Trump’s Vision of Black America Is a White Supremacist Fantasy
Trump’s Vision of Black America Is a White Supremacist Fantasy
It’s clear that Donald Trump’s “black outreach” isn’t actual outreach to black communities. A Trump who wanted to reach black voters would speak to black churches, black colleges, and organizations like the NAACP or the Urban League. The actual Trump, instead, has made his pitch to lily-white audiences in towns and neighborhoods with few black residents.
And for good reason. Trump is never going to win more than a token percentage of black voters. If he wants the White House, he’ll need to persuade as many white voters as possible, and a visible commitment to diversity is one way to win over a certain class of right-leaning, suburban whites.
Or at least, that’s my theory. And it fits the history of modern Republican presidential campaigns, where visible overtures to black voters were part of the process, from Richard Nixon in 1968 to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. But there’s a problem. In the past 24 hours, Trump’s message to blacks has gone from unusual—“you have nothing to lose”—to something on the border of racist. Listen to what the Republican nominee had to say to an almost all-white audience in Akron, Ohio, on Monday evening.
“Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership. Crime at levels nobody has seen,” said Trump, painting a dystopian picture of black life for rallygoers. “You can go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities. They’re run by the Democrats.”
Trump continued. “Look, it is a disaster the way African Americans are living,” he said, erroneously suggesting that most black Americans live in inner cities. “We’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
As big a problem as violent crime is in the nation’s most segregated and impoverished communities, the world Trump describes doesn’t exist for the vast majority of black Americans in 2016. For them, as for most Americans, crime is at historic lows, and cities are safer than they’ve ever been.
Despite this, Trump seems to envision an America where all blacks live in cities that are one part the Detroit riots of 1967, one part the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and one part John Carpenter’s Escape From New York.*
Trump’s outreach to black voters is a dog whistle for racists.
