Bigger than Bernie — Defeating Racism in 2016

The Democratic National Convention has begun in Philadelphia. While the DNC likely wanted to present a unified, organized face (especially after the RNC’s Calamity in Cleveland), so far, this has not been the case. Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders even booed the senator when he implored them to vote for Secretary Clinton. Some of Sanders’ delegates walked out after Hillary Clinton was officially nominated. Clearly, many of Sanders’ supporters are still “Feelin’ the Bern.”

But this election is so much bigger than Bernie Sanders.

Now, at this point, most articles pivot and begin to discuss the dangers of a Trump presidency. I am not going to do that. (Although, for the record, I do believe that Trump is a uniquely dangerous candidate.) I’m not going to do that because this election is bigger than Trump, too. Here’s a bit of history before I continue this explanation.

The year 1955 is acknowledged by most historians as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Two events that year — the brutal slaughter of Emmett Till and Rosa Parks’ refusal to move from her seat set the wheels in motion. After gathering on the National Mall in August 1963, the movement scored its first major legislative victory a year later when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Johnson. The Act prevented businesses from discriminating against customers or job applicants on the basis of race, gender, or religion. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act made it harder for states to restrict voting rights. In 1968, the final piece, the Fair Housing Act, made housing discrimination illegal.

So, by 1968, African Americans (and other Americans of color and religious minorities) were finally full citizens with the ability to vote openly, seek work anywhere, live where they wanted, and shop where they pleased.

And we all lived happily ever after.

Except we didn’t.

What’s talked about less than the success of the Civil Rights Movement is the swift and strong backlash against every single gain that the movement won. Indeed, what is almost never discussed is how, after 1968, the folks who were angry about civil rights didn’t just up and disappear. They didn’t just wake up one day in 1968 and magically embrace the new order of things. They were angry in 1955. They’ve stayed angry since.

For evidence of just how much white (especially white male) anger remained, let’s examine the thinly (and not-so-thinly) veiled racial appeals made by presidential candidates after the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1968 and 1972, Richard Nixon ran as the “law and order” candidate. While that phrases seems racially neutral, civil rights leaders of the day did not see it that way. Moreover, Nixon aide H.R. Haldelman wrote that Nixon once said, “[Y]ou have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Nixon hoped that by playing on racial fears, whites who were disillusioned with Johnson’s push toward racial progress would gravitate to him.

In the 1976 campaign, California governor Ronald Reagan told a story about a woman who repeatedly defrauded the welfare system. Though he did not mention her race, he said she was from the “South Side of Chicago.” Reagan cautioned that these “welfare queens” must be stopped. In 1980, Ronald Reagan gave a speech about “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi — a town best known as the place where civil rights workers Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman were killed. When pressed, Reagan strategist Lee Atwater explained:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni — er, ni — er, ni — er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni — er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni — er, ni — er.”

In 1988, racism in electoral politics arguably reached its apex when George H.W. Bush aired the infamous Willie Horton ad. The ad tells the story of Horton, an African American inmate who was released on furlough by Bush’s opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. The ad, which prominently featured Horton’s mugshot, was a key component of the Bush campaign. In fact, Atwater was quoted as saying, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder if Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”

Democrats are not immune to appealing to white fears, though the motivation is usually to calm fears about the Democrats’ allegiance to non-whites. During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton compared rapper and activist Sista Souljah to David Duke for remarks she made after the Rodney King verdict. After election, Clinton lost his majority in Congress in part because of “angry white males” led by Newton Gingrich. In 1996, one such Republican voter stated, “I think he’s forgotten that there aren’t just black people in the world, that there are also white people. The silent majority has no say in what’s going on anymore. It’s just the noisy minorities.”

Rather than telling these white males that they had no legitimate grievances, Clinton acknowledged the anger. Steve Kornacki writes, “Aware of the damage they’d inflicted on him, he became eager to make substantive and symbolic gestures to redistribution-wary white voters. This was the Clinton who signed a welfare reform bill that his party’s base loathed, and who quietly ran ads on Christian radio stations boasting of his support for the Defense of Marriage Act.”

In 2000, George W. Bush was billed as a “compassionate conservative” and praised for his popularity with African Americans and Latinos in his native Texas. But this did not stop Bush from using racism against his primary opponent, Senator John McCain. McCain and his wife, Cindy, adopted a child from Bangladesh after travelling there. Like many Bangladeshis, the child had dark skin. After Bush lost in New Hampshire, Bush aide Karl Rove started and circulated a rumor in South Carolina that McCain had an “illegitimate black child.” The smear worked as Bush won the South Carolina primary easily and went on to win the nomination.

