Category Archives: racism

Is America repeating the mistakes of 1968?

Julian E Zelizer writes: “All of us, as Americans, should be troubled by these shootings, because these are not isolated incidents,” said President Barack Obama following the horrific shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal-justice system.” In an American tragedy of the nation’s own making, Obama will end his historic presidency with racial turmoil rocking the nation. The person whose election brought so much hope about the trajectory of race relations in the United States, a country that has perpetually suffered from the original sin of slavery, is spending these days desperately trying to calm the anger over police killings of African Americans and the protests and violence that have ensued.

Today, America has a president who understands the urgent need to address the problems of institutional racism that have been broadcast to the entire world through smartphones and exposés of a racialized criminal-justice system. But this conflict is taking shape right in the middle of a heated election season—one that includes a candidate who has made draconian proposals for national security and who appeals to the “Silent Majority.” Following the events in Dallas, Donald Trump released a statement that read: “We must restore law and order. We must restore the confidence of our people to be safe and secure in their homes and on the street.”

This is not the first time this has happened. When questions over race and policing were front and center in a national debate in 1968, the federal government failed to take the steps necessary to make any changes. The government understood how institutional racism was playing out in the cities and how they exploded into violence, but the electorate instead was seduced by Richard Nixon’s calls for law and order, as well as an urban crackdown, leaving the problems of institutional racism untouched. Rather than deal with the way that racism was inscribed into American institutions, including the criminal-justice system, the government focused on building a massive carceral state, militarizing police forces, criminalizing small offenses, and living through repeated moments of racial conflict exploding into violence. [Continue reading…]

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America remains an intentionally segregated society

Natalie Y Moore writes: After the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota last Wednesday, the state’s appalled governor, Mark Dayton, said police wouldn’t have killed Castile if he had been white. Here’s a white politician recognising racism and not swatting it away like a pesky mosquito. But we need to recognise that a rigged, racist system of police brutality is indicative of deep-seated institutionalised racism.

Many of our cities are defined by entrenched residential segregation that created black ghettos and continues to perpetuate inequity. This was not by accident. In the 20th century, the government created housing policies that discriminated against black people and favoured white people in terms of wealth building. Despite the idea of “separate but equal” being struck down by our courts, the ideology still lingers in housing and public education. This isn’t about hokey ideas of harmony, of black and white people smiling and getting along just for the sake of getting along. Instead, if we start to address segregationist policies, we may have some hope of creating fairness.

After racial uprisings in US cities in the 1960s, the Kerner Commission released a report, which asserted that our country was moving towards two societies: one black, one white, separate and unequal. The report said: “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood – but the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.”

These words still ring true today.

Police brutality isn’t isolated from other forms of racism. Segregation is about division, disinvestment and uneven resources based on race. In policing, we often see white officers who grew up in homogenous white places placed in black urban settings. These officers enter without understanding racial and cultural differences. It’s a set-up for failure.

Segregation isn’t about choosing to live among like-minded or racially similar people. American segregation is historic and intentional and must be a part of any conversation on race as the root of many of our problems. [Continue reading…]

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A week from hell

Charles Blow writes: This was yet another week that tore at the very fiber of our nation.

After two videos emerged showing the gruesome killings of two black men by police officers, one in Baton Rouge, La., and the other in Falcon Heights, Minn., a black man shot and killed five officers in a cowardly ambush at an otherwise peaceful protest and wounded nine more people. The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said, “He was upset about Black Lives Matter” and “about the recent police shootings” and “was upset at white people” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

We seem caught in a cycle of escalating atrocities without an easy way out, without enough clear voices of calm, without tools for reduction, without resolutions that will satisfy.

There is so much loss and pain. There are so many families whose hearts hurt for a loved one needlessly taken, never to be embraced again.

There is so much disintegrating trust, so much animosity stirring.

So many — too many — Americans now seem to be living with an ambient terror that someone is somehow targeting them. [Continue reading…]

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Death in black and white

Michael Eric Dyson writes: We, black America, are a nation of nearly 40 million souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. And I fear now that it is clearer than ever that you, white America, will always struggle to understand us.

Like you, we don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die the same.

But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want cops to be executed at a peaceful protest. We also don’t want cops to kill us without fear that they will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our death on a homemade video recording. This is a difficult point to make as a racial crisis flares around us.

