We can’t ignore the role race had in the election
Illustration by Caroline Linton, Opinions Editor
The Sunday before the election, I went to vote in person with my parents. My father is half-Mexican. He was born in Sylmar, California. His father was born in Fort Worth, Texas. All his life, he has lived and worked in America with an American accent and a distinctly American view of the world. You would really only be able to tell that he was Hispanic by two things: his last name and his skin color.
When we were leaving the polling place, we passed a Trump supporter camping outside the entrance. As soon as he saw my father, he immediately started ranting loudly about illegal immigrants voting. Was I surprised? Quite frankly, no.
In 1981, Republican campaign consultant Lee Atwater was interviewed anonymously by Alexander P. Lamis. Atwater was working in the Reagan administration at the time, and he would later go on to manage George H.W. Bush’s campaign for president in 1988, a campaign filled with racial dog-whistles culminating in the infamous “Willie Horton” ad.
I won’t go much further into the interview here, considering how much of it is filled with a certain racial slur, but I will sample one quote from Atwater: “You say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Four decades later, you would be hard-pressed not to say that strategy remains a dogma within certain political circles. Several of the talking points espoused by President-elect Donald Trump over the years can directly be traced back to age-old conspiracy theories and stereotypes.
When he began his run in 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists, drug traffickers and criminals, it was to play on the falsehood that all Latin Americans are drug-smuggling sicarios. In reality, American citizens commit crimes at a higher rate than immigrants do.
When he began proclaiming himself to be the Law and Order candidate in 2020 in the wake of the groundswell of protests against police brutality, it was to play on the falsehood that Black people are illiterate hypersexual criminals. In reality, Black people commit crimes at the same rate as any other race, but are far more likely to be incarcerated, and far more likely to die at the hands of cops.
Even Trump’s most recent talking points were filled to the brim with racial overtones, especially his claim that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in their communities, something that has been thoroughly debunked by local officials from his own party. It’s not even a stereotype specific to Haitians. We live in Orange County, which saw an influx of refugees from the Vietnam War half a century ago, and those immigrants saw the exact same stereotype placed upon them. And no, it wasn’t true then, either.
Trump will never directly come out and say that all Black people are criminal beasts, all Hispanic people are dirty trash, all Arabs or Palestinians are rock-throwing terrorists and so on. But he’ll do 90% of the work, and he’ll let people fill in the blanks however they see fit. How do I know?
Hate crimes have risen every year since he first took office. Online race-based abuse is rampant, especially since Trump ally Elon Musk took over X (formally Twitter). The number of white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups increases annually. And whenever you see a Nazi flag or a Confederate flag displayed in public, it’s more often than not paired with a Make America Great Again flag.
Even Donald Trump’s signature catchphrase, “Make America Great Again,” doesn’t have a flattering origin. While it has been said before by other presidents, its original inception was by American Nazis in the 1930s.
Was race the only factor in the election? Certainly not. The economy was absolutely a key factor in how people decided to vote this November. But race and prejudice cannot be discounted from the equation.
When a qualified prosecutor of Black and South Asian origins went up against a white man who has a history of incendiary remarks and dog-whistles, who took out a full-page ad advocating for the death penalty for the now-exonerated Central Park Five, who has been sued for racial discrimination in his renting practices, and who hesitated to condemn white supremacists marching to his flag, and half the country still voted for him, it says something about our nation.
Time and time again, we are told that America is a melting pot, that we live in an age of post-racial harmony, that Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has been achieved.
God, I wish that were true.