Donald Trump just made it official, in case you had doubts: The GOP is the party of racism, whether reverse-spun, dog-whistled or broadcast without guise.
On Wednesday, in comments the White House called “repulsive,” Trump said of presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, “all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.” He made the comments in a room of Black journalists.
Trump’s comments were of a kind with those Republicans made last week, repeatedly referring to Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire” – diversity, equity and inclusion – implying that she hadn’t earned her way to her position on merit. Try that on the millions of voters who elected her to four state and federal offices without a defeat.
The list of racist GOP hits on the vice president keeps growing. Monday, Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law whom he planted as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said that the vice president is like a “trash bag” disguised as a women’s high-priced designer handbag.
Politico reported earlier this week that Rep. Mike Garcia, R-CA, had “harsh words” to describe Harris: “She’s not very intelligent, she’s not very well-spoken.” Calling Garcia’s words “harsh” misses the racial venom in Garcia’s words. He might as well have said she comes for “the inner city.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., warned his members last week that the racial dog whistle won’t hunt. It apparently won’t heel either.
The tipoff to the racism in Garcia’s statement is in how far removed it is from reality. Anybody who has watched Kamala Harris recently, or seen her cross-examine a witness as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, knows her skill with language. Check out this 2019 video clip of her reducing Bill Barr, the Attorney General of the United States under then-President Donald Trump, to a puddle as he “grappled” with the meaning of the word “suggest!”
And let’s not forget her poise and authority in the 2020 vice-presidential debate when she reigned in Mike Pence: “I’m speaking, Mr. Vice President. If you let me finish, we can have a conversation.”
For any who don’t know, a “dog whistle” is “political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people,” but is in reality, “a covert appeal to some noxious set of views” – such as in racial bias. Because of historic inequality whose legacy persists, unconscious racism can slip out even in well-intentioned people. An example is paying an intended compliment which, in actuality, implies a slur on their ethnic group or race.
One example is when someone expresses surprise that a Black American is articulate. Further along the same continuum is when one’s commanding speech actually provokes ire, confusion, and fragility in the listener who cannot reconcile reality with entrenched stereotype beliefs.
Whether Garcia’s trolling results from implicit or explicit bias or racialized cognitive dissonance, the net effect is that he’s gone full MAGA. He accused her, in effect, of what’s known in other circles as being “inarticulate while Black.”
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As Yannick Marshall, an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Illinois’ Knox College put it:
If Man is seen as a speaking animal, then the further Black people are placed outside of good speech, the further they are dehumanized. . . If Man is a political animal . . . then the “black” who is . . . incapable of good speech, is always external to politics and thus the law.
Usually, dog whistles contain a patina of “plausible deniability” for hiding racial animus. In the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad run against George H.W. Bush’s Democratic opponent Mike Dukakis, Bush’s backers defended it as not about race but rather about “law and order,” notwithstanding all the enhanced Black visuals of Horton, its featured criminal.
Trump’s, his daughter-in-law’s and Garcia’s comments have no such cover.
It’s notable that being “inarticulate” does not seem to disqualify white politicians, as we know from the “misunderestimated” George W. Bush. He was famous for misspeaking. Yet he was culturally and politically regarded as a guy you’d just love to have a beer with.
Kamala Harris did not get elected a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and a vice president by being inarticulate. Saying otherwise is all part of an orchestrated MAGA playing the race card to its base and anyone else who might be vulnerable to it.
The Republicans may not know that very cool white dudes, like actors Jeff Bridges and Mark Ruffalo, are all in for a black woman for president. In fact, just Monday night, his “White dudes for Harris” Zoom raised $4 million from 200,000 participants. Like those actors, Garcia resides in Southern California, representing a “Biden district” – one that the president carried while Garcia beat his Democratic opponent. Unlike those actors, however, Garcia is living in the past. This November, his district’s voters can send his House membership right back there with him.
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