Trump’s Inconvenient Racial Truth
By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
NOV. 1, 2016
With the race for the presidency entering its last days, Donald J. Trump last Wednesday once again made his pitch to black America: a new deal aimed just at them. “I will be your greatest champion,” Trump said at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina. “I will never ever take the African-American community for granted. Never, ever.”
The hyperbolic remarks elicited the same collective eye roll among black Americans and white progressives that they have since Trump began regularly including black Americans in his platform in August. It was then, following days of unrest in Milwaukee after the police killed a black man there, that Trump flew to Wisconsin to give a speech on race. He headed not to the heavily black city where the embers of outrage still smoldered but instead, as his critics noted with glee, took the stage at the county fairgrounds of a bleached-out, deeply conservative Milwaukee suburb in order to address the problems of the “inner city.”
There was, of course, the usual and expected “law and order” and pro-police rhetoric that elicited hoots and cheers from the crowd. But then Trump, as he is known to do, added an unexpected twist.
“Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets,’’ Trump said. ‘‘Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus, or the young child walking home from school. For every one violent protester, there are a hundred of moms and dads and kids on the same city block who just want to be able to sleep safely at night.”
He pointed out the high unemployment rate among black men in Milwaukee, the number of households run by single mothers who were living in poverty and the low high-school-graduation rates. “I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today who wants a different and much better future,” Trump told the crowd, which at times stood eerily silent. “It is time for our society to address some honest and very, very difficult truths. The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community.” Trump went on to say that Hillary Clinton “panders and talks down to communities of color,” “seeing them only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” It was time, Trump proclaimed, that Democrats compete for black votes.
There was something utterly surreal about that moment. Trump had spent months whipping up his supporters, focusing on other so-called minority groups whom he labeled rapists and terrorists, and now he was telling the nearly all-white crowd that if they voted for him, he’d use his power to help black residents in the inner cities by bringing jobs back and improving their wages. Trump’s message did not seem to be directed at his audience (recent research by professors at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota showed that white Trump supporters are less likely to support government programs if they think they will help black people). As one resident of West Bend, the approximately 1-percent-black town where the rally was held, put it to The Times: “They think we owe them something. I don’t want to seem racist or anything, but the black heritage has been raised in a certain way that there’s no incentive to get out and work, because all of a sudden you have five kids and there are no dads around.” Nor was it directed to black people, who of all the nonwhite voters are the least poachable by the G.O.P. The message was presumably targeted at white moderates, the independents and disillusioned Bernie Sanders legions, whom Trump was most likely hoping to reassure that he was not racist despite his years of fueling the birther conspiracy theory and months of spewing bigotry about Muslims and Mexicans.
But in his speeches, Trump was speaking more directly about the particular struggles of working-class black Americans and describing how the government should help them more than any presidential candidate in years. Let that uncomfortable truth sink in.
Whatever his motives, Trump was talking about the black working class in a way that few national politicians do. By now it’s no surprise that when they talk about black Americans as at all, Republican politicians typically conflate blackness with poverty, and then quickly blame black people for their struggles. In March 2014, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that the problems in the “inner cities” Trump was talking about were rooted not in the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of businesses and the tax base to government-subsidized suburbs, but on an absence of a “culture of work.”
Liberals quickly lambasted Ryan for those remarks. But far too often, the way Democrats talk to, and about, black Americans is indistinguishable from the way their Republican counterparts do. And President Obama has been as guilty as anyone. A year before Ryan made his remarks, Obama delivered a commencement address at the historically black Morehouse College, where he warned the graduates at the prestigious all-male school that they shouldn’t use racism as an excuse, and to be good fathers.
Politicians regularly deploy this type of shaming when referring to, or even when addressing, black Americans. But it’s hard to fathom a politician, Democrat or Republican, standing before a predominately white crowd in a sagging old coal town, and blaming the community’s economic woes on poor parenting or lack of work ethic or a victim mentality. Those Americans, white Americans, are worthy of government help. Their problems are not of their own making, but systemic, institutional, out of their control. They are never blamed for their lot in life. They have had jobs snatched away by bad federal policy, their opportunities stolen by inept politicians.
It would have been easy, expected, for Trump in his speeches to recycle the same old personal-responsibility narrative for black voters. But Trump didn’t call for black people to stop lazing around and use a little more elbow grease on those bootstraps. He was pushing for more government — Republican-led government — to help black folks prosper, a racially specific new deal that included investing in schools, high-wage jobs and black entrepreneurs. And in doing so, Trump, at least rhetorically, did something the Democrats and Republicans have largely failed to do — he took black citizens into the ranks of “hardworking Americans” worthy of the government’s hand.
