How do you determine if someone is a racist?
Words and actions.
When confronted with the topic of a President having a long, long history of racist words and actions, his defenders retreat to the ultimate epistemological puzzle: “How can you know what’s in his heart?”
And the media plays along. Chuck Todd, oh FFS, in response to Sherrod Brown’s clear statement on the matter: “We have a President who’s a racist.”
Amanda Marcotte of Salon sums it up well:
Apparently, after years of hearing Donald Trump spew racist invective about Latino immigrants, Muslims, black football players and various other people of color, NBC anchor Chuck Todd still can't handle the factual description of the president as a "racist."
...
Whatever Todd's intention was, by using the phrase "in his heart" he was playing right into the hands of Trump propagandists, by setting a standard of evidence that is unattainable. "In his heart" refers, after all, to a metaphorical space. In the literal sense, all that's in Donald Trump's heart is a bunch of cholesterol plaque. Turning this into a debate about whether we can really "know" the truth about an abstract concept suits the ends of gaslighters, who love the idea that the evidence is entirely subjective and that its meaning can be quibbled about until the end of time.
[Diarist note: I swear I wrote the diary title before I found the above quote! Link in tweet below]
In his column “The First White President”, Ta-Nehesi Coates cuts right to the heart of the matter. www.theatlantic.com/...
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.
For Presidential candidates other than Sherrod Brown (and he is not yet announced), the topic is treated as a minefield. They can’t quite come out and say it. For instance, Cory Booker applies a version of the “Quacks like a duck” standard but stops half a step short:
I know. We want to be decent people, not thinking the worst. Politicians don’t want to be accused of hyperbole. Journalists don’t want to be accused of bias.
But sometimes, the weight of evidence, accumulated over the decades, is too great.
When someone says “What’s in his heart?”, it’s the the equivalent of saying “What is reality, anyway?” I mean, how can you be certain that you’re not really just a brain in a vat being fed neural illusions?
Sometimes you have to play the odds. And when you consider all the evidence, the scenario where Donald Trump is NOT a racist is just a tad less likely than the one where we are all brains in vats.
When something is true, we should say it.
We have a President who’s a racist.