Society The Donald J. Trump Show - 4 more years editions

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kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
12,435
23,026
All of them? or can you give me some specific ones? and are you making a leap on any of these policies and implying racism, or are they actually racist?
I think we've had this conversation a number of times maybe or at least conversations tangential to it. I'm a little short on time this evening, but I'll give you the Readers Digest version of my argument to bookmark for later discussion.

First, it's fairly incredible to me that people are still litigating the racist nature of Trump's rhetoric and policy ideas, which have been readily available to us since 2012 if not earlier. To even have the discussion requires hair splitting about what racism is, what it does and then apply various litmus tests that ultimately collapse due to the prevalent misapplications of the word racism in popular media (especially social media). So to use the simplest (and oldest) definition, racialization is ascribing characteristics to a person based on their color, familial background, or place of origin. Racism is using those ascribed characteristics to define a group of people as having natural predispositions that make them inferior or less deserving in some way. This is all an invention, of course, and can be applied to anyone. Often when we use the term racism we collapse it into the Black/white dichotomy because it's the one we're most familiar with in the North Atlantic world, but any group can be racialized and subjected to systematic marginalization. People often mistake racism for a set of inner beliefs and those biases are certainly a part of it, maybe even fundamental to it, but they typically arise out of the way society is organized rather than being some instinctual feeling that manifests in social relations. Characteristics can be ascribed to people under the broad header of "culture" or based on the equally nebulous concept of ethnicity, but they're all illusions that become categories to distinguish and arrange people, often hierarchically.

This president has created some interesting categories since he's been on the campaign trail. "Mexicans" became a catch all term early on for any Central or South Americans migrating to the US, despite a majority coming from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala, all countries the US has participated in destabilizing over the last 40 years. From "bad hombres" to "rapists," this president has made a general racialized caricature of migrants already here and those en route. Then after devising this label he rejected asylum status for these groups on the basis of their perceived undesirability. This same logic is now spreading to other migration and travel policies as he has recently announced he's redefining people from particular nations as having a higher likelihood of being a public burden or of being a safety risk (see the various iterations of the travel ban).

There have of course been other policies such as attempts to remove white nationalists from the terror list, dismantling civil rights related investigatory arms at the justice department and of course not just calling countries "sh*tholes" but applying foreign policy to them as if they were. In his rhetoric he's much more clear about who a real American is and who might not be, which sometimes has racist overtones, but more often is just anyone he doesn't like that day.

With all of that said, the purpose of the advertisement in question was to spark exactly this discussion. To make people who oppose Trump say "wow, this guy is really racist" and people who support him say "oh yeah, but how, look at what he did" and then get into discussions about moving the goalposts of racism under the guise of being an ad about his being a criminal justice reformer. It's a fairly basic piece of political communication and airing it during a football game was shrewd, since there's a fanbase that's already been vocal about their distaste for activism about policing and criminal justice reform. Now that audience has a narrative to repeat, i.e. he's obviously not racist, Trump gets things done, he's the real criminal justice reformer, and "they" should be grateful. These are common refrains he uses to frame every issue when creating his imaginary "we" and "they" populist binaries. So we've all in this thread taken the bait, as have many goofs on Twitter who I believe largely misread the ad to have been targeted to Black voters.
 

Jehannum

TMMAC's Most Handsome Artist
Jan 26, 2016
12,756
14,077
I think we've had this conversation a number of times maybe or at least conversations tangential to it. I'm a little short on time this evening, but I'll give you the Readers Digest version of my argument to bookmark for later discussion.

First, it's fairly incredible to me that people are still litigating the racist nature of Trump's rhetoric and policy ideas, which have been readily available to us since 2012 if not earlier. To even have the discussion requires hair splitting about what racism is, what it does and then apply various litmus tests that ultimately collapse due to the prevalent misapplications of the word racism in popular media (especially social media). So to use the simplest (and oldest) definition, racialization is ascribing characteristics to a person based on their color, familial background, or place of origin. Racism is using those ascribed characteristics to define a group of people as having natural predispositions that make them inferior or less deserving in some way. This is all an invention, of course, and can be applied to anyone. Often when we use the term racism we collapse it into the Black/white dichotomy because it's the one we're most familiar with in the North Atlantic world, but any group can be racialized and subjected to systematic marginalization. People often mistake racism for a set of inner beliefs and those biases are certainly a part of it, maybe even fundamental to it, but they typically arise out of the way society is organized rather than being some instinctual feeling that manifests in social relations. Characteristics can be ascribed to people under the broad header of "culture" or based on the equally nebulous concept of ethnicity, but they're all illusions that become categories to distinguish and arrange people, often hierarchically.

