Athos_131 · 60119
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Mocking someone for having native American ancestry sounds like white supremacy to me. It is most shameful that a President of the United States would engage in such offensive and petty name calling.
Mocking a person for claiming falsely Native American ancestry. Trading on that lie to gain hiring advantage and status advantage among Educational peers is low life behavior, if not illegal, unfair to peers. Being called on it is chump change compared to the shunning that should have happened, but is ignored by Democrats/Media. Again, I am being redundant.
Quote from: Athos_131 on November 04, 2017, 10:28:54 PMALT-RIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS CLAIM PAPA JOHN'S AS OFFICIAL PIZZA#ResistIn an email to the Huffington Post, Papa John’s also said it condemns racism in all forms. “We do not want these individuals or groups to buy our pizza,” the company said in a statement. This is every business owner's worst nightmare. The Stormer names you official [anything] of the Alt-Right." It's a publicly traded NASDQ company that's lost about 25% of its value since August. Unfair to punish shareholders for this. IMHO.
ALT-RIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS CLAIM PAPA JOHN'S AS OFFICIAL PIZZA#Resist
Mocking a person for claiming falsely Native American ancestry. Trading on that lie to gain hiring advantage and status advantage among Educational peers is low life behavior, if not illegal, unfair to peers. Being called on it is chump change compared to the shunning that should have happened, but is ignored by Democrats/Media. Again, I am being redundant.Quote from: Lois on November 04, 2017, 04:34:37 AMMocking someone for having native American ancestry sounds like white supremacy to me. It is most shameful that a President of the United States would engage in such offensive and petty name calling.
Does not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.
Quote from: joan1984 on October 19, 2017, 03:43:16 PMDoes not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens#Resist
Quote from: Athos_131 on November 20, 2017, 12:08:11 AMQuote from: joan1984 on October 19, 2017, 03:43:16 PMDoes not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens#Resisthttps://www.snopes.com/donald-trump-father-kkk-1927/
Delisa Lynch, who goes by @MommaLynch24 on Twitter, quickly jumped into the fray with a retort of her own. “What NFL team do Trump own?” she fired off, citing the president’s tweet. “Oh yeah they wouldn’t let him have one!”Lynch appeared to be referring to Trump’s long and stormy relationship with the NFL. The president bought a United State Football League team in 1983 for a fraction of the price of an NFL franchise, but never purchased an NFL team, getting outbid in 2014.
The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.
He made a farce of his populist campaign by putting bankers in charge of the economy and industry insiders at the head of the federal agencies established to regulate their businesses. But other campaign promises have been more faithfully enacted: his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries; the unleashing of immigration-enforcement agencies against anyone in the country illegally regardless of whether he poses a danger; an attempt to cut legal immigration in half; and an abdication of the Justice Department’s constitutional responsibility to protect black Americans from corrupt or abusive police, discriminatory financial practices, and voter suppression. In his own stumbling manner, Trump has pursued the race-based agenda promoted during his campaign. As the president continues to pursue a program that places the social and political hegemony of white Christians at its core, his supporters have shown few signs of abandoning him.One hundred thirty-nine years since Reconstruction, and half a century since the tail end of the civil-rights movement, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who explicitly pledged to use the power of the state against people of color and religious minorities, and stood by him as that pledge has been among the few to survive the first year of his presidency. Their support was enough to win the White House, and has solidified a return to a politics of white identity that has been one of the most destructive forces in American history. This all occurred before the eyes of a disbelieving press and political class, who plunged into fierce denial about how and why this had happened. That is the story of the 2016 election.One of the first mentions of Trump in The New York Times was in 1973, as a result of a federal discrimination lawsuit against his buildings over his company’s refusal to rent to black tenants. In 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper ad suggesting that the Central Park Five, black and Latino youths accused of the assault and rape of a white jogger, should be put to death. They were later exonerated. His rise to prominence in Republican politics was first fueled by his embrace of the conspiracy theory that the first black president of the United States was not an American citizen. “I have people that have been studying [Obama's birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they're finding,” he said in 2011. “If he wasn't born in this country, which is a real possibility ... then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”Trump began his candidacy with a speech announcing that undocumented immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And “some,” he said, were “good people.” To keep them out, he proposed building a wall and humiliating Mexico for its citizens’ transgressions by forcing their government to pay for it. He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Amid heightened attention to fatal police shootings of unarmed black people and a subsequent cry for accountability, Trump decried a “war on police” while telling black Americans they lived in “war zones,” in communities that were in “the worst shape they’ve ever been in”—a remarkable claim to make in a country that once subjected black people to chattel slavery and Jim Crow. He promised to institute a national “stop and frisk” policy, a police tactic that turns black and Latino Americans into criminal suspects in their own neighborhoods, and which had recently been struck down in his native New York as unconstitutional.Trump expanded on this vision in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, which gestured toward the suffering of nonwhites and painted a dark portrait of an America under assault by people of color through crime, immigration, and competition for jobs. Trump promised, “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” citing “the president’s hometown of Chicago.” He warned that “180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens,” and said that Clinton was “calling for a radical 550-percent increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama.
The plain meaning of Trumpism exists in tandem with denials of its implications; supporters and opponents alike understand that the president’s policies and rhetoric target religious and ethnic minorities, and behave accordingly. But both supporters and opponents usually stop short of calling these policies racist. It is as if there were a pothole in the middle of the street that every driver studiously avoided, but that most insisted did not exist even as they swerved around it.