We close a week of violence that witnessed the tragic deaths of two black men — Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile — at the hands of the police with a terrible attack in Dallas against police officers, whose names we’re just beginning to learn. It feels as though it has been death leading to more death, nothing anyone would ever hope for.

A nonviolent protest was hijacked by violence and so, too, was the debate about the legitimate grievances that black Americans face. The acts of the gunman in Dallas must be condemned. However, he has nothing to do with the difficult truths we must address if we are to make real racial progress, and the reckoning includes being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted. [Continue reading…]

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Refugee who fled Boko Haram for Italy killed by ‘ultra’ football fan

The Guardian reports: A Nigerian refugee thought to have fled the terrorist group Boko Haram with his wife has died after being attacked by an “ultra” football fan in a small Italian town.

Emmanuel Chidi Namdi, 36, died of injuries he sustained when a local man, who had reportedly been racially abusing Namdi’s wife, attacked him in the town of Fermo, in central Italy.

Amedeo Mancini, 35, allegedly referred to the 24-year-old woman as a “monkey”, and attacked Namdi when he attempted to defend her, according to Italian media reports. Namdi fell into a coma and was pronounced dead on Wednesday.

Namdi and his wife, identified by her first name, Chimiary, were being hosted by Fermo town’s parish while they sought asylum. They are believed to have fled from Boko Haram and travelled through Niger and Libya before boarding a boat to Italy.

Father Vinicio Albanesi, who was hosting the couple, said they had previously lost a two-year-old daughter, and that Namdi’s wife suffered a miscarriage during the journey to Italy.

At an evening vigil on Wednesday, Chimiary cried out to her late husband: “Why do you leave me in this wicked world?” [Continue reading…]

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Quiet fixer in Donald Trump’s campaign: His son-in-law, Jared Kushner

The New York Times reports: International diplomacy is a world of careful rituals, hierarchy and credentials. But when the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, wanted to communicate with Donald J. Trump, he ended up on two occasions in the Manhattan office of a young man with no government experience, no political background and no official title in the Trump campaign: Jared Kushner.

Mr. Kushner held court at length with Mr. Dermer, doing his best to engage in the same sort of high-level conversation that the ambassador conducted with career diplomats and policy experts from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

A 35-year-old real estate developer, investor and newspaper publisher, Mr. Kushner derives his authority in the campaign not from a traditional résumé but from a marital vow. He is Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.

Yet in a gradual but unmistakable fashion, Mr. Kushner has become involved in virtually every facet of the Trump presidential operation, so much so that many inside and out of it increasingly see him as a de facto campaign manager. Mr. Kushner, who is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, helped recruit a sorely needed director of communications, oversaw the creation of an online fund-raising system and has had a hand in drafting Mr. Trump’s few policy speeches. And now that Mr. Trump has secured the Republican nomination, Mr. Kushner is counseling his father-in-law on the selection of a running mate.

It is a new and unlikely role for Mr. Kushner, a conspicuously polite Harvard graduate whose prominent New Jersey family bankrolled Democrats for decades and whose father’s reputation was destroyed, in a highly public and humiliating manner, by his involvement in electoral politics.

Now, in a Shakespearean turn, Mr. Kushner is working side by side with the former federal prosecutor who put his father, Charles Kushner, in prison just over 10 years ago: Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whom Mr. Trump named as a top adviser. Mr. Kushner originally voiced objections to Mr. Trump about the appointment, but Mr. Kushner and Mr. Christie have since become wary allies in seeking to impose greater discipline on Mr. Trump’s unconventional campaign.

Much about the Trump candidacy seems at odds with Mr. Kushner’s personality and biography: An Orthodox Jew and grandson of Holocaust survivors, Mr. Kushner is now at the center of a campaign that has been embraced by white nationalists and anti-Semites. [Continue reading…]

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A climate of fear: Brexit vote triggers eruption of racism

The Guardian reports: In a room in St George’s Cathedral, Southwark, south London, on Thursday morning, more than 80 people, spilling into the corridor, talk about their experiences since the referendum result.

They are mainly from South America, holding Spanish passports, still members of the European Union, legitimately in the UK. Half a dozen had been expected. Barristers María González-Merello and John Samson hold a free weekly legal advice clinic for Spanish-speaking cleaners who work for government departments and major companies in the city. This was different.

