IS DONALD TRUMP A RACIST?

Peter Radan (14 September 2019)

Is President Donald Trump a racist?

Night time commentators on Fox News and CNN have clear answers to this question. The pundits at Fox News - Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson - are adamant that their President is not a racist. On the other hand, CNN's pundits - Anderson Cooper, Chris 'Let's Get After It' Cuomo, and Don Lemon - emphatically insist that America's Commander in Chief is a racist.

However, in deciding whether Trump is or is not a racist, one need not weigh up the competing claims of these after dark pundits. All one has to do is see Trump's answer to that question.

On 30 July this year, while standing outside the White House, in responding to a reporter’s question as to whether his recent attacks on four Congresswomen of colour and his disparaging remarks directed towards an African-American Congressman from Baltimore were racist, Trump proudly asserting that he was the “least racist person there is anywhere in the world.”

In the endless commentary that this claim stirred up, all of it interpreted Trump's statement as a denial that he was a racist. This inevitably led to the after dark punditry that I have already referred to.

However, whatever one may think of Trump, there is one thing that is clear. He is careful in the choice of words he uses when it comes to either denigrating others or praising himself. In relation to the former, there is "Crooked Hilary", "Lyin' Ted" Cruz, and African nations that are "shitholes". On the other hand, in relation to himself, Trump has said that he would be "the greatest jobs producer that God ever created", that he understands debt "probably better than anybody", that he "was always the best athlete", and to Australia's then Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, that he (Trump) is "the world's greatest person".

One would then have expected that, if he was to deny being a racist, Trump would have said something equally clear, such as "I am not a racist" or "There is not a racist bone in my body". However, he said that he was the "least racist person there is anywhere in the world".

If Trump believes, as he surely does, that he is the "least racist person" in the world, it logically follows that there must be people who are "more racist" than him. Although one can debate at which end of the racist spectrum Trump fits and, indeed, whether a racist can be more or less racist than a another racist, it is beyond doubt that Trump is, by his own words, a racist.

That the President of the United States of America is a racist, should, however, not come as a surprise. He is far away from being America's only racist Commander in Chief. Racism in America can be traced back to the arrival of a shipment of 20 or so African slaves at Jamestown, Virginia in August 1619,[1] an event which was the start of what, two centuries later, the then former President, James Madison, referred to as America's "original sin".[2]

America's "Original Sin"

Slavery in the America was always race-based. Thomas Jefferson, later to become America's third Commander in Chief, made this clear in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781, where he noted that African-Americans, although equal to whites in terms of memory, were inferior in relation to the capacity to reason and possessed of an imagination that was simultaneously "dull, tasteless, and anomalous". As Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen notes, although Jefferson never defended slavery, his conflicted musings on slavery in Notes "provided an authoritative framework and conceptual language for marking racial difference, which would justify the evils he thought unfortunate and hoped were remediable".[3] Like his predecessor, George Washington, and his successors - James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor - Jefferson was a slaveowner. Between them these men held the office of President for 49 of the 72 years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War which had, as one of its outcomes, the abolition of slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1865.

However, the end of slavery had no impact on racism. As Edward Pollard, in his defence of the South's "Lost Cause" that was the Civil War, put it in 1866, "the war did not decide negro equality".[4] Professor Robert Forbes, a historian, aptly sums up the impact of the end of slavery as follows:

"The formal end of slavery could not put an end to the complex network of ideologies, dogmas, and prejudices that had been employed to sustain it. Indeed, emancipation eliminated the most devastating argument against slavery, which had always been slavery itself; the abolition of slavery liberated the racist scaffolding of the proslavery argument to flourish uninhibited by the ugliness and cruelty of its object. To a heartening degree, Americans have extricated themselves from the tangled web of racist thought; but the ubiquitous and invisible complex of sustaining ideas remains largely intact".[5]

Forbes's statement that the Thirteenth Amendment "liberated the racist scaffolding of the proslavery argument" meant, as David Goldfield has written, that although "whites could not, of course, re-enslave blacks, ... they could devise new institutions that would limit the freedom for former slaves and ensure white supremacy". And they did with the policy of racial segregation, a policy endorsed by the Supreme Court in Plessy v Ferguson,[6] which, in the words of Fred Kaplan led to "the virtual re-enslavement of most Southern blacks".[7]

The position of the now technically free African-Americans was aptly described in 1888, by Frederick Douglass, a former slave, as follows:

Frederick Douglass

"I admit that the Negro, and especially the plantation Negro, the tiller of the soil, has made little progress from barbarism to civilization, and that he is in a deplorable condition since his emancipation. That he is worse off, in many respects, than when he was a slave, I am compelled to admit, but I contend that the fault is not his, but that of his heartless accusers. He is the victim of a cunningly devised swindle, one which paralyzes his energies, suppresses his ambition, and blasts all his hopes; and though he is nominally free he is actually a slave. I here and now denounce his so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud - a fraud upon him, a fraud upon the world."[8]

