Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made Chicago’s gun violence problems the linchpin of his “law and order” message yet again. During a 20-minute discussion about “racial healing” at the first presidential debate, Trump bypassed Hillary Clinton’s remarks about systemic racism in law enforcement and instead doubled down on calls to revive stop and frisk in Chicago and other major cities—despite the fact that this tactic has been ruled unconstitutional principally because the practice disproportionately affects minorities.
Folks, this is what happens when systemic racism gets treated as a matter of opinion and not as a fact of life: it allows white supremacy to persist. Trump’s campaign has breathed new life into this problem by galvanizing overt racists—people once driven underground by the civil rights movement who have now reemerged as mainstream. But the survey suggests that even before the current election cycle many people have continued to allow subtler forms of racial prejudice to fester by looking the other way.
So does failing to call Trump out for such beliefs make his less-racist supporters “bad people?”
And until more people recognize and confront all forms of racism, bigotry will continue to be the problem we all live with. v