One measure of the allure of Trump’s white identity politics is the extent to which it has overridden other concerns as his administration has faltered.The president’s supporters have stood by him even as he has evinced every quality they described as a deal breaker under Obama. Conservatives attacked Obama’s lack of faith; Trump is a thrice-married libertine who has never asked God for forgiveness. They accused Obama of being under malign foreign influence; Trump eagerly accepted the aid of a foreign adversary during the election. They accused Obama of genuflecting before Russian President Vladimir Putin; Trump has refused to even criticize Putin publicly. They attacked Obama for his ties to Tony Rezko, the crooked realtor; Trump’s ties to organized crime are too numerous to name. Conservatives said Obama was lazy; Trump “gets bored and likes to watch TV.” They said Obama’s golfing was excessive; as of August Trump had spent nearly a fifth of his presidency golfing. They attributed Obama’s intellectual prowess to his teleprompter; Trump seems unable to describe the basics of any of his own policies. They said Obama was a self-obsessed egomaniac; Trump is unable to broach topics of public concern without boasting. Conservatives said Obama quietly used the power of the state to attack his enemies; Trump has publicly attempted to use the power of the state to attack his enemies. Republicans said Obama was racially divisive; Trump has called Nazis “very fine people.” Conservatives portrayed Obama as a vapid celebrity; Trump is a vapid celebrity.There is virtually no personality defect that conservatives accused Obama of possessing that Trump himself does not actually possess. This, not some uncanny oracular talent, is the reason that Trump’s years-old tweets channeling conservative anger at Obama apply so perfectly to his own present conduct.Trump’s great political insight was that Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound on many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. He intuited that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wage” of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not, and could not, take place.
When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories, but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative—one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white.
The defenses of Trump voters against Clinton’s charge share in commo an aversion to acknowledging an unpleasant truth. They are not so much arguments against a proposition as arguments that the proposition is offensive—or, if you prefer, politically incorrect. The same is true of the rejoinder that Democrats cannot hope to win the votes of people they have condemned as racist. This is not a refutation of the point, but an argument against stating it so plainly.
From a different vantage point, what Trump’s supporters refer to as political correctness is largely the result of marginalized communities gaining sufficient political power to project their prerogatives onto society at large. What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth, but of power. It is why unpunished murders of black Americans by agents of the state draw less outrage than black football players’ kneeling for the National Anthem in protest against them. It is no coincidence that Trump himself frequently uses the term to belittle what he sees as unnecessary restrictions on state force.But even as once-acceptable forms of bigotry have become unacceptable to express overtly, white Americans remain politically dominant enough to shape media coverage in a manner that minimizes obvious manifestations of prejudice, such as backing a racist candidate, as something else entirely. The most transgressive political statement of the 2016 election, the one that violated strict societal norms by stating an inconvenient fact that few wanted to acknowledge, the most politically incorrect, was made by the candidate who lost.
Even before trump, the Republican Party was moving toward an exclusivist nationalism that defined American identity in racial and religious terms, despite some efforts from its leadership to steer it in another direction. George W. Bush signed the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, attempted to bring Latino voters into the party, and spoke in defense of American Muslims’ place in the national fabric. These efforts led to caustic backlashes from the Republican rank and file, who defeated his 2006 immigration-reform legislation, which might have shifted the demographics of the Republican Party for a generation or more. In the aftermath of their 2012 loss, Republican leaders tried again, only to meet with the same anti-immigrant backlash—one that would find an avatar in the person of the next Republican president.In 2015, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan L. Hajnal published White Backlash, a study of political trends, and found that “whites who hold more negative views of immigrants have a greater tendency to support Republican candidates at the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial levels, even after controlling for party identification and other major factors purported to drive the vote.”
“Birtherism was the beginning, it was a way of tying together his foreignness and his name, in an effort to delegitimize him, from the get-go,” says James Zogby, a Democrat whose Arab American Institute has spent years tracking public opinion on Muslim and Arab Americans. By 2012, the very idea of Muslims in public service “had become an issue in presidential politics, with five of the Republican candidates saying they wouldn't hire a Muslim or appoint one, without special loyalty oaths.”
“I think you can draw a straight line between Obama and heightened racialization, and the emergence of Trump,” Tesler told me. “Birtherism, the idea that Obama's a Muslim, anti-Muslim sentiments—these are very strong components of Trump's rise, and really what makes him popular with this crew in the first place.”
Birtherism is rightly remembered as a racist conspiracy theory, born of an inability to accept the legitimacy of the first black president. But it is more than that, and the insistence that it was a fringe belief undersells the fact that it was one of the most important political developments of the past decade.Birtherism is a synthesis of the prejudice toward blacks, immigrants, and Muslims that swelled on the right during the Obama era: Obama was not merely black but also a foreigner, not just black and foreign but also a secret Muslim. Birtherism was not simply racism, but nationalism—a statement of values and a definition of who belongs in America. By embracing the conspiracy theory of Obama’s faith and foreign birth, Trump was also endorsing a definition of being American that excluded the first black president. Birtherism, and then Trumpism, united all three rising strains of prejudice on the right in opposition to the man who had become the sum of their fears.
Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen. To acknowledge the centrality of racial inequality to American democracy is to question its legitimacy—so it must be denied.
Nevertheless, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals. That is the reality that all Americans will have to deal with, and one that most of the country has yet to confront.Yet at its core, white nationalism has and always will be a hustle, a con, a fraud that cannot deliver the broad-based prosperity it promises, not even to most white people. Perhaps the most persuasive argument against Trumpist nationalism is not one its opponents can make in a way that his supporters will believe. But the failure of Trump’s promises to white America may yet show that both the fruit and the tree are poison.
The United States of America by and large is racist.