Racism With No Racists: The President Trump Conundrum

 

by Tressie McMillan Cottom 

President-elect Donald Trump ran on a fundamentally racist platform.

President-elect Donald Trump promulgated the idea that Mexicans are rapists, blacks are trapped in inner cities, Muslims are terrorists and that America could only be great “again” by becoming what it was in the 1950s when all manner of de facto and de rigeur racism was common.

That is probably why noted and admitted white racist groups supported his candidacy, celebrate his election and congratulate themselves for winning.

For the media, this presents a special kind of problem for which modern media is poorly equipped. 

I said over two years ago that media style guides precluded major newspapers from calling something racist.

Then I asked around and professional media people told me that there isn’t a style convention on this matter so much as an informal culture. The general rule, I was told, is to never call anything racist and certainly to never call anyone racist. At best, they might quote someone calling something or someone racist.

The implication is that there is no such thing as objectively racist. Racism, according to many mainstream media producers and gatekeepers, can only be subjective.

There is a lot of research on this.

The most cited and widely recognized is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s theory of colorblind racism in which there is racism but no racists. It is worth noting Sarah Mayorga-Gallo’s etymology of the term, attributing first usage to Grace Carroll Massey, Mona Vaughn Scott and Sanford M. Dornbusch’s 1975 article. But, recent scholarship tends to start with Bonilla-Silva.

Using a variety of survey and discourse analysis methods, Bonilla Silva (also later writing with Tyrone Foreman and David Embrick) traces the discursive moves that whites use to de-center racism in their everyday race talk. This discursive distancing takes several forms. Whites attribute race to some unknown other. Sometimes they locate race and racism in biology or nature, attributing any racism to a deity or natural order. The most common tactic, according to research by Teun a van Dijk, is whites using euphemisms.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom is professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and former fellow at the Microsoft Social Media Collective and the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis. She has written for the New York Times , Washington Post , and the Atlantic.

Source: tressiemc.com