Why won't Trump supporters openly embrace their feelings about "colored" people?

[dwayneb]

Back in the 50's and 60's (yes, old enough to remember those days) segregationists were not shy about expressing their true feelings about the separation of race, and their desire to keep America white - or at least to keep non-white "colored" people in their place as second class citizens (manual labor, waiters, ball players).

Their stance was crystal clear, no ambiguity, we knew exactly what the segregationists wanted, and we knew where the Civil Rights activists stood. Then we passed a few laws, like the Civil Rights act of 1960 and 1964 (later adding the EEOC) and we pretended that racism in America had gone away.

The reality of course is that it never went away. It has always been part of our heritage from the beginning, when Europeans destroyed the Native American nations and of course into the heady days of the slave trade from Africa which generated enormous wealth for an emerging nation.

Trump understands very well that the undercurrent of racism in the American heartland is still alive, and it is a powerful force that can be leveraged to his benefit. Directly or indirectly he has renewed feelings of pride and ignited anger in many light skinned people in the USA. Will it carry him to re-election in 2020? Remains to be seen but it is certainly a possibility.

What we wonder though - why don't all Trump supporters openly admit their desire to go back the the Jim Crow era? Some do; we saw the open face of racism in Charlottesville, and we surely see it in recent Trump rallies. But others seem to be on the fence.

This is the baffling part. Are they ashamed of it? Are they in denial? As we get closer to the 2020 election my guess is that more and more of them will be coming out of the closet. Hard to say whether that will help Trump in the end, but it will be familiar to everyone that remembers the days of segregated housing and newspapers that had separate "colored" and "white" classified sections.

[rzemanfl]

1. Bookmarking for after I wash my socks. n/t

[democratisphere]

2. Don't forget to rinse twice.

[ProudLib72]

9. Make sure you use plenty of bleach

[democratisphere]

3. We had this ugly stain on our country suppressed to the point where

being openly racist was socially not acceptable. drumpf has now made it "OK" to be openly and publicly racist again chanting and repeating cloaked racist phrases. People I know who are racists have become more open about blaming people of another color for the woes of the world.

[dwayneb]

7. Simple minded fascist tactic

It is a simple minded fascist tactic that has been used for a hundred years and it still works. Create an "us versus them" mentality, and the "them" might be African Americans, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, Somalians, liberals, progressives, it really doesn't matter. The scary part is how easily people can be led down the path by someone like Trump. Otherwise rational people toss their critical thinking skills aside and follow him on over the cliff. Maybe because I am old enough to remember what this was like back in the waning days of the Jim Crow era, that it seems possible to slide back again.

[Bayard]

4. You still see the occasional Confederate flag flying around here

Every though KY was not a member of the Confederacy.

Welcome aboard DU!

[dwayneb]

8. Thanks

Have lurked here for years, participate in many other fora across the Internets. It's hard to find time for them all.

KY in many ways seems more tolerant than other states in the area even considering the occasional Confederate flag.

[loyalsister]

5. It is beneficial to deny it

Robin DiAngelo addresses it well in White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

When I first started digging into it, I was stunned to realize that I never thought much about myself in a context of race. I didn't have to because being white only affects me in ways that are beneficial. To seriously consider the meaning of my having a race is to acknowledge that my superior social position exists as a function of racial oppression.
To understand people who harbor bigotry they don't want to examine, it starts with understanding people who consider themselves to not be racist but are or have been complicit in maintaining the system that benefits them. It can be jarring and some think of it as white guilt. I understood it as using my racist history to lead me to ways to do better. Many white people who have good intentions have yet to put some effort into understanding how it works and fall into the status quo trap of defending and denying their own role without realizing that how maintaining superiority by denying that it exists is an oppressive act which was first perfected by white supremacists who do not hide their malicious beliefs.

saying “white people,” as if our race had meaning, and as if I could know anything about somebody just because they’re white, will cause a lot of white people to erupt in defensiveness. And I think of it as a kind of weaponized defensiveness. Weaponized tears. Weaponized hurt feelings. And in that way, I think white fragility actually functions as a kind of white racial bullying.

https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/summer-2019/whats-my-complicity-talking-white-fragility-with-robin-diangelo

[uponit7771]

6. They want to appear a certain way in front of other people that are not part of their mind-set

[Initech]

10. Racists don't like being called racist.

I think we're touching a huge nerve here, the more we call them out on it, the more they hate it and try to defend themselves. It's going to be fun watching them squirm in the months leading up to the 2020 election.

[dwayneb]

11. You can always tell when you've touched a nerve

I participate in other fora where the participants are not shall we say quite as friendly as they are here . When you broach this topic there is always wild screaming and twisting and turning and pretzel logic to try to distance themselves from the reality that they have aligned themselves with a racist leader.

Many of them really don't understand that they have been slowly reverting to the same segregationist mindset that led to the Civil Rights upheaval. It isn't lost on politicians like McConnell though.

Trump is learning more every day about how best to leverage their bigotry to his advantage.