Trump, the Obamas and racism: Why won't some people admit when it's racism?
As someone who has written about race, media and society for decades, it's a mystifying question. Why don't people who advocate racist beliefs embrace the word?
(Billboard in Arkansas for a white supremacist audio program.)
For years now, I have been thinking about writing a column titled “the death of the code word.”
I wanted to describe how Donald Trump and the MAGA movement were making it more acceptable to express outright prejudices about non-white people and folks from marginalized groups – from Trump spreading the fiction that immigrants were eating pets in the Midwest, to eventually admitting he used the phrase “shithole countries” to refer to majority non-white nations in Africa and elsewhere.
But the controversy over Trump posting a video which portrays Barack and Michelle Obama as apes – and his administration’s later attempts to argue that it was somehow an accident – shows there are still boundaries for him and MAGA when it comes to open expressions of straight up racism in the general public space.
To be honest, it kind of surprises me that they’re being so coy about this. One laugh line I get in my public presentations is when I display a slide with a photograph of the billboard shown up top, sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan supporting a white supremacist podcast which insists it is not racist.
Cue rimshot.
I haven’t done any research on this dynamic or seen any studies, so this is just my supposition. But I credit the success of the traditional civil rights movement, led by visionaries like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, in convincing America that the word “racism” is so evil, even those who actively participate in its practice will not claim it.
From a political perspective, Trump is probably just trying to hold onto so-called independents who support him, but don’t want to spend much time thinking about his racism, sexism or classism. They’ll tolerate a belated admission about disparaging “shithole countries” or false allegations that undocumented immigrants bring more crime, cost Americans jobs or eat pets. But they can’t quite get behind a chief executive who straight up endorses depicting America’s first Black president and his wife as apes.
(Here’s a wonderful photo of the Obamas to make up for that BS Trump posted. Sometimes it feels like America didn’t deserve them.)
So the “code word” isn’t dead, it’s simply shifted its tone – enabled by Trump supporters who seemingly will forgive just about anything he does. But make no mistake, when an incident like this stands and doesn’t cost Trump significant support, it moves us one step closer to a moment when he won’t apologize for — or, God forbid, refrain from intiating — such despicable actions.
It’s what happened with “shithole countries.” Trump denied saying it until he got confident that admitting it would earn him more political support than it would cost him.
To be sure, I know there are some people who harbor racist ideas and don’t realize or won’t admit that they are so. But in the case of the podcast sponsored by the KKK or the president who won’t even apologize for elevating horribly racist imagery, this denial borders on insanity — or outright lying.
So let’s say code words aren’t dead – they’re just on life support.
(I’m really hoping every traditional journalist who has access to Trump keeps asking him if depicting the Obamas as apes is something he thinks is acceptable. Even when Trump tries to change the subject or insult his way past the question. Keep asking.)
What I won’t do, is go down a rabbit hole on what the word “racism” really means. I like this definition, from David M. Newman’s 2012 book Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life. Newman defines racism as: “Belief that humans are subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as superior or inferior.”
There’s nothing in this definition about having the power to enact those beliefs, which some people think is an essential component of racism. I think it is possible for people to be racist when they don’t have power and I also think it is possible for people to have power in pockets of society, when they might have no influence outside of it (say, a neighborhood, church or job dominated by one racial group that is often oppressed outside that environment.)
It’s also possible for people of good faith to disagree agreeably on all of this, so feel free to weigh in – respectfully – in the comments.
One other element in this is something I’ve written about many times: The envy Trump and MAGA conservatives have for the moral authority the traditional civil rights movement still has in America.
Not only is it a constant reminder of how much advantage white America has been given in this country over hundreds of years. It’s also an instant trump card – yeah, I went there – for some arguments about discrimination, prejudice, Affirmative Action and systemic oppression.
Black History Month, MLK’s birthday as a national holiday, public displays about the evils of slavery, schools and facilities named after prominent civil rights heroes – they are all evidence of how deeply unfair America has been to non-white people for generations. And how much blood, sweat and tears have been expended to earn something close to theoretical equality in more recent times.
How much easier it is to simply disappear those reminders; to erase them by force rather than try to argue against their obvious logic in a good faith public debate. Because then you might be called – probably correctly – a racist. Which we know Trump and his followers still seem to fear.
Back in 2012, when I wrote my book Race-Baiter about how some media outlets (Fox News, in particular) were leveraging these ideas about prejudice and racism to make big money, I was heartened by some research which showed getting people to think directly about the racism behind some statements – basically, exposing the code words – might get them to reject those statements and the ideas behind them.
I have a fantasy that people will eventually wake from the white-centered fantasies sold to them by Fox News Channel, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump and others.
As I wrote in Race-Baiter:
“I hope to turn us all into race-baiters of a sort: Those (people) working together to insist on a new way of communicating from a media structure too addicted to controversy, division and conflict to make it happen alone.
Perhaps, at long last, it’s time for the audience to save media from itself.”
It’s long past time, people. Let’s just hope we’re not too late.
In 2015, when Ken Burns spoke in Amherst upon receiving The Emily Dickinson Museum's "Tell It Slant Award," my husband Jerome Charyn (author of the Secret Life of Emily Dickinson) and I were in the audience. These words from his acceptance speech have haunted me (this is what he said, as I remember it): "Everything political that has occurred in this country, from the revolution on, led to the Civil War, and everything since has been a consequence of it."
My paternal grandfather was a Protestant Indiana farm boy who in the early 1920s joined a fraternal organization that promised to uphold white Protestant values. Yes, he was briefly a member of the KKK. When I knew him in the ‘60s and ‘70s, his two primary interests were stamp collecting and China. He was one of the first ordinary citizens to visit mainland China after we re-established diplomatic relations with the Communist government. So I was surprised to find out that he briefly disowned my aunt when she married a Catholic, and that he often used the N word in the presence of my uncle who married a black woman. I think it’s important to recognize how endemic racism was in the past, and those prejudices are just below the surface in many people today.