Donald Trump Is a Candidate for White Supremacists — Not the Jews

trump-hands-head

In response, to this article: The truth will prevail. You can not cheat justice. It will find you out soon or later.

I’ll say it plainly: The high-profile Jews supporting Donald Trump make me sick. This is simply not about Democratic and Republican politics; I’ve certainly never said the same thing about supporters of (any) Bush. It’s about white supremacy.

Let’s take “white supremacy” out from the realm of insult. It is an ideology, all things considered, not simply a slur, and it is believed by tens of millions of Americans. It’s the proposition that the true (“great”) America is white America, and whilst the “melting pot” can absorb some blacks, Asians and Latinos, the essential core of what America is remains the Christian, European iteration that prevailed for 200 years. It is English-speaking, Merry-Christmas-wishing, and ruled by “real” American men, not by women or people who have the middle name Hussein.

Moreover, white supremacy isn’t the provenance of the Ku Klux Klan along with other easy-to-dismiss villains. It is the very air that people breathe. It is, as Mohammed Ali commented in 1969 , the fact that Jesus is white, angels are white, Miss America is (or ought to be) white and Snow White is white.

Similarly, racism just isn’t about individuals having bad thoughts (or perhaps not) about other races. Racism is a structural phenomenon, constructed into the way we live — and it’s also often completely invisible to those of us in the privileged side. (this is the reason writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates get accused of “playing the race card.” For some white people, referring to race is playing a card; to folks of color, it will be the entire card game.)

Which brings us back again to Trump, as well as the Jews who support him — Mel Sembler, Elliott Broidy, Sam Fox, Lewis Eisenberg and Ronald Weiser from the fundraising side ; Jason Greenblatt and David M. Friedman on Israel , not to mention, Sheldon Adelson.

It’s been a commonplace of late that Trump’s appeal rests on two foundations: first, the economic insecurity of working-class whites, who have been trained for an economy that no more exists and have now not recovered from 2008, and second, the nativist, racist resentment these whites feel toward anyone who isn’t them. As scholars and critics have dug more deeply to the Trump phenomenon, however, it offers ended up that the second motivation is in fact the predominant one.

First, white Republicans in general hold a lot more negative views of blacks than white Democrats do. In a wonderful summary of information from two Vanderbilt University researchers, published within the New York Times on May 11, Thomas Edsall observed that on a scale of racial resentment whites feel toward African Americans, fully 58% of Republican whites were into the “most resentful” quartile, weighed against 22% of Democrats and 42% of Independents. Meanwhile, only 4% of Republicans were in the least resentful quartile, in contrast to 23% of Democrats and 10% of Independents.

The Vanderbilt researchers also amalgamated how whites regard blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and LGBT people in accordance with themselves. Seventy-three percent of Republicans have unfavorable views of the “others,” with only 16% neutral and 11% favorable. Among Democrats, 41% had unfavorable views, 20% neutral and 38% favorable.

Think of that for a moment. Seventy-three percent of white Republicans think they are a lot better than other groups Fifty-eight percent are strongly resentful of blacks.
Then came the data-crunching over at Vox on June 2, which showed that the best predictor of Trump support was not if they think the economy is getting worse, but if they think President Obama is a Muslim. “If they are white while the answer is yes,” Philip Klinkner wrote, “89 percent of that time period see your face will have an increased opinion of Trump than Clinton.”

You can find a great deal more data points in that piece, but the takeaway is disturbing. It’s not the economy, stupid; it is the brown people.

Indeed, when you chart Obama’s disapproval rating according to the standard of an individual’s racial resentment, as Vox did, it’s practically a straight line. People dislike Obama towards the extent they dislike blacks.

In a way, the entire Trump story is a simple one: black, “Muslim” president results in nativist backlash, with a consummate salesman-demagogue giving his followers permission to say what had previously been beyond the bounds of polite discourse.

Now, neither Vanderbilt nor the sources cited in Vox included Jews among these “others.” But we all know the shocking amounts of anti-Semitism among Trump’s supporters, Trump’s retweets of white supremacists, in addition to now infamous (((echoes))) among various code words they use to dog-whistle one to the other.

Let’s dig one level deeper, though.

Twenty seven years ago, feminist theoretician Peggy McIntosh published an influential essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” This information is a must-read, and makes all the invisible visible. “My schooling provided me with no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture,” she writes. Rather, “I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.”

Yet McIntosh went on to list 26 ways in which her skin color gave her advantages in everyday life, from “I’m able to be pretty certain that my neighbors… will undoubtedly be neutral or pleasant to me” to “I can be pretty certain that if I ask to talk to ‘the person in charge,’ i’ll be facing a person of my race.”

Finally, she observes, “there was one main bit of cultural turf; it absolutely was my very own turf, and I was the type of who could control the turf. My pores and skin was a secured item for just about any move I was educated to would you like to make. I possibly could think of myself as belonging in major ways as well as making social systems work for me. I possibly could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or perhaps oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of this main culture, i really could also criticize it fairly freely.”

Here is the “great” America that Trump’s supporters are mourning: the America of white male hegemony, no Spanish on the phone-tree menus, no political correctness to prohibit hateful speech toward women, and no Kenyan Muslims in the White House. (As Ali pointed out, it’s the “White” House, most likely.) White Supremacy isn’t in what Trump may or might not rely on his heart; it is about his core message of restoring a more nativist, sexist, white-hegemonic America.

Do we American Jews really believe that we now have so successfully assimilated that people are not an element of the problem relating to this white supremacist logic? That the viciously anti-Semitic trolling of Jonathan Weisman, Julia Ioffe and, for this paper, Bethany Mandel (among others) is simply happenstance?

Jewish tradition is clear that it is a sin to aid a candidate of racial resentment, nationalism, and demagoguery who wishes to oppress the foreigner and who makes generalizations about disfavored groups (see Exodus 22:21-22 or 23:9, Deuteronomy 23:7 or 24:17 or 27:19, Jeremiah 7:6 or 22:3, Psalms 94:6, Zechariah 7:10, Malachi 3:5 and elsewhere). It also flies in the face of our own recent experiences as immigrants to this country, and also as objects of religious hatred throughout Western Civilization.

But, beyond that, it is rather foolish. We Jews are not so white that the logic of white supremacy passes over us like the Angel of Death on Pesach. We, too, are also. And if it is now acceptable to shower contempt on those people who are different, we shall not remain untouched.

Find out more: http://forward.com/opinion/national/342291/donald-trump-is-a-candidate-for-white-supremacists-not-the-jews/#ixzz4BBsedaj4

One thought on “Donald Trump Is a Candidate for White Supremacists — Not the Jews”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s