Eugene Robinson: Try as He Might, Trump Can't Make America White Again

[babylonsister]

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/06/try_as_he_might_trump_cant_make_america_white_again_137443.html

Try as He Might, Trump Can't Make America White Again
By Eugene Robinson
July 06, 2018


WASHINGTON -- Racism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug. Like demagogues before him, President Trump and his aides consistently single out one group for scapegoating and persecution: non-white Hispanic immigrants.

Trump doesn't much seem to like non-white newcomers from anywhere, in truth -- remember how he once expressed a fond wish for more immigrants from Norway? -- but he displays an especially vicious antipathy toward men, women and even children from Latin America. We have not seen such overt racism from a president since Woodrow Wilson imposed Jim Crow segregation in Washington and approvingly showed "The Birth of a Nation," director D.W. Griffith's epic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House.

Trump encourages supporters to see the nation as beset by high levels of violent crime -- and to blame the "animals" of the street gang MS-13. He is lying; crime rates nationwide are far lower than two or three decades ago, and some big cities are safer than they have been in a half-century. But Trump has to paint a dystopian panorama in order to justify the need to Make America Great Again.

snip//

Yet there is no evidence that immigrants from Latin America fail to assimilate in any way except one: They do not come to look like Trump's mental image of "American," which is basically the same as his mental image of "Norwegian."

This is a story as old as the nation. German, Irish, Polish, Italian and other immigrant groups were once seen as irredeemably foreign and incapable of assimilating. The ethnic and racial mix of the country has changed before and is changing now.

Hispanics are by far the biggest minority group in the country, making up nearly 18 percent of the population; by 2060, the Census Bureau estimates, that share will rise to nearly 29 percent. Trump is punishing Central American mothers and babies because, try as he might, he can't Make America White Again.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Trump's idea of dealing with whites being the new minority party is to change the U.S.

into pre-Mandela South Africa and Churchill's Rhodesia. The minority of whites will rule over the non-white majority and call it a democracy.

[NewJeffCT]

2. I'd never even heard of MS-13

Untii Trump started ranting about them before the Virginia gubernatorial election last year

And, he was first claiming that ICE liberated entire towns from MS-13, now it is merely communities.

[Hoyt]

3. Love Robinson's pieces. trump reminds me of the white leaders in 196/70s in South Africa. eom

[dalton99a]

4. Kick

[appalachiablue]

5. K & R. Great Eugene Robinson tells the truth yet again.

[hunter]

6. I grew up in 99% white U.S.A..

My parents are artists; it's where their day jobs were. Artists can't be too picky, especially when they have a mob of kids, conceived in the Catholic tradition, to feed.

I quit high school in the mid 'seventies and left white world entirely in the mid 'eighties. There's no way in hell I'd ever return. Even the "colorblind" Democrats and Bernie Sanders independents annoy me. No, it's not about economic class... Racism and misogyny have always tainted U.S.A. politics. We must recognize that.

My parents and siblings have likewise fled to cosmopolitan communities.

As other people have noted, many white supremacists have accepted that demographic trends are against them, so now they are working to retain their political dominance. They're okay with being a minority so long as the white guys are in charge.

[Gothmog]

7. Trump wants to make America white again and will fail