This president has created some interesting categories since he's been on the campaign trail. "Mexicans" became a catch all term early on for any Central or South Americans migrating to the US, despite a majority coming from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala, all countries the US has participated in destabilizing over the last 40 years. From "bad hombres" to "rapists," this president has made a general racialized caricature of migrants already here and those en route. Then after devising this label he rejected asylum status for these groups on the basis of their perceived undesirability. This same logic is now spreading to other migration and travel policies as he has recently announced he's redefining people from particular nations as having a higher likelihood of being a public burden or of being a safety risk (see the various iterations of the travel ban).

There have of course been other policies such as attempts to remove white nationalists from the terror list, dismantling civil rights related investigatory arms at the justice department and of course not just calling countries "sh*tholes" but applying foreign policy to them as if they were. In his rhetoric he's much more clear about who a real American is and who might not be, which sometimes has racist overtones, but more often is just anyone he doesn't like that day.

With all of that said, the purpose of the advertisement in question was to spark exactly this discussion. To make people who oppose Trump say "wow, this guy is really racist" and people who support him say "oh yeah, but how, look at what he did" and then get into discussions about moving the goalposts of racism under the guise of being an ad about his being a criminal justice reformer. It's a fairly basic piece of political communication and airing it during a football game was shrewd, since there's a fanbase that's already been vocal about their distaste for activism about policing and criminal justice reform. Now that audience has a narrative to repeat, i.e. he's obviously not racist, Trump gets things done, he's the real criminal justice reformer, and "they" should be grateful. These are common refrains he uses to frame every issue when creating his imaginary "we" and "they" populist binaries. So we've all in this thread taken the bait, as have many goofs on Twitter who I believe largely misread the ad to have been targeted to Black voters.
 

jason73

Yuri Bezmenov was right
First 100
Jan 15, 2015
72,790
134,173
or maybe it is just an ad on a football game and nobody really cared
 

KWingJitsu

ยาเม็ดสีแดงหรือสีฟ้ายา?
Nov 15, 2015
10,311
12,758
I think we've had this conversation a number of times maybe or at least conversations tangential to it. I'm a little short on time this evening, but I'll give you the Readers Digest version of my argument to bookmark for later discussion.

First, it's fairly incredible to me that people are still litigating the racist nature of Trump's rhetoric and policy ideas, which have been readily available to us since 2012 if not earlier. To even have the discussion requires hair splitting about what racism is, what it does and then apply various litmus tests that ultimately collapse due to the prevalent misapplications of the word racism in popular media (especially social media). So to use the simplest (and oldest) definition, racialization is ascribing characteristics to a person based on their color, familial background, or place of origin. Racism is using those ascribed characteristics to define a group of people as having natural predispositions that make them inferior or less deserving in some way. This is all an invention, of course, and can be applied to anyone. Often when we use the term racism we collapse it into the Black/white dichotomy because it's the one we're most familiar with in the North Atlantic world, but any group can be racialized and subjected to systematic marginalization. People often mistake racism for a set of inner beliefs and those biases are certainly a part of it, maybe even fundamental to it, but they typically arise out of the way society is organized rather than being some instinctual feeling that manifests in social relations. Characteristics can be ascribed to people under the broad header of "culture" or based on the equally nebulous concept of ethnicity, but they're all illusions that become categories to distinguish and arrange people, often hierarchically.

This president has created some interesting categories since he's been on the campaign trail. "Mexicans" became a catch all term early on for any Central or South Americans migrating to the US, despite a majority coming from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala, all countries the US has participated in destabilizing over the last 40 years. From "bad hombres" to "rapists," this president has made a general racialized caricature of migrants already here and those en route. Then after devising this label he rejected asylum status for these groups on the basis of their perceived undesirability. This same logic is now spreading to other migration and travel policies as he has recently announced he's redefining people from particular nations as having a higher likelihood of being a public burden or of being a safety risk (see the various iterations of the travel ban).

There have of course been other policies such as attempts to remove white nationalists from the terror list, dismantling civil rights related investigatory arms at the justice department and of course not just calling countries "sh*tholes" but applying foreign policy to them as if they were. In his rhetoric he's much more clear about who a real American is and who might not be, which sometimes has racist overtones, but more often is just anyone he doesn't like that day.

With all of that said, the purpose of the advertisement in question was to spark exactly this discussion. To make people who oppose Trump say "wow, this guy is really racist" and people who support him say "oh yeah, but how, look at what he did" and then get into discussions about moving the goalposts of racism under the guise of being an ad about his being a criminal justice reformer. It's a fairly basic piece of political communication and airing it during a football game was shrewd, since there's a fanbase that's already been vocal about their distaste for activism about policing and criminal justice reform. Now that audience has a narrative to repeat, i.e. he's obviously not racist, Trump gets things done, he's the real criminal justice reformer, and "they" should be grateful. These are common refrains he uses to frame every issue when creating his imaginary "we" and "they" populist binaries. So we've all in this thread taken the bait, as have many goofs on Twitter who I believe largely misread the ad to have been targeted to Black voters.
 

