There is a more convenient way to consider this. The system gave Trump a slight advantage in some places. Mr. Trump and his allies opposed that advantage being curtailed. So he framed the cuts themselves as an effort to fix the race in Joe Biden’s favor. He framed his efforts to reduce his advantage as efforts to create a disadvantageous situation against him.
That’s exactly what Trump and his allies hope to do on a larger scale as they consider efforts to address systemic racial disadvantage.
On Monday, Axios reported on the extent to which President Trump’s second term will seek to loosen rules and processes aimed at addressing the historic racial disadvantages faced by Black Americans in particular. Ta. Words from President Trump’s press secretary, Stephen Chan, summed up his intentions, saying the former president is “committed to eliminating discriminatory programs and racist ideology from across the federal government.”
“Discriminatory programs” here refer to programs that seek to address systemic racial disadvantage. This is a development of the idea that affirmative action policies aimed at eliminating these imbalances are, in effect, racist against white people.
In recent years, this view (long rooted on the right) has rapidly become more visible to the public. In 2013, long before Mr. Trump emerged as a national political figure, only one-fifth of Republicans said they supported laws aimed at protecting racial minorities from discrimination. Ta.
In the same poll, multiple Republicans said white Americans have more to lose from efforts to address racial inequality than minorities have lost in the workplace to discrimination in the first place. . In fact, the Republican Party 14 times Whites were more likely to say they were more disadvantaged.
This was the situation when Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. A Washington Post ABC News poll from March of the following year found that the perception that white people were losing out was a better predictor of support for Mr. Trump than economic anxiety. A February 2016 YouGov poll found that two-thirds of Republicans believe white people face more discrimination than minorities.
That continues even today. A YouGov poll conducted in December for The Economist found that Republicans are more likely than blacks or Arab Americans to say white people face a “tremendous amount” of discrimination. They were also more likely to say that hate crimes against white people are a very serious problem compared to hate crimes against blacks and Arab Americans.
Of course, over the past eight years, this sentiment has become mainstream. Republicans once carefully pitched their racial rhetoric with winking phrases, but President Trump has erased that nuance. The backlash against “critical race theory” and subsequent “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives after his defeat in 2020 (and racial justice protests that year) It developed into a blatant contempt for non-white people, especially black people. — People in positions of power and influence.or I imagined The positions of power that right-wing voices claim have been achieved only thanks to affirmative action policies.
The mayor of Baltimore was strangely scorned for his DEI efforts after last week’s collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, as if a black man couldn’t win an election in that city, but the criticism One aspect was withdrawn.
“I know what they want to say,” he said last week, “but they don’t have the courage to say the n-word.”
But these attacks work because many white Americans, especially those who are less wealthy or do not have college degrees, do not feel that they are benefiting from racial superiority. This is one of the reasons. That’s fair, but it’s also somewhat similar to our voting analogy. So being able to vote relatively quickly and easily is not necessarily an advantage.
One of the reasons President Trump is focusing on this issue at this time is because of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, in which the establishment has unevenly, steadily, but clearly targeted white Americans. This means that new attention has been focused on the ways in which the government is advantageous to the government. Following the initial BLM push, Americans became much more likely to attribute employment and housing inequalities between black and white Americans to discriminatory policies.
According to the biennial General Social Survey (GSS), the most common reason white Republicans cite when asked to consider these disadvantages is that black Americans have no incentive or desire to escape poverty. It is said that there is a lack of will.
This is the flip side of all the backlash against efforts to level the playing field. Not only do white Republicans not see the playing field as level, they think black Americans are just bad at the game.
There is no question that black Americans face real disadvantages that are directly or historically rooted in race. His KFF poll conducted last year made the former point clear. This means that dark-skinned Black people are more likely to report facing negative or discriminatory behavior.
Absent widespread disadvantage centered around skin color (and by extension racial perception), there is no reason for these numbers to diverge. And that’s just a clear response. There are also documented disadvantages for Black Americans in employment, housing, and other areas.
Republicans generally do not accept such things. In the 2022 GSS, only about a quarter of white Republicans say economic inequality is rooted in discrimination.Therefore, it is no surprise that the same people do They don’t think policies aimed at addressing that discrimination are necessary, and therefore would think those policies would rather disadvantage whites.
President Trump aims to heighten and address these grievances in his first appearance in the New York Times, centering on allegations that his real estate business discriminated against black people. He is also fighting efforts to make it easier for everyone to vote equally, and hopes a win in November will give him the power to do so. It’s all one of a kind.