“We called an emergency meeting because we’ve had so many people telling us about incidents [of apparent racism and xenophobia],” González-Merello says. “One woman had a cut in her pay packet, and when she complained she was told if she didn’t like it she should go back home. Another man was waiting for the night bus at 2am to go to work when a stranger said: ‘Haven’t you heard the news? You should have left.’”

At the meeting, packed with babies, toddlers and anxious adult faces, one woman says she has worked for an employer for six years. On the Friday of the referendum result she was offered a new, less attractive, zero-hours contract.

Another young woman says she and her friends, all with Spanish passports, regularly visit a Watford nightclub. Last weekend they were refused entry. “Is this because of Brexit?” they asked. The answer was yes.

González-Merello, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, says she was talking to her son on a bus in Spanish and a man said: “You fucking foreigners, you are always making a noise.”

Victims such as her, she says, are now self-policing, taking care, for instance, not to speak in a language other than English in public. Her 12-year-old son recently asked: “Mama, are you going to be deported?”

“It’s the hurt and humiliation,” she says. “And the concern that we don’t know where it may end.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation

Timothy Egan writes: In committing economic suicide, Britain is trying to close the door and hide from the world. It felt good, no doubt, to tell those overbearing bureaucrats in Brussels to bugger off. We’ll stick with our bangers and mash without any interference from Europe! But the Brexit vote was also a drunken swing at those “others” remaking the image of a lost England. To hear the haters tell it, “Polish vermin” and brown-skinned hordes have overwhelmed the little island nation.

Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation — by race, religion and trade. His philosophy, the rant of a besotted boob making things up in public, is anti-American at its core. In rejecting our former colonial masters, we threw off monarchy, the class system and a state religion. We opened our doors to all nations, all religions, all opinions.

The New World can certainly learn much from the Old World. But the sun never sets on a stupid idea. And this vote to stop the spinning globe and get off at 1952 is among the stupidest. Britain is cracking up now because it followed the crackpots. The United States could make the same mistake — rejecting free trade, and rejecting a welcome mat for free people.

Today, about 13 percent of Britain is foreign-born. What’s disruptive, especially in the timeless tableau of rural England, is that the number of immigrants has more than doubled since 1993. That’s what caused some of the open hatred in the campaign to leave the European Union. Trump is playing with that same fire now. [Continue reading…]

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After a campaign scarred by bigotry, it’s become OK to be racist in Britain

Aditya Chakrabortty writes: On chaos of the kind Britain now faces, history is clear: some people always get hurt more than others. Just which groups stand to suffer most this time round is already becoming worryingly clear. Take a look at the hate reports that have come pouring in over the past few days.

In Huntingdon, Polish-origin schoolkids get cards calling them “vermin”, who must “leave the EU”. They come with a Polish translation, thoughtfully enough. From Barnsley, a TV correspondent notes that within five minutes three different people shout, “Send them home.” On Facebook, a friend in east London tells how, while trying to sleep on a hot night, he hears a man bellowing outside his open window: “We’ve got our country back and next I’ll blow that fucking mosque up.”

None of this is coincidental. It’s what happens when cabinet ministers, party leaders and prime-ministerial wannabes sprinkle arguments with racist poison. When intolerance is not only tolerated, but indulged and encouraged. For months leading up to last week’s vote, politicians poured a British blend of Donald Trumpism into Westminster china. They told 350m little lies. They made cast-iron promises that, Iain Duncan Smith now admits, were only ever “possibilities”. And the Brexit brigade flirted over and over again with racism. [Continue reading…]

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UK after the referendum: ‘There is a poisonous anti-foreign sentiment in the air’

The Guardian asked Eastern Europeans and ethnic minorities in the UK to share their experiences after the EU referendum result:

I feel scared after the referendum. In my workplace I have heard people saying things, such as: “Pack your bags and get the fuck out.” Followed by, “If you want I can give you a suitcase.” This referendum has not led to communities coming together in any way – the opposite has happened. Now I feel worried about me and my daughter’s future in Britain.