BeardOfKnowledge

The Most Consistent Motherfucker You Know
Jul 22, 2015
60,547
56,268
I think we've had this conversation a number of times maybe or at least conversations tangential to it. I'm a little short on time this evening, but I'll give you the Readers Digest version of my argument to bookmark for later discussion.

First, it's fairly incredible to me that people are still litigating the racist nature of Trump's rhetoric and policy ideas, which have been readily available to us since 2012 if not earlier. To even have the discussion requires hair splitting about what racism is, what it does and then apply various litmus tests that ultimately collapse due to the prevalent misapplications of the word racism in popular media (especially social media). So to use the simplest (and oldest) definition, racialization is ascribing characteristics to a person based on their color, familial background, or place of origin. Racism is using those ascribed characteristics to define a group of people as having natural predispositions that make them inferior or less deserving in some way. This is all an invention, of course, and can be applied to anyone. Often when we use the term racism we collapse it into the Black/white dichotomy because it's the one we're most familiar with in the North Atlantic world, but any group can be racialized and subjected to systematic marginalization. People often mistake racism for a set of inner beliefs and those biases are certainly a part of it, maybe even fundamental to it, but they typically arise out of the way society is organized rather than being some instinctual feeling that manifests in social relations. Characteristics can be ascribed to people under the broad header of "culture" or based on the equally nebulous concept of ethnicity, but they're all illusions that become categories to distinguish and arrange people, often hierarchically.

This president has created some interesting categories since he's been on the campaign trail. "Mexicans" became a catch all term early on for any Central or South Americans migrating to the US, despite a majority coming from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala, all countries the US has participated in destabilizing over the last 40 years. From "bad hombres" to "rapists," this president has made a general racialized caricature of migrants already here and those en route. Then after devising this label he rejected asylum status for these groups on the basis of their perceived undesirability. This same logic is now spreading to other migration and travel policies as he has recently announced he's redefining people from particular nations as having a higher likelihood of being a public burden or of being a safety risk (see the various iterations of the travel ban).

There have of course been other policies such as attempts to remove white nationalists from the terror list, dismantling civil rights related investigatory arms at the justice department and of course not just calling countries "sh*tholes" but applying foreign policy to them as if they were. In his rhetoric he's much more clear about who a real American is and who might not be, which sometimes has racist overtones, but more often is just anyone he doesn't like that day.

With all of that said, the purpose of the advertisement in question was to spark exactly this discussion. To make people who oppose Trump say "wow, this guy is really racist" and people who support him say "oh yeah, but how, look at what he did" and then get into discussions about moving the goalposts of racism under the guise of being an ad about his being a criminal justice reformer. It's a fairly basic piece of political communication and airing it during a football game was shrewd, since there's a fanbase that's already been vocal about their distaste for activism about policing and criminal justice reform. Now that audience has a narrative to repeat, i.e. he's obviously not racist, Trump gets things done, he's the real criminal justice reformer, and "they" should be grateful. These are common refrains he uses to frame every issue when creating his imaginary "we" and "they" populist binaries. So we've all in this thread taken the bait, as have many goofs on Twitter who I believe largely misread the ad to have been targeted to Black voters.
I'm also short on time, so I apologize for the lack of content, but I'd pose a simple question. What does a Mexican look like?
 

KWingJitsu

ยาเม็ดสีแดงหรือสีฟ้ายา?
Nov 15, 2015
10,311
12,758
I'm also short on time, so I apologize for the lack of content, but I'd pose a simple question. What does a Mexican look like?
Ask a racist. They'll tell you it's someone who looks like they should "go back to Mexico".
 

BeardOfKnowledge

The Most Consistent Motherfucker You Know
Jul 22, 2015
60,547
56,268
Ignorance and racism often go hand in hand.
Couldn't agree more, but it's improtant to make the distinction between "policies that incite ignorant racists" and "racist policies". They're two very different things, and people constantly conflating them, and accusing anyone who likes these policies as an "*insert-ist/ism here* is how you elect a Trump in the first place.
 

BeardOfKnowledge

The Most Consistent Motherfucker You Know
Jul 22, 2015
60,547
56,268
Sha-fuckin'-lom!


Is it true if you have a middle east visa in your passport you won't be allowed entry?
Don't remember where I saw that.....
My sister-in-law went to a couple different middle east countries before Israel a couple years ago. She didn't get any static. Sounds like one of the many rumors that float around about those rascally old Juice.