Jamelle Bouie writes:

“Trumpism” is a politics of racial demagoguery. America in the age of Donald Trump is more permissive of explicit racism than it’s been at any point since the civil rights era. And because bigotries rarely dance alone, the president’s nativism is accompanied by anti-black racism—first seen in his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama—anti-Muslim prejudice, and anti-Semitism.

These ideologies exist on a continuum, with casual prejudice on one end and virulent hatred on the other. But common to every expression is a desire to ostracize, remove, and even eliminate the racialized group. The difference between segregation to isolate black Americans and race riots to remove them is one of degree, not kind. Individual efforts to keep black people out of public space are a soft expression of the same impulse that drives radical calls for a white “ethno-state.”

Seen as part of a continuum, the relationship between bigoted rhetoric and bigoted action becomes clearer. The former can facilitate the latter. A society permissive of rhetorical dehumanization is necessarily more vulnerable to actual dehumanization. Allow racial contempt to spread unchallenged, and racist violence will eventually follow. [Continue reading…]