 found 36 criminal cases nationwide in which the president was ‘invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault’ largely against minorities by white men.  While several of these cases involved acts that defied Trump, 29 of the 36 involved people echoing his rhetoric, not condemning it.  The ABC researchers were unable to find any state or federal criminal cases where a violent act or threat carried the names of either President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush, each of whom served eight years in office.

Overall, in the years since the president launched his 2015 campaign, the number of hate groups in the U.S., hate crimes generally, and violent white supremacist attacks in particular, have all increased.  The Southern Poverty Law Center, the longstanding civil rights organization that tracks hate groups in the U.S., reported in its latest annual survey that in 2018 the number of hate groups reached its highest level in two decades–1,020–up 30 percent since 2014.  Among these groups, white nationalist organizations grew 48 percent from 2017 to 2018 alone, to 148 groups in the latter year.  Notably, this growth occurred after the president’s remark that there were “some very fine people” among the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, where one of them ran his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one and wounding many more.  

Meanwhile, according to FBI data, reported hate crimes in the U.S. increased 21 percent in 2017 as compared to 2016, rising to 7775 crimes in 2017.  It is noteworthy, too, that November 2016–the month of President Trump’s election–was the worst month for hate crime incidents in the U.S. (758 incidents) since September 2002, and the day after the election–November 10–was the worst day for such incidents (44) since June of 2003.  Research has also found that hate crimes spiked in many major American cities around the 2018 mid-term elections, elections in which the language of ‘immigration,’ ‘wall,’ and ‘caravan’ was highlighted.  While most of the larger cities studied had declines in hate crimes during the first half of the year, by the end of 2018 hate crimes in 30 large cities had reached a decade high of more than 2000.

The research also found that 2018 saw 17 murders by white supremacists, compared to 13 in 2017, while Jihadist killings in the U.S. dropped to 1 in 2018.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray, in testimony before a U.S. Senate hearing in mid-2019, reported that the FBI had already that year made almost 100 arrests for domestic terrorism-related incidents, a number higher than that for all of 2018.  He added that ‘A majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.’

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Trump’s racism is essential.  It is core to who he is.  America’s racism is also of the essence.  It is a piece of the national fabric:  incorporated into our founding document, the U.S. Constitution, and playing out since then through slavery, Jim Crow, de facto segregation, the mass incarceration of African Americans, police killings of unarmed black children and adults, racial gerrymandering of political districts and voter disenfranchisement, Trump’s reinvigoration of white nationalism, and most recently in the mass killings of 22 people in El Paso, TX, by a gunman fueled by anti-Latino bias and echoing Trump’s racist rhetoric.

The undercurrent of American racism is wide and deep, affecting us to greater and lesser degrees, in both conscious and unconscious ways.  Collectively, in recent decades, it has usually been felt and expressed in less overt and angry ways than it was 50 and more years ago.  But it still remains in supply enough to serve as tinder for the torch of inflamed perceived threats to the racial balance of power in the U.S.  Trump and his enabling Republican Party have supplied that torch.  The resulting conflagration has heated the American pyramid of fear and hate to the point at which racism has been re-activated in increasing rates of violence.

The fire about us also reminds us of our vulnerabilities to hateful ideas and deeds.  And it is this that opens the door to the possibility of ever more redemption.

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