To be clear, I am not arguing that the man who called for the execution of the since-exonerated Central Park Five (and who still insists on their guilt) and who seeks nationwide implementation of the stop-and-frisk program ruled unconstitutional in New York City, and who warns that voting in heavily black cities is rigged, is a racial progressive who will enact policies that will help black communities. Nor am I saying black voters should buy what Trump is selling. (And they aren’t: A poll released last week by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College of likely voters in Pennsylvania found that “no black respondent from Philadelphia supported Mr. Trump in the survey.”)
What I am saying is that when Trump claims Democratic governance has failed black people, when he asks “the blacks” what they have to lose, he is asking a poorly stated version of a question that many black Americans have long asked themselves. What dividends, exactly, has their decades-long loyalty to the Democratic ticket paid them? By brushing Trump’s criticism off as merely cynical or clueless rantings, we are missing an opportunity to have a real discussion of the failures of progressivism and Democratic leadership when it comes to black Americans.
Trump is not wrong when he says that black Americans have suffered in a particular way in blue cities and blue states. (Of course, they suffer in red states as well.) The most segregated cities have long been clustered above the Mason-Dixon line and are Democratically run. Some of the most segregated schools in the country educate students in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee. Efforts to integrate schools in these cities have met resistance from white progressives. Democrats did as much to usher in the era of mass incarceration as anyone else. And in these cities, with their gaping income inequality, black communities shoulder a terrible burden of gun violence, high unemployment, substandard schools and poverty.
Though black Americans these days consistently vote Democratic at higher margins than any other racial group, this wasn’t always the case. Before 1948, black voters were fairly evenly split between Republican and Democrats. Then President Harry S. Truman pushed a civil rights platform, and a majority of black voters swung Democratic, though a significant percentage still identified as Republican. That changed in the 1960s, when black voters moved en masse to the Democratic Party after Lyndon B. Johnson showed he was willing to lose the South in order to pass the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Southern Democrats abandoned the party to become Republicans, and Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a Southern strategy of stalling forward movement on civil rights. And the party of Lincoln came to be considered anathema to black progress.
By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
NOV. 1, 2016
With the race for the presidency entering its last days, Donald J. Trump last Wednesday once again made his pitch to black America: a new deal aimed just at them. “I will be your greatest champion,” Trump said at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina. “I will never ever take the African-American community for granted. Never, ever.”
The hyperbolic remarks elicited the same collective eye roll among black Americans and white progressives that they have since Trump began regularly including black Americans in his platform in August. It was then, following days of unrest in Milwaukee after the police killed a black man there, that Trump flew to Wisconsin to give a speech on race. He headed not to the heavily black city where the embers of outrage still smoldered but instead, as his critics noted with glee, took the stage at the county fairgrounds of a bleached-out, deeply conservative Milwaukee suburb in order to address the problems of the “inner city.”
There was, of course, the usual and expected “law and order” and pro-police rhetoric that elicited hoots and cheers from the crowd. But then Trump, as he is known to do, added an unexpected twist.
“Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets,’’ Trump said. ‘‘Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus, or the young child walking home from school. For every one violent protester, there are a hundred of moms and dads and kids on the same city block who just want to be able to sleep safely at night.”
He pointed out the high unemployment rate among black men in Milwaukee, the number of households run by single mothers who were living in poverty and the low high-school-graduation rates. “I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today who wants a different and much better future,” Trump told the crowd, which at times stood eerily silent. “It is time for our society to address some honest and very, very difficult truths. The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community.” Trump went on to say that Hillary Clinton “panders and talks down to communities of color,” “seeing them only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” It was time, Trump proclaimed, that Democrats compete for black votes.
There was something utterly surreal about that moment. Trump had spent months whipping up his supporters, focusing on other so-called minority groups whom he labeled rapists and terrorists, and now he was telling the nearly all-white crowd that if they voted for him, he’d use his power to help black residents in the inner cities by bringing jobs back and improving their wages. Trump’s message did not seem to be directed at his audience (recent research by professors at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota showed that white Trump supporters are less likely to support government programs if they think they will help black people). As one resident of West Bend, the approximately 1-percent-black town where the rally was held, put it to The Times: “They think we owe them something. I don’t want to seem racist or anything, but the black heritage has been raised in a certain way that there’s no incentive to get out and work, because all of a sudden you have five kids and there are no dads around.” Nor was it directed to black people, who of all the nonwhite voters are the least poachable by the G.O.P. The message was presumably targeted at white moderates, the independents and disillusioned Bernie Sanders legions, whom Trump was most likely hoping to reassure that he was not racist despite his years of fueling the birther conspiracy theory and months of spewing bigotry about Muslims and Mexicans.