In the Obama era, the election of our first African American president has once more brought racism into the fore of politics. Both before and after his election, Obama was denigrated in barely coded racist terms by Republicans. He was asked to show his birth certificate and college transcripts. He was called the “food stamp president.” He was called a liar during his own State of the Union address. He was labeled a pimp for supporting women’s reproductive health. In 2010, the Tea Party arose as a direct racial response to Obama. Tea Party rallies featuring “Take Our Country Back” placards were unsurprisingly filled with whites angry about racial progress.

There is a moral to this story, and it is this: Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes won their elections. Racial appeals get votes. Therefore, for Republicans, coded racism has not been not a necessary evil, but rather a social good.

Now, consider the 2016 election. Rather than the old style of coded racial appeals, or “dog whistles,” the GOP nominee has been blatantly racist (and sexist and ableist and . . ., etc.) since the very first day of his campaign. Though pundits predicted Americans would be turned off by his racism, this has not been the case. In fact, during the primaries, the more Trump insulted minority groups, the more he seemed to succeed. Even after refusing to immediately reject the endorsement of Klansman David Duke, Trump’s campaign sailed easily to victory in the Republican primary.

So, in 2016 the real opponent isn’t Trump. It’s racism.

Because Trump’s campaign is built on overt racism, if Trump wins, it will prove that blatant, proud, loud racism is a good and necessary thing. A Trump victory would show the GOP that the reason they lost to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama was not because they used racism, but because they didn’t use enough of it. A Trump win will usher in an era where it will become acceptable again to use the phrases Lee Atwater cautioned against. And if it becomes acceptable to use this language in the political realm, as Mitt Romney predicted, it won’t be long before the racism “trickles down” to the public square.

One might say, “sticks and stones” to all of this. But the reality is that words do hurt. Study after study has shown that as racist rhetoric against people of color increases, so does physical violence against them. And Romney’s “trickle down” prediction has already come to pass. A homeless Latino man was beaten by Trump supporters. An African American protester was punched at a Trump rally — after Trump offered to pay the legal fees of supporters that engaged in violence. In addition, racism takes a psychological toll on those that experience it. Already, Latino students have been taunted with shouts of “Trump.” Already, children of color are more racially anxious. Latino children carry identification. Muslim children are called “ISIS.”

But most troubling is that racial hostility toward non-whites expresses itself in legislation that is hostile. Whites would not have had the resentment leading to welfare reform without being reminded of “welfare queens” who were not like them gaming the system. Also, it is a very short leap from Nixon’s “law and order” to Reagan’s “war on drugs.” If the war on drugs, something which caused untold devastation to black and brown communities, could occur based on coded racial appeals, we should shudder to think about the laws that will be passed when the code words are dropped and the raw racism is revealed.

Some might consider a third party vote as a vote against Trump. In theory, maybe, but not in reality. No third party candidate will win, so either Trump or Clinton will be the next president. Moreover, every vote matters in this election. If Hillary Clinton wins in a close race, it won’t be enough. Trump cannot merely lose. He must suffer a defeat of Biblical proportions that leaves no doubt that his racism has been soundly rejected by the American people. He needs to lose the popular vote. He needs to lose in the Electoral College. States that are normally red need to go blue. He needs to lose so badly that the nation as a whole is forced to have a “come to Jesus” moment wherein we have to grapple with the legacy of race in America.

I don’t imagine that the defeat of Trump will automatically end racism. That’s not how it works. Racial progress, when it happens, occurs at a snail’s pace. Sadly, though, racial relapses happen much more quickly. If Trump wins, we will go backward at warp speed. All of the progress people of color have fought for over the last half-century will be in grave danger. The Voting Rights Act will surely be in Trump’s crosshairs. Trump’s judicial appointees will actively attack fragile gains such as LGBTQ rights, affirmative action, and reproductive rights. But outside of the law is where the true danger will occur. Imagine Latino students attacked on their way to school after being called “illegals” — regardless of their birthplace. Imagine young Muslim women and girls of all races afraid to cover as they wish for fear of physical attack. Imagine the strain of Black parents raising their children under a regime that tells them unequivocally, in words and deeds, that their lives and their children’s lives do not matter. Imagine a rise in anti-Semitism and hate crimes. All of this will happen. And we know it will because it’s already happening now. If racism wins this fall, it will only get worse.

The good news is we can stop Trump and his racism in their tracks. The even better news is that in striking this blow against racism, we don’t have to risk being beaten like John Lewis. We don’t have to risk arrest like Rosa Parks. We don’t have to risk our livelihood like Muhammad Ali. We don’t have to risk our lives like Viola Liuzzo.

All we have to do is vote.