When I was growing up in Poland I experienced racism because my father was from the Middle East. I don’t want my child to feel the same sense of exclusion I did. Three years ago I decided to move permanently to the UK because it’s such a multi-cultural place. Since coming here I have joined classes to improve my English and learned about the country’s culture and history. My whole family used to love England, but now I feel disappointed. I had no idea so many people hated us so much – me and my family have never done anything wrong in England: we have never claimed benefits and we pay taxes, we respect English culture.

I have never had any problems in the UK until now. I feel like an unwanted guest and I have now decided it is time for me and my family to move on. We don’t feel safe any more. It’s very weird how this country has turned completely against us.
Anonymous, 31, Somerset

My blood ran cold when I heard we were leaving. I live in a small town in the north-east that voted 65% to leave. The Brexit campaign made me feel like an alien, an outsider, like being brown was now bad in England. I was excluded from the debate because I was up for debate – somehow I had become up for national debate.

Recently I spoke to a mum I know from my daughter’s school who has just recently moved from London. She says she isn’t happy here as the people are not very open and friendly.

Having been born and bred in England, my nationality, my birthright, has been suddenly called into question. I am fearful for my six-year-old daughter living in a place where people are being told on the street to “get back to your own country” or to “start packing”.
Sam, 34, Middlesbrough

The result has left me feeling like an outsider. As a child, I grew up in a predominantly white, working-class area, and ignorant comments were almost made on a daily basis to me. As a mixed-race child of Oriental and European descent, I felt like I had to prove myself. My mother was put off teaching me her native language as a teacher told her it would stop me from progressing and “confuse” me. I was ashamed to show off my culture.

Seeing the active persecution of ethnic minorities and immigrants, I’m scared that those feelings of isolation and alienation that I experienced as a child will come back. But on a bigger scale, to the point I fear for my safety. I walk down the street now and I’m worried that people think I’m an outsider and that they want me gone.

I’m scared to go to my home town to visit my parents. I’m scared of how people will treat my white father for being married to my Oriental mother. I am scared that she may be attacked. I feel safer being in Manchester, but there is this poisonous anti-foreign sentiment in the air.

Brexit has allowed some people to believe that their intolerance and racism is now justified. I was in Manchester city centre and a woman glared at me in disgust. Whether or not it was to do with Brexit, I am now vigilant and cautious when I used to be carefree and happy. It all builds up and as an ethnic minority I don’t know if people accept me anymore. I used to be proud of this ethnically diverse country. Now I feel scared of it.
Khristi, 23, Manchester

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White nationalist group will go to GOP convention to ‘defend’ Trump supporters

McClatchy reports: A group of white nationalists and skinheads who held a rally in Sacramento over the weekend where at least five people were stabbed plans to show up at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next month to “make sure that the Donald Trump supporters are defended.”

The violent clash at the California state Capitol accentuates concerns about the Republican National Convention, with political tensions high and thousands of pro- and anti-Trump protesters expected to descend on Cleveland.

“I think everybody is concerned about the potential for violence at the convention,” said Ryan Lenz, senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists and hate groups. [Continue reading…]

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Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply

Randeep Ramesh writes: One of the genies uncorked by the referendum of the EU has been low-lying fascism and extreme nationalism. This is not to say that all leavers were racists. Far from it. But one of the political forces that have been unleashed is a form of dangerous nativism that unchecked will threaten us all.

It’s clear from the barrage of reports that a form of bigotry in everyday conversation is being legitimised. It is not racist to worry about high levels of immigration but a climate of fear is being created in the name of leavers. There are reports of schoolchildren terrified of being deported. “Polish vermin”, “Paki cunt” and “send them home” seem to be becoming something that immigrants and non-whites once again have to endure.

Monday night’s BBC news report featured a neo-Nazi in a balanced piece about the fallout for eastern European immigrants of Brexit in Leeds. Outside a Polish shop, in an interview a heavily inked Lee described himself as a “nationalist” and a “fascist”. He openly displayed his swastika tattoo and talked of a “sense of relief” after the Brexit vote. It was, said Lee, time to “take our country back”.

For the leave campaigners, it must weigh on their conscience that their slogans have been easily adopted by the far right. That’s the trouble with words, you never know whose mouth they have been in. Seven years ago the country had an impassioned debate over the right of the British National party’s Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time. Griffin did appear. His cause died a political death, eviscerated by his fellow panellists’ fury.