But in his speeches, Trump was speaking more directly about the particular struggles of working-class black Americans and describing how the government should help them more than any presidential candidate in years. Let that uncomfortable truth sink in.
Whatever his motives, Trump was talking about the black working class in a way that few national politicians do. By now it’s no surprise that when they talk about black Americans as at all, Republican politicians typically conflate blackness with poverty, and then quickly blame black people for their struggles. In March 2014, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that the problems in the “inner cities” Trump was talking about were rooted not in the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of businesses and the tax base to government-subsidized suburbs, but on an absence of a “culture of work.”
Liberals quickly lambasted Ryan for those remarks. But far too often, the way Democrats talk to, and about, black Americans is indistinguishable from the way their Republican counterparts do. And President Obama has been as guilty as anyone. A year before Ryan made his remarks, Obama delivered a commencement address at the historically black Morehouse College, where he warned the graduates at the prestigious all-male school that they shouldn’t use racism as an excuse, and to be good fathers.
Politicians regularly deploy this type of shaming when referring to, or even when addressing, black Americans. But it’s hard to fathom a politician, Democrat or Republican, standing before a predominately white crowd in a sagging old coal town, and blaming the community’s economic woes on poor parenting or lack of work ethic or a victim mentality. Those Americans, white Americans, are worthy of government help. Their problems are not of their own making, but systemic, institutional, out of their control. They are never blamed for their lot in life. They have had jobs snatched away by bad federal policy, their opportunities stolen by inept politicians.
It would have been easy, expected, for Trump in his speeches to recycle the same old personal-responsibility narrative for black voters. But Trump didn’t call for black people to stop lazing around and use a little more elbow grease on those bootstraps. He was pushing for more government — Republican-led government — to help black folks prosper, a racially specific new deal that included investing in schools, high-wage jobs and black entrepreneurs. And in doing so, Trump, at least rhetorically, did something the Democrats and Republicans have largely failed to do — he took black citizens into the ranks of “hardworking Americans” worthy of the government’s hand.
To be clear, I am not arguing that the man who called for the execution of the since-exonerated Central Park Five (and who still insists on their guilt) and who seeks nationwide implementation of the stop-and-frisk program ruled unconstitutional in New York City, and who warns that voting in heavily black cities is rigged, is a racial progressive who will enact policies that will help black communities. Nor am I saying black voters should buy what Trump is selling. (And they aren’t: A poll released last week by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College of likely voters in Pennsylvania found that “no black respondent from Philadelphia supported Mr. Trump in the survey.”)
What I am saying is that when Trump claims Democratic governance has failed black people, when he asks “the blacks” what they have to lose, he is asking a poorly stated version of a question that many black Americans have long asked themselves. What dividends, exactly, has their decades-long loyalty to the Democratic ticket paid them? By brushing Trump’s criticism off as merely cynical or clueless rantings, we are missing an opportunity to have a real discussion of the failures of progressivism and Democratic leadership when it comes to black Americans.
Trump is not wrong when he says that black Americans have suffered in a particular way in blue cities and blue states. (Of course, they suffer in red states as well.) The most segregated cities have long been clustered above the Mason-Dixon line and are Democratically run. Some of the most segregated schools in the country educate students in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee. Efforts to integrate schools in these cities have met resistance from white progressives. Democrats did as much to usher in the era of mass incarceration as anyone else. And in these cities, with their gaping income inequality, black communities shoulder a terrible burden of gun violence, high unemployment, substandard schools and poverty.
Though black Americans these days consistently vote Democratic at higher margins than any other racial group, this wasn’t always the case. Before 1948, black voters were fairly evenly split between Republican and Democrats. Then President Harry S. Truman pushed a civil rights platform, and a majority of black voters swung Democratic, though a significant percentage still identified as Republican. That changed in the 1960s, when black voters moved en masse to the Democratic Party after Lyndon B. Johnson showed he was willing to lose the South in order to pass the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Southern Democrats abandoned the party to become Republicans, and Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a Southern strategy of stalling forward movement on civil rights. And the party of Lincoln came to be considered anathema to black progress.
