White liberals have this perception that Republicans are racist, therefore Democrats are "not racist" (in the words of Ibram X Kendi, who studies racism, "I'm not even sure what 'not racist' is supposed to mean").
As you can see from this poll of the various supporters of the 2016 primary candidates, Trump supporters are the most likely to be racist, Bernie supporters are the least likely to be racist, while the supporters of moderate Democratic candidates and moderate Republican candidates are about equally racist. I find it curious that Cruz (who is Latino) supporters are more racist than Kasich supporters.
First, as a Bernie supporter, I want to point out that being in the least racist category of this group is nothing for anyone to brag about. Look at those numbers. Even for Bernie supporters, those numbers are shockingly high.
As you can plainly see from the graph, if we lumped all Republicans together and lumped all the Democrats together, the result would definitely show that Republicans are statistically more likely than Democrats to be racist, but that the difference would be depressingly small, all things considered.
Somehow, white Democrats have convinced themselves that the fact that Republicans are more racist somehow proves that white Democrats are "not racist" (whatever that means). If you are a minority, the above chart probably isn't going to surprise you.
The 2019 Canadian Election
Let's go back to the 2019 election. For whatever reason, Canadian liberals decided that Trudeau's party was the better bet than Singh's party despite Trudeau being caught doing racist things in the recent and further past.
Before he got into politics, Trudeau dressed in shocking blackface multiple times at a school. People took pictures of him. His apologies for doing this were frankly tepid at best. Further, while the prime minister of Canada, Trudeau did some pretty awful things to indigenous Canadians for the benefit of oil companies. One could easily argue that the policies he took towards indigenous Canadians counted as bigoted or racist, as one of the effects of racism is to show far less concern for the well-being of entire populations. He showed even less remorse for this than he did for the blackface thing.
The Canadian Conservative party quite rightly criticized Trudeau for his racism.
If all they did was point out that Trudeau was racist, it would have been fine. The problem is that they argued, "Trudeau is racist, therefore you should vote for the Conservative party instead of Trudeau's party." This is the point at which the Conservative party angered just about everyone.
See, if you are a Canadian racist, the above argument is going to anger you because the argument operates on the assumption that racism is a bad thing, and we all know how racists react to anyone saying that racism is a bad thing.
But if you are Canadian and not racist, then the above argument is even more infuriating because it reduces to "the other guy is racist, therefore you should vote for us, who are even more racist." If you are truly against racism, then the above argument is absurd and insulting. No one who is against racism is going to vote for someone even more racist just because the opposition is racist. Would they prefer to vote for someone not racist at all? Maybe. Then again, Canadian liberals (little "l" not big "L") decided not to vote for Singh's party. Still, the idea that anyone against racism would vote for greater racists because the Liberal party candidate was racist is simply absurd. Because the Conservative party pretty much ran on attacking Trudeau for Trudeau's racism, they angered both racists and anti-racists and lost the election.
American Republicans and Racism
In the 2020 election, I saw a lot of Republicans making the same mistake as Canadian Conservatives did in the 2019 elections in Canada. Yes, Biden was racist. If you argued that he still is, I'm not sure I would disagree with you. When school busing first started, Biden famously opposed it, and opposition to school busing is one of the classic examples of dog-whistle racism.
Whether or not he himself is racist, he has proved expert in using dog-whistle racism to appeal to racists while allowing himself plausible deniability of having used arguments meant to appeal to racists. The distinction between being racist and merely using racism to advance his political career is meaningless as far as I'm concerned.
Hillary Clinton is no stranger to racist dog whistles either. Perhaps the most famous example of Hillary Clinton using dog-whistle racism was her now-infamous superpredator comment.
If you are a Republican and want to criticize Democratic politicians when they use dog-whistle racism to appeal to racist voters, knock yourself out. I'll probably agree with you.
Unfortunately, when Republicans try to criticize Democratic politicians for racism, the arguments are simply not connected to reality. I recently talked to Republicans who insisted that Biden's desire to ban menthol cigarettes was somehow an example of racism against African-Americans. I don't get how someone can claim that is racist, and completely ignore things Biden has done that warrant making accusations of racism (opposition to school busing is the most famous example, but there's any other number of examples that could be drawn from).
OK, so let me rephrase. If you are a Republican and want to criticize Democratic politicians for racism, and your accusations of racism are based on reality and logic, knock yourselves out. I'll happily agree with you in public. There is no problem with saying "Joe Biden is racist." The problem comes when you say "Joe Biden is racist, therefore you should vote for Trump instead." Here, you run into the same problems Canadian Conservatives had in the 2019 elections.
I'm not going to bother giving examples of Trump's racism. Some of the earliest newspaper articles about him were about him being a racist landlord. Such stories dogged him as long as he's been in public life. Aside from being a racist landlord, he has said and done shockingly racist things his whole life, which is not surprising given that his father was in the KKK and he is said to keep a copy of Mein Kampf by his bed for late-night reading. No one who is sane and can read would argue that Trump is less racist than Biden.
Republicans made the same mistake in 2020 that Canadian Conservative party members made in 2019. They argued, "Joe Biden is racist, therefore you should vote for Trump instead." It should come as no surprise that this same bad argument produced the same result in 2020 in America that it did in 2019 in Canada. Simply making this argument pissed off both racists and anti-racists in the same breath.
And I do hope that white Republicans are not making the same mistake white Democrats make. Someone else being racist does not make you "not racist." That's not how reality works, and I should not have to explain this to adults.
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