This Race Is About Race

This Race Is About Race

By Dr.Fourkan Ali

The Republican presidential nominee was supported by white nationalists, including members of the Ku Klux Klan. African-Americans were publicly protesting institutional racism, often enduring a backlash for their activism. Two white people were seeking the presidency and race was a constant and underlying issue, with black people fearing the police and whites feeling threatened by the potential power of African-Americans.

The year was 1964, and the candidates were Republican Barry Goldwater and sitting Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. More than a half-century later – and after nearly eight years of administration by the nation's first African-American president – the U.S. is again looking at a presidential campaign with deep, and painful, racial undertones.

Support among African-Americans and Latinos for Democrat Hillary Clinton is heavily lopsided – even more so that when Barack Obama was on the ticket. A former KKK grand wizard has professed his admiration for Republican Donald Trump and is now formally seeking a Senate seat. Whites, blacks and Hispanics, in polls, voice drastically different perceptions of the discrimination racial and ethnic minorities face.

Talk of a "post-racial" society after Obama's two elections was probably always premature, experts say. But the current campaign between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton suggests race relations might actually be getting worse or, at least, more heated, they say.

"In the 1960s you had white people who were really scared of change, and who were attracted to Goldwater's rhetoric and agenda, including his vote against the Civil Rights Act," says Christopher S. Parker, a political science professor at the University of Washington and author, with Matt Barreto, of "Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America." Nowadays, white Americans are feeling not only the threat of social change, but the diminished power that comes with the the increased percentages of African-American and Latinos citizens in the U.S., adds Daniel Cox, research director of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.

"White conservative men are seeing a cultural displacement. Their influence in the culture is being challenged and is receding," Cox explains.

Obama's election, far from making Americans more comfortable with minority leadership, in some ways exacerbated those fears, Parker says, giving rise to Trump. "I think that Trump is actually a course correction, probably an over-course correction," he says. "Obama scared so many white people, it made Trump's candidacy possible and his nomination plausible."

The growth of the Latino population has added to the national angst as well, says Pastor Samuel Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. "We're having this uber, exacerbated moment as it pertains to race and our culture," he says. "Instead of [racial tension and animus] dying down, or moderating to a degree that it becomes de minimus, we're actually regressing. It seems like we're going backwards."

While Democrats have long captured an overwhelming majority of the African-American vote, Trump (who has gotten less than 1 percent of black voters in some polls) is doing worse against Clinton among those voters than either Mitt Romney or John McCain did against Obama. And while race was always an undercurrent of the Obama-McCain contest in 2008, it was less mainstream ( -- racially offensive images and remarks about Obama tended to be contained to extremist websites and niche publications. Nor did McCain personally encourage such talk, famously correcting a woman at a McCain rally who called Obama an "Arab."

Trump, Parker says, doesn't even bother with what political specialists call "dog whistle" remarks – statements that seem benign on the surface but act as a subtle signal to certain groups, such as Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens" comments that appealed to a racist idea but were not explicitly racist. Instead, Trump has been blatant about describing Mexican-American immigrants as "rapists" and "criminals," has called for a ban on Muslim immigration to thwart terrorism and has described African-American communities as dens of unemployment, poverty, bad education and violent crime. And that message is resonating among many white voters, in part, Cox says, because they resent "politically correct" standards that make them feel they have to censor their own thoughts. "You can see how that would engender the idea that 'I'm being attacked,'" Cox says.

And unlike Goldwater, who denounced the KKK and refused their endorsement, Trump refused several times to renounce former Klansman David Duke, insisting he knew nothing about him. He later said a faulty earpiece kept him from hearing the question clearly.

Polling shows the races have widely divergent ideas of what life is like for racial and ethnic minorities. A recent Pew Research Center study showed that just 45 percent of whites thought race relations were generally bad, compared to 61 percent of African-Americans and 58 percent of Hispanics. Meanwhile, 41 percent of whites believe too much attention is being paid to racial issues, compared to 25 percent of blacks and 22 percent of Hispanics. The same study showed that African-Americans are about twice as likely as whites to say discrimination is holding back success for black Americans.

A recent PRRI poll also showed a large difference in perception of equality when the question was put to Democrats (who have African-Americans and Latinos in their base of support) and Republicans (who have a bigger portion of the white vote). About 80 percent of Democrats believe that both African-Americans and immigrants face significant discrimination in society, compared to 32 percent of Republicans who think blacks face significant discrimination, and 46 percent who say immigrants suffer from bias. And a Suffolk University poll Sept. 1 showed a drastically different impression of trump's rhetoric, with 76 percent of Democrats casting trump as a racist, and just 11 percent of Republicans leveling that charge.

When African-Americans have protested against what they see as institutional racism, they have faced aggressive push-back. The Black Lives Matter movement, spurred by suspect police killings of African-Americans, has been vilified by critics including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who called the group "inherently racist." A New York Times-CBS poll this summer found that 70 percent of blacks approve of the BLM movement, compared to just 37 percent of whites.

When mixed-race San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, citing oppression of African-Americans and people of color, critics burned his jersey. Trump said Kaepernick should find another country in which to live.

That disparity in perspective has come to define the views on race relation held, generally, by supporters of the respective presidential candidates. Where one side sees racism, the other sees "the race card," rhetoric and protests they say make things worse. "From my perspective, I think a lot of this [tension] has to do with President Obama," says conservative writer Tom Borelli. After delivering campaign speeches about a united America, "President Obama kind of weighed in on local police matters and race issues" such as the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case, Borelli says. "It kind of escalated the racial tension."

As for statistics showing that African-Americans are far more likely to be shot and killed by police than whites, Borelli points to the same social problems Trump assigns to black communities, saying poverty and unemployment lead to crime. They "go into crime, drug-dealing. That's a tragedy," Borelli says. "What we need is better schools, lower taxes."

Rodriguez says the differing perceptions of the reality of race is due to two factors: anxiety among white Americans over the changing racial and ethnic demographics in the country, and disappointment among African-Americans and Latinos, who had hoped Obama's presidency would bring immigration reform and more opportunity for blacks. "There's angst on the majority side, and disappointment on the minority side," he says.

Whites also don't have the same personal experiences minorities have, Cox says, noting an earlier PRRI study showing that 70 percent of white Americans did not have people of color in their families or inner social circles. And many also don't like to acknowledge that America, a nation founded on inclusion and opportunity, is still struggling with racism, he says.

"There's a desire to point to these big, symbolic events, such as the election of Barack Obama, as a milestone," Cox says. "It is absolutely a milestone, but it doesn't mean everything else is changed."