Dr. Jason Johnson on Democratic Candidates Targeting #Trump
August 1, 2019 by Dr. Jason Johnson
Dr. Jason Johnson discusses how the 2020 Democratic frontrunners addressed racist statements of President Trump during the second round of Democratic primary debates. Other panel members are Fmr. Rep. David Jolly (R- Florida), Jonathan Alter (The Daily Beast), Maria Urbina (Indivisible), Tiffany Cross (The Beat DC), and host, Joy Reid.
Filed Under: Jason Johnson on Television Tagged With: 2020 Election, Donald Trump, race relations
Dr. Jason Johnson on Trump and South Africa White Genocide Myth
August 25, 2018 by Dr. Jason Johnson
Dr. Jason Johnson discusses the backlash that President Trump is getting in reference to a racial myth about "large scale killings of farmers." Other panel members are Tim Wise (Author, "White Like Me"), Rick Wilson (Author, "Everything Trump Touches Dies"), and host, Joy Reid.
Filed Under: Jason Johnson on Television Tagged With: MSNBC, race relations, South Africa
Is Trump a racist? You don't need an n-word tape to know.
Originally posted in The Washington Post
Omarosa Manigault-Newman — who once declared that "every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump — has evolved from mentee to frenemy to antagonist during her nonstop media blitz, promoting her new post-White House tell-all, during which she's touted the existence of a recording of Trump using the "n-word." It's all sent the White House scrambling, with the president tweeting Monday that "I don't have that word in my vocabulary, and never have," and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders telling reporters Tuesday that she "can't guarantee" Americans will never hear audio of Trump using the slur.
Trump is a racist. And that doesn't hinge on whether he uttered one particular epithet, no matter how ugly it is. It's about the totality of his presidency, and after only 18 months in office you can see the roots of his racial animus throughout his policy initiatives whether you hear it on tape or not.
Over the course of his career, well before he took office, Trump's antipathy toward people of color has been plainly evident. In the '70s, his real estate company was the subject of a federal investigation that found "Trump employees had secretly marked the applications" of minority apartment rental applicants with codes such as "'C' for 'colored.'" After black and Latino teenagers were charged with sexually assaulting a white woman in Central Park, he took out full-page ads in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty, but never backtracked or apologized when the teenagers' convictions were overturned. He championed birtherism, and wouldn't disavow the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya until the end of his 2016 presidential campaign. As president, he's singled out African American athletes for criticism, whether it's ranting, "get that son of a bitch off the field," in reference to professional football players silently protesting police brutality or tweeting that:
Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn't easy to do. I like Mike!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 4, 2018
Referring to African American Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) as a "low IQ person" is now a routine bit at his political rallies. He was quoted referring to Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as "shithole" countries. He announced his campaign in 2015 by referring to Mexican immigrants as "rapists." Later that year, he called for the United States to implement a "total and complete" Muslim ban.
After taking office, he hired xenophobes such as Stephen Miller — an architect of the ban, whose hostility toward immigrants is so stark, and hypocritical, that his uncle excoriated him this week in an essay for Politico Magazine, writing of Miller and Trump that "they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human."
[Trump wanted 'facts' before calling out racists. When I was on trial, he didn't care.]
I could go on. The point is that Trump's view of nonwhites is out in the open. And as Slate's Christina Cauterucci notes, there's every reason "to believe that an n-word tape wouldn't torpedo Trump's presidency," because there's little indication his supporters "will turn against him because he used a racial slur." If "C" for "colored," "rapists" and "shithole didn't do it, why would the n-word? Trump's words and deeds over time have demonstrated his racism — it doesn't hinge on being outed, Paula Deen-style, by a tape of him using that word. Indeed, racism hardly ever does.
