Racism should never be diminished as a distraction—history shows well that the strategic deployment of bigotry is a default practice used to undercut democracy, an expert from the Brookings Institution charged last week, adding that inserting nativist, xenophobic language has been the reliable prelude to codifying bigotry into law.
This statement from Andre M. Perry, a David M Rubenstein Fellow for the Metropolitan Policy Programme, came barely a week after US President Donald Trump told four Democratic Congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.
Trump’s disrespectful remarks towards New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachussets’ Ayanna Pressley and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib were condemned by various quarters as racist and xenophobic, and afterwards dismissed as a distraction by the same women.
But Perry refuted the distraction term, stating in his research paper that “those who charge that Trump’s bigoted vitriol is a distraction wrongly limits policy to those written, concrete forms”. “Policy also comes in the form of practice—regularly exercised procedures that are also used to influence behaviours,” he added.
“Many policies are unwritten or are implied through communicated rhetoric. Many voters make decisions and vote on racist rhetoric just as they would act on issues of foreign policy or social security,” Perry charged, as the debate heats up amid the election campaign.
US’s history of racism
The United States, often seen by many observers as the most discriminatory nation in the world due its ongoing unfair treatment of minorities, has had a long history of racism dating back in the early 16th century.
Several incidents, including the brutal killings of defenceless black Americans by white police officers, has demonstrated that racism and discrimination is still alive and kicking and is not going away anytime soon. Trump’s rise in power seemed to have officially galvanised a dangerous scourge described by the United Nations as a ‘social cancer’ of modern times.
Buoyed by Trump’s election to the White House, white supremacists are believed to be using the president’s increasingly hateful, discriminatory, anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiments to energise their movement and restore their ‘former glory’.
“In the United States, racism is a cultural system of values, symbols, and institutions which claims white racial superiority and uses this assertion to subordinate minorities, which are considered inferior,” Jose M. Causadias and Kevin M. Korous wrote in “Racial Discrimination in the United States: A National Health Crisis That Demands a National Health Solution”, an editorial published in 2019 in the “Journal of Adolescent Health”.
“Establishing that black, brown and Asian people don’t belong or aren’t real Americans is how our democracy ended up with legal segregation, internment camps, housing discrimination, racially biased criminal justice systems and immigration policies,” Perry warned.
Perry, who alleges that Trump clearly didn’t create this practice but adopted it from his predecessors, slammed those who study policy and dismiss racism as a distraction for aiding and supporting its proliferation.
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