The intolerant campaign promoted
by Donald Trump and supported by the
Republican Party is a call to the “silent white majority” and a demand that 11
million immigrants be deported. This
campaign promotes a dangerous and divisive racial message. It must be
vigorously opposed.
Donald Trump is a serial liar,
he regularly incites political violence and he is a rampant xenophobe, racist, and misogynist. He has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6
billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S. He promises
to build a wall on the border that would cost at least $35 billion to build,
and billions each year to maintain. And,
it would not work.
Trump has an overly simplistic view of immigration: calling for building
walls, breaking up families, and
deporting people. This fear mongering political message has
found a very receptive base within our society among xenophobic and angry
conservative older voters.
This campaign is dangerous. It
mobilizes right-wing anti immigrant
forces. Trump’s campaign is not just racism- it is a strategy to magnify racism
to win the election – and we must defeat it.
We know these campaigns to be dangerous. He is promoting an anti
Mexican, anti immigrant, anti Muslim agenda. This is more than the ranting of a
fringe right. He is mainstreaming racism.
The Trump–Republican arguments are factually incorrect and
the proposed building of a $30 billion dollar wall along the border would not work.
This is Dog Whistle Politics, as described well in Dog Whistle
Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the
Middle Class, by Ian Haney López (2014).
The Trump campaign is an example of strategic racism, which is a
system of racial oppression created and enforced because it benefits the over
class, in this case the many billionaire funders of the Republican
Party. These groups foster and promote interracial conflict and job
competition as a strategy to keep wages and benefits low and to promote their
continuing white supremacy in the nation.
Mexicans, Mexican
Americans and other Latinos have good reason to be concerned about the
mobilization of racist movements by these
harsh and xenophobic campaigns. During the 1930’s some 1,000,000 Mexicans
were deported in response to similar campaigns, including over 500,000 US
citizens, and an additional 1,000,000
Mexicans were deported in Operation Wetback in the 1950's. Trump proposes that
it should happen again.
We in California know well the history of this kind of
divisive campaign. In November of
1994 Pete Wilson won re-election with
over 56% of the vote based in large part on his mean-spirited, divisive, and
racist campaign directed against Mexican and Mexican Americans, in Proposition
187. We need to recognize the potential
advantage of racist scapegoating as revealed in the Wilson-promoted Proposition
187 initiative.
The purpose of Trump’s intolerant bombasts are not to develop a policy
-- it is to capture and exploit the anxiety and emotion of a particular sub-set
of voters: xenophobic Republicans and the hard Tea Party Right.
Anti-immigrant campaigns such as that promoted by Trump and the Republican Party have effects and must be opposed. Currently, Trump is repeating
and amplifying inaccurate, oppressive,
and highly charged stereotypes about race and immigration in the U.S.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, in his June 16, 2016, talk to his
supporters said, “ the major political task in the next five months is to make
certain that we defeat Donald Trump.”
"We
cannot have a president who insults Mexicans and Latinos, Muslims, women and
African-Americans," he said. "We cannot have a president who, in the
midst of so much income and wealth inequality, wants to give hundreds of
billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very rich. We cannot have a president
who, despite all of the scientific evidence, believes that climate change is a
hoax."
We agree with Sen. Sanders. Politicians using divisive racial politics must be defeated. To do
that, all eligible citizens must register and vote. Low voter turnout among young people and progressives
gives the radical right an opportunity to win. If you
believe in a democratic society -
Join us in a campaign to register and get out the vote.
This is an except from a longer post here. http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2015/10/trumps-racially-divisive-politics-must.html
Anti Racism Working Group. Democratic Socialists of America. www.dsausa.org
Duane Campbell is a
professor emeritus of bilingual multicultural education at California State
University Sacramento, a union activist, and past chair of Sacramento DSA.
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