9/6/20
WASHINGTON — After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans. Not in generations has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America. He has described American cities as hotbeds of chaos, played to “suburban housewives” he casts as fearful of low-income people moving into their neighborhoods, sought to block a move — backed by the Pentagon and Republican lawmakers — to rename Army bases named for Confederate generals, criticized NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag, called Black Lives Matters a “symbol of hate” and vowed to strip funding from cities that do not take what he deems tough enough action against protesters. In effect, he is reaching out to a subset of white voters who think that the news media and political elites see Trump supporters as inherently racist. Mr. Trump has repeatedly rejected the notion that America has a problem with systemic racial bias, dismissing instances of police brutality against Black Americans as the work of a few “bad apples,” in his words.
“Trump is the most extreme, and he has done something that is beyond the bounds of anything we have seen,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Playing with racism is a dangerous game. It’s not that you can do it a little bit or do it slyly or do it with a dog whistle. It’s all dangerous, and it’s all potentially violent.” Public views of Mr. Trump flow through a racial prism. A poll by CBS News last week found that 66 percent of registered voters believed Mr. Trump favors white people, while 20 percent thought he favors Black people and 50 percent said he works against Black people. Among Black voters, 81 percent said he works against their interests. “To say antiracism is anti-American is to say racism is American, which is to say Trump wants white Americans to be racist,” said Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. “And that’s precisely the point. He’s relying on manipulating the racist fears of white voters to win them over. Once white people lose those fears through interventions like training's, Trump loses their votes.”