I'm not saying it would be ok for Trump to use any variation of the n-word — in jest, in anger, singing along to the lyrics of a song, with or without the hard "R." But the feverish speculation about whether he ever used the term wrongly implies that a verdict on his racist character turns on its use. Not only is there ample evidence of his racism already, but what matters more about Trump isn't his disgusting attitudes, it's the positions he's taken and the policy choices he's made that negatively impact communities of color: In his first year as president, Trump evolved from mere interpersonal racist to racist enabler when he proclaimed there were "very fine people, on both sides" when white supremacists and anti-racist protesters converged in Charlottesville last year. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator who, three decades ago, was denied a federal judgeship by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee over concerns that he was a racist, was installed by Trump as attorney general.
Since assuming that role, Sessions has worked to undermine consent decrees meant to restrain racially abusive police departments and explicitly articulated the administration's intent to use family separation to deter immigration. The Department of Education, under Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has "begun dismissing hundreds of civil rights complaints," supposedly in the name of efficiency. Trump hired Omarosa as a liaison to black constituent groups based on their reality-TV relationship and, according to him, her past willingness to say "GREAT things" about him, despite almost universal criticism of her appointment and subsequent work by African American Republicans and Democrats.
Being a racist, which is to believe in a fixed racial hierarchy and then have the power to act upon that belief in commerce, government or social spaces is not now, and never has been, about one word or one slip of the tongue. It is about the ability of those in power to use public and private resources to enforce a racial hierarchy, whether that means having black people arrested for just sitting in Starbucks, refusing to hire and promote qualified black job applicants, or staffing a presidential administration with people who tolerate or encourage white nationalists. Trump's statements and his approach to governance show that he believes in a set racial hierarchy, and the maybe-existence of an Omarosa-hyped tape doesn't change that. So far, and as far as I know, no one's produced audio of white nationalist participants in Sunday's Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington using the n-word. Presumably, by the logic of some Trump defenders, that would mean there's no proof they're racist, either.
If American public discourse on race continues to revolve around a game of "gotcha," with sentiments and smoking guns, divorced from an acknowledgment of how racists use their power, we won't make any progress, during this administration or any other.
Filed Under: Jason Johnson Weekly Column Tagged With: Donald Trump, Omarosa, race relations, racist
It's Not Slavery, It's Not Japanese Internment: Trump's Immigration Policy Is Like the Great Migration
Originally posted in theRoot.com
America tried everything to keep the migrants out. Men and women were arrested at the border. Children were separated from parents. People got thrown in jail for violating random rules that nobody knew or understood. Kids went missing and the white nationalist president blamed his political opponents and the victims at the border.
As much as this may sound like an opening monologue from a CNN pundit talking about Donald Trump's zero tolerance immigration policy in 2018, the scenarios described actually date back 100 years.
They all happened in America during the Great Migration of 1915, except the border wasn't the U.S.-Mexico boundary in Texas—it was the border between Kentucky and Ohio; the white nationalist president at the time was Woodrow Wilson; and the people fleeing violence and seeking asylum were African Americans.
Unfortunately, America has a tendency to repeat itself, and if the past is any indicator, the current chaos at the border is going to get much, much worse.
Most decent Americans think that Trump and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' policy of separating families at the border (and subsequently losing thousands of kids) is barbaric. The need for context in public debate has led to media and political leaders comparing this administration's policies to the Japanese internment era of World War II, or chattel slavery, or even Native American "boarding schools."
Unless your history textbooks were all printed in Texas, it's not that hard to find examples of America's horrible treatment of nonwhite people, but most comparisons miss a crucial element of what is happening today and how it connects with the Great Migration of the past: asylum.
The Great Migration, which ran from right after World War I until the early 1960s, has always been misnamed. Calling the almost 500,000 black folks who made their way from the Deep South to the North "migrants" is like calling the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears speed walkers.
Black folks weren't migrating; they were fleeing Southern terrorism. They were asylum seekers in every single way except name. Post-Reconstruction Southern states routinely terrorized the black population: The convict-lease system put more than 200,000 men and women into a prison slavery system; arbitrary "vagrancy" laws were used as an excuse to imprison men, women and children and steal land. This was on top of the systematic rape and torture of black women and children and the subsequent lynchings of black folks every year directly by, or with the tactic consent of, the police.
