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- cross-posted to:
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TO UNDERSTAND THE rise of Donald Trump, you don’t need to go to a diner in the Midwest or read “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance’s memoir.
You just need to know these basic facts:
In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.
Also, I wanted to say that the more open Trump is about racism, the more he will turn people off. There are a lot of people who are pretty much racists, but they would never admit it, even to themselves. These are people who cross the street when they see a black man coming toward them, but would never dream of saying the N-word and think Martin Luther King had a dream about something involving ending racism and that was good.
Those people will not want to be associated with Trump and Vance the more overt they get.
This is an interesting question - if you’re lying to yourself about being racist, and won’t condone racist policies and you know, act in a way to not look racist… Like a philosophical P zombie, are you for all external functional (maybe limited to politically) purposes not racist?
No, they’re still racist because their actions (e.g. voting for Trump) increase racial inequality.
All people are racist to some degree. The ability of our brains to perform categorization and pattern recognition are two major reasons why humans have been successful as a species. We can’t help but apply those concepts to the people we interact with.
Some people are more fear motivated and gravitate towards the “black people are violent” kind of racism while others tend towards the “Asians are good at math” kind of racism but both are forms of racism. Obviously the first type is going to have more negative outcomes in society than the second but that doesn’t mean the second type is not racist. They’re both fundamentally generalizations based primarily on the race of another human.
Simplifying complex information for quick analysis is how our brains work and that’s essentially what racism is. There is no getting away from it completely.
This is the correct answer. Racism is systematic and it is to simple to blame the individuel.
One doesn’t have to acknowledge their cancer to be full of tumors.
Racism can lay quietly below the surface while festering and slowly rotting away their insides.