Today is Columbus Day

Last night was the second presidential debate between an unlikable but highly qualified candidate who is likely to resume the status quo of a flawed but reasonably successful 8 year period of American history, and an unqualified egomaniac who has reignited the prominence of white supremacist voices in American politics. Despite this clear disparity between the two candidates, last night’s format for debate was a group of undecided voters asking each of them questions about why they should or should not vote for one or the other. And you are likely sitting there reading this and thinking “How on Earth did they find enough people who are actually undecided in this fucking election to fill the seats in the debate auditorium?” and I am nodding with you, because it is utterly confounding.

How did we get here? Why is it that we’ve enabled a presidential candidate that would’ve been considered extreme in terms of his proposals for racial supremacy back in the early 70s to come this far? Why is it that, even if Hillary Clinton wipes the floor with Donald Trump in 30 days (the most likely outcome according to the latest data), there will still be tens of millions of people who cast a ballot for Donald Trump, a man who has said he would ban an entire religion from entry to the country, ship out an entire ethnicity (with no regard for this action’s effects on the US economy), grab women by their genitals without permission, and numerous other offenses that I can’t list without turning this behemoth of a sentence into something even worse?

Today is Columbus Day.

A few months ago, Pew Research released a study that documented the racial views of each candidate’s supporters. The headlines (rightly) pointed out Trump supporters’ extreme over-indexing on racist viewpoints. 40% of them felt that blacks were lazier than whites, half of them felt that blacks were more violent than whites, and they generally displayed a living embodiment of all the shitty memes posted by your shittier friends on Facebook.

However, for anyone who had been paying attention, this was expected. The naïve or those in denial were the only ones ignorant of the fact that Trump’s candidacy had garnered massive waves of support among white nationalists (now given the more media friendly, PC-term alt-right, ironically enough). What was perhaps more concerning when examining the data was the baseline that Pew was working against. Trump supporters over-indexed against the general population, but the general population statistics still indicated that roughly 1 in 4 Americans felt blacks were lazier than whites, and 1 in 3 felt blacks were more violent. Projected over the broader population, that’s equal to about 100 million people who still believe in the same racist stereotypes that perpetuate this godawful swamp of bile that we’re slowly wading through.

And yet, when a black kid is shot to death by the police, there are people who will say we live in a post-racial society. There are people who will claim that bringing race into it is a distraction, that the issue of racial discrimination is something that we have moved past as a society, that these thoughts don’t enter into the equation. We refuse to acknowledge what lies beneath, even when staring at hard data.

Last night, when Donald Trump was asked by a black man if he could be the president for all people, he spoke about what he would do to fix the inner cities (which he has described as “hell” in the past, in perhaps the most misguided attempt to court the black vote that has ever been implemented). This black man gave no indication of where he lived. He gave no indication of his employment status, his likelihood to vote Democrat or Republican, his upbringing, or his family composition. Regardless, Donald Trump immediately jumped to discussing the poor and impoverished black communities of the inner city without any context clues besides the color of the man’s skin.

Again: this is expected, because Donald Trump is a documented racist.

What is not expected and continues to astound is the inability of those who are, ostensibly, not racist to call him on it. There are very few think-pieces about this odd and subtle display of racial bias. There is very little discussion about the automatic assumption that a black man is from the inner city and therefore is worried about Trump’s plans to intervene and improve black life in ways that previous presidents could not. So, while Trump was once again over-indexing, the baseline is disconcerting.

(In the interest of saving time and space, we’ll skip the obvious inherent racism in Trump’s continued insistence that he’ll be the wealthy white savior who comes in and figures things out for those poor black inner city residents who, according to his view, live among a constant hail of gunfire. Let’s just say that his vision for urban black America indicates that his experience with those neighborhoods appears to be skimming through the liner notes of an NWA record.)

In the mind of Trump supporters (like all members of a cult of personality, Clinton fanatics not excluded), these flaws are the lesser sins that are outweighed by the positive aspects of the candidate. He is wealthy. He is famous. He has accomplished these things by being “good at business,” whatever that means in the abstract of the minds of people who will never have a net worth above $50k. His misogyny is forgiven because he is famous, and the famous have a different set of rules and expectations. His religious bigotry is forgiven because ISIS is made up of Muslims, and therefore exclusion of Muslims is necessary to prevent future terrorism (despite the fact that terrorism is an issue that is not religious by nature; see: mass shootings, which we are hesitant to label as terrorism when they are executed by white shooters). His anti-Mexican rhetoric is forgiven because…well, that one is more difficult to explain away. Jobs, I guess? Further vague notions of crime only being perpetrated by non-whites?

Our history is littered with this type of thinking. Our culture is built on the foundation of selective amnesia.

Today is Columbus Day.

Hundreds of years ago, when Trump Tower was nothing but a pile of stardust that had not yet been formulated in this particular branch of the multiverse, white culture actively decided to expand its reach at any cost. It smiled and shook hands and hugged and assured everyone that they would live harmoniously. It raped and pillaged and murdered and smothered those that opposed it until there was no remnant of native culture. It enslaved those that were considered lesser and built its economic strength on their mangled, broken backs, and then pandered to those it had destroyed in order to further monopolize its ownership.

Today, we celebrate those beginnings. We call it an accomplishment. And people have the nerve to ask why Donald Trump is popular.