"Mr. Trump’s campaign has also made it difficult for opinion writers — even those disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt — to avoid describing his behavior as racist. The signal moment came when, having already characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, he declared an American-born judge of Mexican descent unfit to preside over a lawsuit against the con game known as Trump University. Even the House speaker, Paul Ryan, had to concede that this was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Instead of using phrases like “racially inflammatory” or “racially insensitive,” editorial pages were calling racism by its name. The shift was clear in the language of the endorsements Hillary Clinton received from news organizations across the political spectrum...
Black Twitter has ridiculed attempts by traditional news media and others to draw a distinction between racism and “unintentional bias.” Those who defend this distinction typically argue that deploying the charge of racism commits harm by alienating people and stopping “the conversation.”
This argument reduces the discussion of structural racism to the equivalent of dinner party chatter...
This election has made clear that racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and xenophobia still have broad constituencies in America. The first step toward keeping them at bay is to insist on calling them by their rightful names."
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