Trump is not Racist: Change my Mind

"[Obama] came out of nowhere. In fact, I'll take it even further: The people who went to school with him, they never saw him. They don't know who he is. It's crazy."

“The table indicates that birtherism is nonexistent among those in the six lowest six categories of racial resentment. After that, however, birtherism rises rapidly with increasingly levels of racial resentment. In fact, half of all birthers are located in the three highest categories of racial resentment, compared to only 22 percent of the total population.”

“If simple ignorance were the primary reason for birtherism, levels of birtherism should not have increased again after the release of President Obama’s birth certificate. Instead, they rose and as mentioned previously, they are as high as ever....In particular, when public figures made statements questioning President Obama’s birth certificate, levels of birtherism increased.” [10]

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” [11]

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

“The essentialists inside the wall consider themselves defenders of American values and economic opportunities. The pluralists on the other side of the wall are enemies who disrupt American way of life and invaders who take away American jobs, and make the country “un-American,” euphoric term of “un-white.” The Trump Wall will be built on the US-Mexico border, a battleground where a black-and-white scheme places everyone in an “us-or-them” position. Such a dichotomous scheme energizes the populist supporters of the Trump Wall and boxes more than half of the population into the category of the less American or simply the un-American. “Americans” and “un-Americans” confront each other as adversaries.” [13]

“The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,” Trump said last Tuesday during his annual address. “Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.” [14]

“Crime data shows that El Paso has not been one of the most dangerous cities in the nation.From 1985 to 2014, El Paso’s violent crime rate was significantly lower than the average for cities of comparable size.  Border authorities added fencing in the El Paso region in the late 2000s. In the immediate years before and after construction, the violent crime rate went up, contrary to Trump’s claim.” [15]

”I mean, when you have 15,000 people marching up and you have hundreds and hundreds of people and you have two or three border security... how do you stop these people? You can’t.”

At this point an audience member shouted 

“shoot them!” 

Trump responded by laughing and stating, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.” In response, the audience cheered.” [16]

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion." [17]

PRO has offered one definition to which CON objects on several grounds.

OBJECTION: Wrong part of speech.  The resolution claims “racist,” an adjective but PRO defines “racism”, a noun. 

OBJECTION:  Misspelled

OBJECTION:  CON prefers a definition that is both more authoritative and specific to resolution than PRO’s customized definition.

Is Anybody Entirely "Not Racist?"

Politifact rated the claim “Pants on Fire”- a complete and deliberate lie.

Bill O’Reilly was skeptical that Trump even believed his own accusations. [9] 

However, the staying power of birtherism  is in that it conflates a number of popular racist folk tales- that a successful black man in America can’t be legitimate, that blacks are secretly Muslims, that illegal immigrants are taking good jobs from even the highest echelons.  The birth certificate itself was entirely beside the point.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Simply building the wall or giving up on the project would either way cause the emblem of wall building  to recede from the polarizing conversation within the electorate- and for Trump, that polarization along racial fault lines is the primary goal, not any actual construction.

“The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,” Trump said last Tuesday during his annual address. “Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.” [14]

”I mean, when you have 15,000 people marching up and you have hundreds and hundreds of people and you have two or three border security... how do you stop these people? You can’t.”

At this point an audience member shouted 

“shoot them!” 

Trump responded by laughing and stating, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.” In response, the audience cheered.” [16]

Three months later, one of Trump’s “energized populists” traveled to El Paso to take arms in the battle laid out by Trump’s  rhetoric; shooting into a crowded Walmart, killing 22 and injuring another 24.  Posting just before the attack, the shooter wrote:

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion." [17]

• PRO asked CON to instigate- therefore PRO should be at liberty to define terms.
  
• A proper definition ought to employ the same usage as the resolution.  We are debating whether an adjective applies to subject: why is PRO defining nouns related to the adjective rather than the adjective itself?
  
• CON is citing on-point, specific definitions linked to a popular, well-edited source, Wiktionary.  PRO invented his own customized but sloppy definition. 
  

"Perhaps this makes sense."

