From HuffPo/Pollster:
Why condemning racism backfired on Clinton (money quote):
Clinton described the “deplorables” as being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic ― you name it.” So, in a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, we asked Americans how they’d describe people who hold negative views of Muslims, black people, women, gay people and immigrants. Did that make them bad people, prejudiced but not necessarily bad, or neither of the above?
The results show Americans’ discomfort with outright condemning people who hold bigoted views.
Most of those polled fell into the middle category, saying that disliking an entire race, religion, gender or other class of people was prejudiced, but didn’t necessarily make someone a bad person.
Please share widely!
…How many of the responses were preservation of self, rather than a view on others actions? If you ask a racist what he/she thinks about racist views, are they not — perhaps axiomatically — to reply that such doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person?
I think the presumptions of the question are not well examined: it appears to rely on the notion of a discreet and easily recognized group of racist who are distinctly other than those being asked the question. I don’t know that that’s the case….
Nor, it must be said, do I think oppression would be such a problem in America, nor change not quicker and easier, if, in fact, a majority of Americans were not racists. At the very least, if not racist themselves, everybody knows a racist or two (I am related to several) whom they don’t like to think of as ‘bad person’.
My father is a good man. He’s imperfect, both in his individual actions and in his biases and predilections.
My father ran my town’s youth baseball league before he and my mother even had kids. My father was involved in the Lion’s Club, doing community and charity work. My father was a civil servant, a lifer in the US Postal Service. My father is a provider and a protector, of his nuclear family, his extended family, and his community.
My dad’s a racist. He’s no Klansman, but he’s a racist. And a misogynist. And a homophobe. And a bigot.
My dad’s a good man. He’s imperfect, but I believe that, on balance, there’s far more good in him than bad. It’s pretty easy to model my life without capturing his overt -isms. It’s far harder for me to model my life in ways that capture all of his generous, wholesome, or otherwise remarkably positive traits. Lord knows I try, and fail, every day.
A little bit of charitable forgiveness goes a long way. Unfortunately, in the political realm, that discussion quickly goes down the “Nazis also did some stuff that wasn’t bad” blind alley. That leaves us with denunciations and no gray area between the black and white. And that makes any conversation about it, political or otherwise, a minefield best avoided outright.
I have had a hard time maintaining a charitable attitude this election, and have debated with jconway about it. Maybe I can say all this because I am comfortably white.
It’s easy to be charitable with dad. It gets less and less easier the farther that person is from my own personal experiences.
I find it’s also easier to be charitable with centralmassdad, but that’s because he tends to be even keeled and charitable himself.
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I’ve never denied that there are many overt racists on Team Trump, many of them irredeemably odious. What’s more interesting are folks who aren’t bad people or even bad community members, who just blame the hard times by looking down on people of color instead of looking up at the elite.
I’m with President Johnson:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
It sounds a little bit like the phenomenon of everyone having a racist uncle at Thanksgiving. People aren’t ready to condemn their uncles.
On the other hand, it might also reflect the “I’m not racist, but my neighbor is” phenomenon. People never want to admit they’re prejudiced, but maybe they know it deep down.
bad person?
Some of my students were talking about this. I have three or four African American kids in one of my classes. I also have some vehement Trump supporters. One of the black kids called Trump racist. The Trump supporters said he wasn’t. (This isn’t a conversation I could address in this class. I stayed out of it). The black kids sort of shrugged it off and went back to talking to each other. These kids are friends with the white kids who were supporting Trump. They play on the same football team. They like each other. When I have talked to my African American students about the attitudes of some white kids, the word they use to describe them is “ignorant,” that is, they don’t know any better.
If Trump isn’t racist, I don’t know who is. But I know people with racially repugnant opinions. Am I supposed to correct them? Ignore their comments? Avoid them? I’m asking a question here, not complaining. There’s an issue with language here: people reject the label, but not the beliefs.
It’s hard not to be affected by it. Who is not racist? I think it’s more a question as to who is proud of this condition and who is embarrassed by it. I don’t see a majority of us being proud of it but it’s clear that there is a small and loud minority who is proud about it. So yeah, most of us are not bad people, we’re just imperfect and working on it.
Personally I see racism as one of the most profound and worst character flaws one can possess, but understand that lesser faults like bias and prejudice does not make one evil.
training (receiving, not providing) in the 1990s, we were told that everyone is prejudice and that racism was prejudice with power. Prejudice was a feeling, racism was having the ability to enforce it in some way, either verbally or worse.
We have eliminated a lot of overt racism at least here in Massachusetts, but a lot of systemic racism remains. And unfortunately, so does prejudice.
After one of my select board meetings, a lady came up to me to complain about the tax rate on behalf of “the elderly.” I told her that we had a food pantry and no questions were asked and that the Council on Aging would help anyone who qualified for services. These people wouldn’t take charity, she told me. They were proud, not like Puerto Ricans in Holyoke. I’m pretty sure she concerned about her own situation, not someone else’s. I encounter this kind of prejudice pretty often. These are people who wouldn’t have a problem having people of color as acquaintances or co-workers. They would be friendly and genuinely like these folks, but they would see no cognitive dissonance in their prejudiced views. My students talking about Trump, I think, were like that.
I, like probably a lot of other people, was taught to criticize people’s actions, not the person themselves (especially important when dealing with your own kids). So for me to label someone as “a bad person” requires getting over a high bar. Hitler-like. Manson-like. Something that you are never going to change.
So perhaps if the question was reworded to say something like “is acting badly” or “is acting prejudiced” (there has to be a better way to say it) the results would be different.
No normal person who is racist will admit it, even if they’re words and actions suggest otherwise. Somehow there is stigma for the label, but not their speech or actions. The Mariner’s catch was evidently hurt that people called him a racist. He clearly didn’t think these tweets were racist:
What does he think racism looks like?
I’m not sure of this completely, but, believing relatives, I have a racist uncle who became mayor of my home town. I would think that that might raise one’s concern about racism: maybe not a bad person, but not someone you’d want as mayor.
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There’s also a side-effect of segregation. We reside in a country, after all, where support for inter-racial marriage (per Gallop) didn’t cross into being a majority position until the 1990’s (up from a meager 4% in the 1950s). Studies of interracial friendships also show that fairly few white people have African-American friends. The result is a lack of empathy. It spawns the illusion that racist opinions are no big deal, have no large effect, are just a harmless, salty quirk in an otherwise noble person. If more white people were married to Blacks and/or had mixed race children, the harmless, salty stuff might stop sounding so harmless. (“That’s my kid you’re talking about!”)
Standing up against bigotry is one of the leadership traits I want in a leader. Bigotry is wrong and evil. When bigotry rears its ugly head, I don’t turn to polls and I don’t want my President to poll-test responses either. I commend Hillary Clinton for standing up strong to Trump’s bigotry and the Trump campaign’s enpowerment of bigots.
And yes, bigots are bad people whether or not they are self-aware.
http://ap-gfkpoll.com/uncategorized/deplorable-trump-more-so-than-clinton-ap-gfk-poll-finds-2
The poll (released today) shows the race to be a dead heat, with the Clinton numbers evaporating, relative to her August lead.
Money quote:
…in an environment where the media repeatedly fall down on the job and the DUMB candidate has basically stooped to playing an extended game of “I know you are, but what am I?”:(
It does seem to have been a bad month for Clinton, but what does it say about voters when the needle can be moved by a couple of days of pneumonia?