The aftermath of the Brexit vote threatens to reanimate that corpse. It is increasingly clear that the language of extremists is becoming part of the British street. Words are weapons-grade material. They can be made into political bombs. How long before “send them back” becomes a line in a manifesto that suggests voluntary repatriation for the last wave of European migrants? [Continue reading…]

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Why fear won and Britain lost

Gary Younge writes: Referendums are by their very nature crude. “In” or “out”; “yes” or “no”. They take important issues and reduce them to their most basic level and then corral them into uncomfortable alliances. Jeremy Corbyn lines up with the captains of industry and David Cameron; George Galloway makes common cause with Nigel Farage.

But if the question was crude the campaigns were vulgar. Sanctimonious, fear-mongering and uninspiring, remain was tone-deaf to an insurrectionary mood that suffered fools more gladly than experts. Wheeling out John Major, Tony Blair, George Soros and the head of the International Monetary Fund, they failed to realise that the surrogates they were employing represented the very establishment with which people were disillusioned. They produced budgets that didn’t add up, evoked wars that wouldn’t happen. Taxes would rise, pensions would fall, the sick would go untended.

Moreover, it never made a case for Europe, only a case for not leaving it on the basis that terrible things that would happen. Commissioners nobody had elected and leaders of foreign states threatened us in a gentler tone but with the same purpose as they did the Greeks: “It’s your choice, don’t make the wrong one.”

Meanwhile a section of London-based commentariat anthropologised the British working class as though they were a lesser evolved breed from distant parts, all too often portraying them as bigots who did not know what was good for them. Having assumed themselves cosmopolitan, the more self-aware pundits began to realise just how parochial they were: having experienced much of the world, they discovered they didn’t know their own country as well as they might.

But if the remain campaign was incompetent and patronising, leave was both inflammatory and irresponsible.

It is a banal axiom to insist that “it’s not racist to talk about immigration”. It’s not racist to talk about black people, Jews or Muslims either. The issue is not whether you talk about them but how you talk about them and whether they ever get a chance to talk for themselves. When you dehumanise immigrants, using vile imagery and language, scapegoating them for a nation’s ills and targeting them as job-stealing interlopers, you stoke prejudice and foment hatred.

The chutzpah with which the Tory right – the very people who had pioneered austerity, damaging jobs, services and communities – blamed immigrants for the lack of resources was breathtaking. The mendacity with which a section of the press fanned those flames was nauseating. The pusillanimity of the remain campaign’s failure to counter these claims was indefensible.

Not everyone, or even most, of the people who voted leave were driven by racism. But the leave campaign imbued racists with a confidence they have not enjoyed for many decades and poured arsenic into the water supply of our national conversation. [Continue reading…]

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The Brexit debate has made Britain more racist

Anyusha Rose writes: For evidence that the Brexit debate is normalizing British racism, look no further than the country’s most enduring national treasure: the pub.

Last weekend at a pub in London’s Soho neighborhood, I got talking to a middle-aged couple. The conversation soon moved to the senseless slaughter of MP Jo Cox at the hands of a terrorist. Killer Thomas Mair was homegrown: a white working-class man from the Scottish “burgh” of Kilmarnock.

Why Cox, asked the bloke. Why couldn’t he have killed a foreigner? Then he gave me the once over and asked, “Where are you really from?”

Six months ago, I would have found his comments shocking. But the Brexit debate has not just challenged the way we conceive of sovereignty. It has legitimized the poisonous campaign vocabulary of U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage and his “breaking point” propaganda.

Farage is the same leader who once said his party would “never win the n—-r vote”, and defended using a racist word for Chinese people in live radio broadcasts. In March, he fueled antagonism toward foreigners when he claimed that mass male-on-female sex attacks were a “nuclear bomb” waiting to explode because of the United Kingdom’s “high” immigration levels. (Police records show that sexual assaults have decreased by half since 2006.) Last week, Farage linked the upcoming Brexit vote to the refugee crisis explicitly, and unveiled a poster featuring a queue of Syrian refugees captioned “Breaking point: the EU has failed us.”

