It’s NOT the Economy, Stupid; It’s White Supremacy: How We Must Learn to Talk about Racism

When Donald Trump tweets something patently racist, as when he tweeted the squad of four should go back where they came from or when he derided Baltimore as “rat and rodent infested mess,” media pundits can spend days debating whether or not Trump is racist.

The idea seems to be that if Trump can be declared a racist and enough people admit he is racist, somehow that settles some ongoing and open deliberation for which the national audience has been on tenterhooks awaiting a verdict — as if determining he is a racist will be a “gotcha!” moment and his 2020 chances for re-election all but annihilated.

Uh-oh! Trump’s a racist! We can’t elect him.

Ex-post facto spoiler alert: the electorate knew in 2016 what his racial attitudes were.

Instead of discussing Trump’s racial attitudes and having heated arguments about whether or not they rise to the level of racism, perhaps a more effective approach to addressing the electorate is to actually discuss in analytical ways how racism works and how racism impacts the lives of white workers and people of color alike in negative ways; how the racial attitudes to which Trump gives expression, if they were to inform policy, would not actually uplift the lives and economic conditions of white voters but rather worsen them.

Last October, for example, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), in its 30-year…