"First, these narratives provide a glimpse into how a specific ideal type of “hegemonic whiteness” aligns with authentic citizenship. This ideal may become reified

through narrative practices that emphasize inter-racial boundaries of whites versus potent nonwhite symbols (e.g.: Obama) and intra-racial white distinctions of proper and deficient forms of whiteness. These boundaries help to create and/or maintain white racial cohesion in two main ways:

“(1) through positioning those marked as ‘white’ as essentially different from and superior to those marked as ‘non-white’, and

(2) through marginalizing practices of ‘being white’ that fail to exemplify dominant ideals”.

Such meaning-making processes are neither abstract ideals that float above actors’ heads nor functionalist mechanisms that operate within the black box of the mind to ensure white racial cohesion.  Rather, these boundaries operate as socially shared rules that constitute a system of racial classification that help guide the pursuit of interests, the formation of identities, and the drama of interaction. The above Birther narratives indicate how moral concepts synthesize with inter- and intra-racial distinctions to mark hard work, honesty, and responsibility (and ultimately authentic citizenship) as the exclusive and essentialist domain of certain racialized

factions. These boundaries are the product of different political, cultural, and social traditions that created whiteness as an ongoing crisis. Today, whiteness qua true US citizenship is reforming and realigning—both in terms of recent legal maneuvers and the informal sense of belonging—with Nativist, xenophobic, Christian, embattled working-class, and hyper-masculine practices that stake claim to objectivity, morality, and truth. [2]  [bold emphasis mine]

"Trump has also admitted since then that Obama was in fact born in the U.S.  I believe his birth certificate is fake."

• CON submits PRO's own words as another example why Trump perpetrated the birther lie to begin with- the truth quickly ceased to be relevant to the claim's racist resonance.
  

"At the heart of Trump’s latest criticism Sunday is the same ugly nut of the birther movement: a suspicion that people of color, and especially Americans from immigrant families, are somehow less authentically American. It's a conspiracy theory that can be traced further, too, finding its roots as far back as mid-19th century nativism and the idea that immigrants—and their children—cannot have the interests of so-called "native" Americans in mind." [3]

• Pro asserts that referring to Mexico's people collectively as rapists is not inherently racist.  Mainstream political scholarship thinks otherwise:
  

"Consider Trump's now infamous remarks about Mexican migrants:  they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists.  In other words, they are a source of physical, moral, and sexual pollution of the radicalized body politic.  What is the solution?  Purification by... means of a 'big beautiful wall,' a protective skin that would seal off the Southern underbelly of the national body from renewed "infection." [4]

• PRO calls CON's speculation that Trump is postponing wall construction to preserve the issue as racist iconography in 2020 "bogus."  Perhaps, but Trump just blew off yet another deadline tomorrow without explanation:
  

"The Department of Homeland of Security is delaying the construction of more than 40 miles of bollard wall along Arizona's southern border, according to an opposition brief filed late Tuesday by the Trump administration in a lawsuit challenging the wall.  Construction was scheduled to begin August 22, but is now slated to begin in early October or later ...Why the administration decided to wait is unclear....A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment." [5]

• PRO fails to see how a white crowd laughing at the murder of 15,000 brown people on the border might be construed as racist.
  
• PRO fails to see how a subsequent mass shooting targeting brown people on the border might be received as alarming to peace-loving people.
  
• The President of the United States is the United States' first diplomat as well as the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces.  When that Commander identifies an enemy target and laughs approvingly at the suggestion of violent response then that official has extended a certain degree of tacit approval for that violent response on behalf of the US and in spite of the lack of official process.
  
• Wikipedia reports that the El Paso shooter's manifesto
  

"promotes the white nationalist and far-right conspiracy theory of The Great Replacement."  [6]

• The Guardian reports that "the Institute for Strategic Dialogue , a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, has found that the once-obscure ideology has moved into mainstream politics and is now referenced by figures including US president Donald Trump" who the ISD now lists as one of top ten propagators of the ideology. [7]
  
• Most analysts have little trouble calling Great Replacement theory racist propaganda when it inspires the shooters at Christchurch and El Paso.  Why should the theory's most influential promulgators, such as Trump, enjoy immunity from the same accusation?