Racial Animus Toward ‘Minorities’
One of the most baffling questions for Americans is why Donald J. Trump remains so popular among so many of us, yours truly not included. It’s astounding that he could be our president again despite his awfulness on both the personal and professional levels.
Thomas Edsall, a New York Times opinion columnist, provided a cogent clue in his September 25, 2024, column titled “The Real Trump Mystery.” Here are relevant paragraphs:
“Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant. The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus and general resentment toward minorities.
“The political scientists Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski and John V. Kane captured this phenomenon in their June 2021 paper, ‘Activating Animus: the Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support.’
“Trump’s support, they wrote, is ‘tied to animus toward minority groups,’ specifically ‘toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.’”
First, a quick (and snarky?) aside: Should we Americans of Asian descent feel relieved that we aren’t specified as targets of white American male animus when we know we are, in real life? Or should we feel insulted that, once again, we aren’t included in the colorful American mosaic when racial matters are publicly discussed?
Now to the core of this analysis: Trump’s shocking victory eight years ago made it so much easier for rabid white supremacists, white Christian nationalists, and neo-Nazis to express their vile hatred publicly with an approving wink-and-nod or dog-whistle rhetoric of the president of the United States.
Apparently, a fair number of white American men feel threatened by the growing presence of people who aren’t white or Christian or straight, as I note in Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America. These men believe in “the Great Replacement Theory” – i.e., they are being “replaced” by non-white, non-Christian Americans and immigrants and LGBTQ+ people.
What’s ironic to me, as I relate in Sons of Chinatown, is that the straight white men I have interacted with since I broke through the Oakland Chinatown bubble in my early teens aren’t white supremacists who love Trump, thank goodness. In a white-majority high school, college, Peace Corps service, and mainstream newspaper journalism career, I can’t recall dealing with any overtly racist straight white guy, except for a reader or two who self-identified as proudly white in letters berating me for my columns that evoked America’s ill treatment of its non-white people.
Have I been lucky? Maybe. Yet I know there are some white American men (and women too) out there who for whatever reason don’t like America becoming less white, less straight, and less Christian and see in Trump a savior. Now in my ninth decade, I still can’t rationally figure out why many white American men are hostile to those who aren’t like them.
It’s so distressing that the version of America that has provided opportunities and freedom to immigrants like my parents and three oldest sisters – and millions more from around the world – isn’t overwhelmingly dominant over the version that fears and hates those of us who aren’t white and Christian. Instead, what we have is an America in which close to half of us who bother to vote favor the weirdly coiffed, orange-hued Racist-in-Chief.