This rhetoric has had a poisonous effect. Because of the Brexit campaign, racism is no longer racism – it’s legitimate opinion. The idea of “getting our country back,” once considered a crass empire throwback, is now causing ripples of bigoted glee. [Continue reading…]

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Racism and paranoia are threatening to engulf stable societies. It’s time to fight back

Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, writes: The murder of British MP Jo Cox last week has forced the world to look at itself anew. This week, social movements will hold events to remember Jo’s life in many cities, including Ottawa. Members of parliaments in Canada and everywhere have been asked to “stand together to stem the poisonous rising tide of fear and hate that breeds division and extremism.”

We all need to hold ourselves to this same challenge. It feels like the world is entering a frightening new phase. No one is immune, anywhere.

Jo Cox dedicated her life to the struggle against injustice and intolerance. I did not know Jo myself, but so many across Oxfam did and were touched by her. So many people were inspired by her compassion, commitment and energy for change. She was clearly an incredible woman.

Jo was a passionate feminist, a woman after my own heart. While working in Oxfam she got involved in a discussion about how women can best become genuinely empowered. “Education,” said one person. No, said Jo, the answer is politics. Support women as they seek political power — the rest will follow. Everything I have ever experienced, working with women in Africa and across the world, tells me she was right. [Continue reading…]

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1,500 MPs around the world sign pledge to uphold legacy of Jo Cox

The Guardian reports: Almost 1,500 parliamentarians have signed a pledge to uphold the legacy of love and tolerance left by Jo Cox, the Labour MP killed last week.

MPs from 40 countries from Australia to Zimbabwe put their names to a statement on what would have been the eve of Cox’s 42nd birthday.

From the UK, the signatories include Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, the former London mayor, and his successor, Sadiq Khan. [Continue reading…]

The joint statement of parliamentarians and democratic representatives says:

Last week, the life of UK MP Jo Cox was brutally and senselessly snatched away. As many have been, we are shocked to the core at a violent attack on democracy and our values.

As human beings, we are devastated at the loss of an indefatigable and compassionate campaigner, mother and colleague. And as parliamentarians, we commit to ensuring her legacy is upheld.

In her first speech to parliament, just one year ago, Jo said: “While we celebrate our diversity … we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”

Every elected representative should reflect on those words this week. Let this be a turning point for us all.

Beyond politics and parties, we must as societies stand together to stem the poisonous rising tide of fear and hate that breeds division and extremism. We must follow Jo’s example to open our arms with love to our communities, our neighbours and those less fortunate than ourselves, and to celebrate our tolerance and diversity.

Jo was a lifelong campaigner against injustice. She entered parliament because she wanted to be in the engine room of change, to steer a course toward a better future. Today we say: we will keep our hands on the wheel. We will do whatever it takes to renew our bonds and fight for those at the margins of our society, our continent and the world.

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Trump has ripped the mask off the GOP pretense on racism

Sasha Abramsky writes: eight years after Obama’s extraordinary electoral victory, Donald Trump is stoking a racial violence, a seething, bubbling, street-violent animus last whipped up so overtly by a presidential candidate in 1968, by the segregationist George Wallace.

Trump has repeatedly re-tweeted, thus endorsing, White Supremacist tweets, launched a vicious verbal assault on Mexican-Americans, made sweeping anti-Muslim statements that, if one were to substitute “Jew” for “Muslim,” would not have been out of place in early Nazi propaganda, and has, in the process, racked up endorsements from a who’s who of white nationalists and neo-fascist groups.

It’s not that that animus hasn’t long been there; it’s just that, since the civil rights era, politicians have calculated that subtlety wins out over naked bigotry, that it’s somehow more palatable to the great mass of middle-of-the-road voters. Hence the rise of what came to be described as “dog whistle politics,” a coded appeal to racial hatreds that could be heard and clearly understood by those it was aimed at while being plausibly denied when politicians were publicly called out for it.

Neither party can claim to have been immune to this. On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton, for example, despite his great popularity amongst African American voters and his reputation as a post-segregationist, liberal Southern governor, sought to shore up his conservative credentials with tough-on-crime policies and welfare reforms that disproportionately impacted black Americans.

But, by and large, once the national Democratic Party broke with its southern segregationist wing and embraced Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights agenda in the mid-1960s, it was the GOP, employing what Richard Nixon termed “the Southern Strategy,” that utilized race-resentment politics in the crudest, most personal, of ways. After all, millions of white Americans were largely unreconciled to the civil rights revolution, and for a party willing to pander to their bigotries, there were rich electoral pickings to be had. [Continue reading…]

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