History books would have you believe that the Great Migration was mostly about finding nice jobs in Chicago and escaping a drought, just like how Sessions wants Americans today to believe that the people being rounded up at the U.S.-Mexico border are just trying to steal apple-picking jobs from hardworking Americans.
Both are lies. These people today are fleeing terror, just as black folks were 100 years ago.
I'm sure some of you are putting on your Corey Lewandowski thinking caps and saying: "Nice try, you liberal tool—but the Great Migration was black citizens traveling in their own country; that's totally different from these foreigners at the border—whose shithole countries are not our problem, by the way! #MAGA!"
These are the kinds of thoughts that go through the minds of people who learn all of their American history from Bill O'Reilly's books.
First, in the early 20th century, Southern black folks were citizens in name only, and barely that. They couldn't vote, their property rights were seldom enforced and their human rights were routinely violated. Despite paying taxes, they received no protection from the government. They were treated like undocumented aliens in a nation they'd built for free.
The same can be said for the thousands of men, women and children at the U.S. border today, who are victims of drug cartels, corrupt government and relative anarchy in many of their countries. They aren't enjoying much citizenship, either.
As for the idea that the conditions asylum seekers face today aren't really America's problem, unlike those of Jim Crow refugees, that's just patently untrue.
The rampant violence that leads people to seek asylum from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador can be directly traced to America sticking its nose into the affairs of those countries. Starting in the 1960s and still active today, the U.S.-funded U.S. Army School of the Americas (now renamed the generic Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) has trained more than 60,000 soldiers and officers who have always seemed to end up back in South America to overthrow democratically elected governments. School of the Americas alumni have destabilized Guatemala, El Salvador and dozens of other countries. The Honduran coup in 2009 was led by an SOA graduate and had Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's fingerprints all over it.
Like black folks a century ago, these people are forced to seek asylum from the very nations that disrupted their lives to begin with.
So what happens with all of this Trump-manufactured chaos at the border? History tells us that we have a lot of violence coming.
As most public schools skip out on all black history between slavery and the civil rights movement, most people have never learned about the "white-lash" to the Great Migration.
During the Red Summer of 1919 (celebrating 100 years of racial violence next year!), white mobs attacked black communities and businesses in Arizona, Arkansas, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Norfolk, Va., and dozens of other places across the country, leaving hundreds dead and thousands of lives ruined.
Within the next year, it's not hard to imagine terror attacks on so-called sanctuary cities and migrant internment camps, to go along with the rising number of white nationalist and hate crime attacks across the country since Trump and Sessions got into office.
We've seen this story before, played out in the same country, with just a different set of nonwhite people, and we already know it doesn't end well.
Filed Under: Jason Johnson Weekly Column Tagged With: family separation, Great Migration, immigration, politics, race relations, Red Summer, The Root, Woodrow Wilson
For The Movement – Weaponizing Whiteness: Racism, Implicit Bias and Social Exclusion | Dr. Jason Johnson, Dr. Connie Razza | Listen via Stitcher Radio On Demand
Originally posted on (Click Here to Listen) https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-urban-league/for-the-movement
This week we discuss why white people routinely call the police on black people when doing innocuous things and the implications of these occurrences. We also unpack the concept of social exclusion and how it affects people of color. The guests are Dr. Jason Johnson, politics editor at The Root.com, political science professor at Morgan State University, and frequent contributor to MSNBC and Sirius XM; and Dr. Connie Razza, director of research at Demos. The hosts for this episode are Kezmiché "Kim" Atterbury and Jordun Lawrence. From the National Urban League, For The Movement discusses persistent policy, social, and civil rights issues affecting communities of color. Mentioned in This Episode: Starbucks Yale University Racial sensitivity training White allyship Implicit bias Social exclusion Social deprivation Democratic disqualification Contact and Follow: Web: #ForTheMovement Email: podcast@nul.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/NULpolicy Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NULPolicy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/NULPolicy Marc's Twitter: @MarcMorial Don's Twitter: @DCravins Kim's Twitter: @kayellea Jordun's Twitter: @_jordun
Filed Under: Jason Johnson on the Radio Tagged With: 911 call, race relations, racism valets, Starbucks