Trump to Woodward: "You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn't you? Wow. Listen to you. No, I don't feel that at all."
Trump feels good about himself. No guilt. No empathy. He knows he is OK, and so are other White people.
In the taped interview Bob Woodward had asked:
"We share one thing in common, we're White, uh privileged. My father was a lawyer and a judge in Illinois, and we know what your dad did, and do you have any sense that that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave to a certain extent, as it put me and lots of White privileged people in a cave, and that we have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain particularly Black people feel in this country?"
Trump mocked the question and questioner.
Some of my readers will see this as an extraordinary example of clueless lack of empathy. The son of a multi-multi millionaire, a New York playboy, doesn't acknowledge his extraordinary good fortune and is willfully blind to the problems of people he and his father were punished for discriminating against. Wow, huh?
Another way to look at it was political malpractice. He is a sitting president and a journalist is asking an obvious softball question. Any politician--any well brought up human being--would have seen it as an opportunity to show even some pretense of empathy. How easy it would have been for Trump to acknowledge that, yes, he had every advantage, but then segue into something about how he values everyone, how hard he works to understand other people's point of view.
Stop a moment and consider: If you were asked on tape if you understood the pain some fellow American was feeling, wouldn't your own first instinct be at least to pretend some sympathetic connection?
Trump did not.
It does not reflect good character, but it was probably excellent politics for a president who staked his re-election on maintenance of a traditional social order, and a reminder that he is a bulwark against cultural and demographic change. A significant divide in this country is over the issue of whether White Americans are under attack. Trump says they are. A lot of White Americans agree, especially White Evangelical Christian Americans, people who live in rural America, people who are part of gun culture, and people who have attitudes toward race that were common fifty years ago but are disapproved of now.
Sixty four percent of White Republicans believe discrimination against White people is as great as discrimination against Blacks, down slightly from 72% last year.
Asked the question whether generations of slavery, and then segregation and discrimination, made it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of poverty 80% of Republicans disagreed, up from 75% last year.
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| https://www.prri.org/research/racial-justice-2020-george-floyd/ |
Mainstream media calls Trump's answer to Woodward tone deaf and extraordinary for its lack of empathy. They are not Trump's audience. His base was his audience and his answer both connected with them and it was politically artful. Notice that Trump did not argue the point. Instead he mocked Bob Woodward. He said Woodward "drank the Kool-Aid, and therefore was part of the chorus of hated liberal elites and politically correct scolds who criticized Republicans for feeling the way they actually feel, and who don't think there is anything wrong with how they feel.
Most Trump voters do not consider themselves racist. Indeed, they resent enormously the charge, and are alert to even the implication. Saying nice things about White Power is problematic, as is defending Confederate flags, or people who say overtly racist things, but it is safe harbor to say that Democrats are wrong to think Whites have anything to feel guilty about.
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| Republicans: just isolated incidents |
Most humans like their own language, culture, and religion, and usually are most comfortable with people like themselves. Immigrants to America gather in their own neighborhoods and communities until they assimilate, i.e. "Little Italy" and "Chinatowns." My grandparents were Greek immigrants. My mother was born in Boston and lived primarily in Boston's Greek community, was bi-lingual, then met and married my father. I speak no Greek, nor do my first cousins. Three generations to assimilation for Europeans.
Racial and religious differences slow and until recently sometimes legally prohibited the assimilation of some groups into American culture--Jews, Native Americans, Chinese, and Blacks most notably. Some Americans are suspicious and uncomfortable around those groups. They are "different."
Trump speaks directly to that discomfort. He defends White culture. He is OK. White culture is OK. Other White people are OK. Voters know who he is. He is White, he recognizes no legitimate grievance of Blacks, and he has contempt for any Democrat or liberal who thinks he ought to feel any differently.
There is a constituency for that.
5 comments:
"Most Trump voters do not consider themselves racist."
Ya Think?
"White privilege" is just a nicer way to say white supremacy. Maybe all Trump supporters aren't racist, but it's a sure bet that all racists support Trump. It's a tragedy for our society that there are so many of them.
Progress in civil rights is agonizingly slow, when one considers that slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, yet prejudice continues dividing the nation. The persistent connection between poverty, crime and skin color opens the door for bigots to make bogus claims about human nature to justify discrimination in policing and access to opportunity.
Change is slow, but two trends are moving the country towards tolerance. Demographics and a growing awareness of systemic racism give some hope that prejudice will be overcome before it crushes the American spirit.
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The civil rights movement was a big part of the news and everyone I knew including me supported it. "Racism" had a very clear meaning back then. It meant you hated black people and would respond to peaceful protests by them with vicious violence. Everyone had images in their heads of what racism meant: lynchings, police dogs, and fire hoses. Unacceptable arbitrary violence against black people. The word carried an enormous emotional charge, and rightfully so.
Over the decades since then, activists have redefined the word (according to the tenets of "critical race theory") to mean something very different: anything that causes a "disparity" is "racist," regardless of what might be causing that disparity. This is an implicit demand for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity. With stunning dishonesty, the activists have painted this new and very debatable definition with the emotional charge of the original definition.
When they accuse someone of "racism," images of the lynchings, dogs, and fire hoses loom up behind that accusation and give it its enormous power. People successfully accused in this way are at enormous risk of losing their jobs and social standing.
And if you object to being painted with that brush, the activists accuse you of "white fragility," something that one of them has written an entire poorly-reasoned book about. Objecting to being painted as "racist" is proof to them that you are racist. This is known as a "Kafka Trap." You can either admit that you are racist, or prove that you are racist by denying that you are racist.
The prevalence of ideas like this has led to ridiculous and pathetic scenes straight out of Mao's Chinese Cultural Revolution: "struggle sessions" in which white people tearfully confess to their supposedly "racism" and beg forgiveness which will never come because, as is said, "the work" is infinite and ongoing and can never be completed.
Recently there have been a number of scenes of Black Lives Matter mobs invading restaurants and demanding with an implied threat of mob violence that all of the (usually white) occupants raise their fists in support of the movement. Out of fear of being called "racist" were being attacked by the mob, very few people have had the courage to either not raise the fist or to raise a middle finger instead.
I always supported the idea of equal opportunity and I still do. I do not support the idea of equal outcomes, which is equivalent to a demand for a racial quota system. This position gets me targeted with accusations of "racism," an attempt to paint me with those images of the dogs and fire hoses. I refuse to accept that. I think that most white people in this country refuse to accept that.
The people who want to paint all white people with those lynchings, dogs, and firehoses may be well on their way to re-electing Donald Trump.
Michael Trigoboff times 100.
Sally,
That would create a vast disturbance in The Force... :-)
Agree to your truth!
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