In reality, as Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, have pointed out, in terms of work skills, family stability, health, mortality, and crime, African-Americans were in many ways worse off in 1900 than they were as slaves in 1860.[9]

Constitution of Oregon, 1857

However, it was not white southerners alone who created what became known as Jim Crow and which lasted until the latter part of the twentieth century. During the pre-Civil War era in the free states of the north, free blacks were aware that the society in which they lived was one based upon the doctrine of white supremacy and African-American inferiority.[10] Jim Crow laws at that time in these states gave legal force to this reality. As Nina Silber has pointed out, "northerners pioneered in the creation of institutional segregation before its formal appearance in the post-Civil War South".[11] For example, in 1803, Ohio enacted legislation that precluded African-Americans from settling in that state unless they produced a court certificate that established that they were not slaves. In 1818, Connecticut passed legislation restricting the vote to white males. In 1819, Illinois passed legislation requiring African-Americans entering that state to post a $1000 bond guaranteeing good behaviour. In 1838, Pennsylvania revoked the voting rights of male African-Americans. In 1844, the provisional government in Oregon passed legislation that punished slaves by whipping if they did not leave the state upon being emancipated.[12] In 1857, in relation to its resident African-Americans, Article II of Oregon's state Constitution stipulated that "No negro, Chinaman, or mulatto shall have the right of suffrage" and in Article I prohibited a "free negro or mulatto" not resident in Oregon from entering that state.[13]

The pre-Civil War antislavery activist Gerrit Smith summarized the approach of Northern states to free African-Americans when he wrote:

"The laws and usages by which free people of color in the northern States are vexed, hampered, outraged, crushed, constitute so gratuitous, so wantonly wicked a chiming with the slaveholding policy of the South, and so indispensible a prop of this policy, as to make them not less guilty than the bloodiest slave codes".[14]

Although Jim Crow laws after the Civil War  were in the main passed by the former slave states in the South, a particularly notable instance of Jim Crow in practice at the federal level in the twentieth century was the segregation of the federal bureaucracy at the behest of President Woodrow Wilson.[15]

Professor Forbes statement that "to a heartening degree, Americans have extricated themselves from the tangled web of racist thought," is a reference to the formal end of segregation, initiated by the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka[16] and culminating in the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

These acts were, as Acararya, Blackwell, and Sen point out, "quite effective in addressing racial inequalities, particularly with regard to economic indicators and education ... [but] have been less effective in addressing regional persistence in political attitudes and political culture".[17] The authors go on to state that the consequence of this political culture is that "it is within the formerly high-slave areas that whites are most likely to oppose the Democratic Party, oppose affirmative action, and express sentiments that could be construed as racially resentful".[18]

Nevertheless, many had the audacity to hope that, with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, racism in America was in terminal decline.

However, their hopes were shattered in 2016 when, 62,984,824 voters, some of whom Donald Trump would undoubtedly say were "very fine people", elected a self-proclaimed racist as their President and, as Rick Reilly accurately put it, Commander in Cheat.[19]

Footnotes

[1] T Hashaw, The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007.

[2] James Madison, ‘To Marquis De La Fayette’, 25 November 1820, in G Hunt (ed),The Writings of James Madison, Vol IX, 1819-1836, G P Putnam’s Sons, 1910, 37.

[3] J Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History, Oxford University Press, 2019, 41.

[4] E A Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, E B Treat & Co, 1866, 752.

[5] R P Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America, University of North Carolina Press, 2007, 291.

[6] 163 US 537 (1896).

[7] F Kaplan, Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War, Harper Perennial, 2018, xvii.

[8] Frederick Douglass, ‘I Denounce the So-called Emancipation as a Stupendous Fraud’, 16 April 1888, in P S Foner (ed), Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, Lawrence Hill Books, 1999, 715.

[9] R W Fogel & S L Engerman, Time on the Cross, The Economics of Negro Slavery, Little, Brown & Company, 1974, 260-1.

[10] C Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd Rev Ed, Oxford University Press, 1974, 12-21.

[11] N Silber, ‘Emancipation without Slavery Remembering the Union Victory’ in W J Cooper Jr & J M McCardell Jr (eds), In the Cause of Liberty, How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals, Louisiana State University Press, 2009, 106.

[12] A Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, Penguin Press, 2018, 128.

[13] F N Thorpe, The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Law of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, Vol V, Government Printing Office, 1909, 3000-1.

[14] Quoted in Delbanco, above note 12, 130.

[15] K L Wolgemuth, ‘Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation’ (1959) 44(2) Journal of Negro History 158.

[16] 347 US 483 (1954).

[17] A Acharya, M Blackwell & M Sewn, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics, Princeton University Press, 2018, 11.

[18] Ibid, 16.

[19] Rick Reilly, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, Hachette Books, 2019.