Does More Trump Mean Less Racism?

Ah yes, the indignity of it all. It is an article of secular faith that Donald Trump stokes racism. His detractors have labeled him the crown prince of white supremacy, so a rational mind would reasonably conclude that his presidency would see a significant spike in racism. The same detractors, being wholehearted Obama supporters, believe that the Obama presidency struck a blow against racism, and thus that racism must have declined during his eight years in office.

Such are our articles of secular faith. Imagine the shock felt by two University of Pennsylvania researchers when they discovered that American racism had declined during the Trump years. From Zero Hedge via Maggie’s Farm.

Depending on where you derive your intellectual amusement, you will be delighted to see the contortions the sociologists need to perform in order to maintain their biased view of the Trump presidency and their faith in the curative properties of the Obama presidency.

Here are the results:

Sociologists Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington conducted a study to analyze the impact of Trump’s election on prejudice against blacks and Hispanics. They used a panel of 2,500 Americans whose views on race and other matters had been documented since 2008. According to the report, the researchers expected to see an increase in racial prejudice in the Trump era. Yes, it might be difficult to believe that professors at a major university would immediately assume that the president singlehandedly made the country more racist, but it’s true.

They believed that we, that is, white people, are all racists beneath the skin. If you are not a manifest bigot you must be a repressed bigot. By this reasoning the Trump presidency must have awakened everyone’s repressed racism.

And why did they make this assumption? Apparently, they formed their hypothesis based on the idea that people have deep-seated racism lying dormant within themselves, waiting to be awakened by a provocative event. The theory was that Trump’s election somehow pushed the magic “I’m totally a racist” button that lurks in the hearts of men – probably white men, specifically – and instantly transformed them into a legion of slobbering white supremacists bent on the utter destruction of minorities.

Obviously, the researchers refused to accept the conclusions. Because, fact must always yield to the narrative:

But the findings were surprising, and likely a bit disappointing, to the researchers and the media establishment. Instead of an increase in racism, the study revealed a marked decrease. Between 2012 and 2016, racist attitudes had decreased by a small degree, but after 2016, when Trump was elected, racism plummeted. The drop was equally present in Republican voters and Democrats.

It is apparent that the findings of the study put the researchers and the press in quite a quandary. How could they spin the results in a way that doesn’t damage the narrative? Fortunately for them, being a progressive makes one highly proficient in the sport of mental gymnastics. Instead of acknowledging that America is not as racist as Al Sharpton wants us to think, the researchers posit that perhaps Trump’s racism has been so abhorrent, it made racist Americans want to be less bigoted.

Better yet, the Spectator offered a novel rationalization. It argued that the Obama presidency had so stoked the flames of racism that the Trump presidency allowed racism to revert to the mean or the norm or some such:

But some on the left had another idea. The Spectator suggested the reason racism declined was that it had risen to drastic heights when Obama was in office. It argues that, “maybe social science has got it the wrong way round: it was the sight of a mixed race man in the White House who brought out in the inner racist in Americans who are inclined towards those feelings, while the reassuring sight of white man back in the Oval Office has calmed them down.”

Author Jeff Charles has a more reasonable approach:

The reality is that the president does not have the power to make the country more or less racist. And yes, this also goes for Obama, who many conservatives blame for escalating racial tensions during his time in office. While neither president handles racial issues perfectly, American attitudes evolve on their own and are not subject to the whims of the person who happens to occupy the Oval Office.

This report showed that racial tensions were already decreasing under Obama, albeit at a slower pace. Perhaps some whites reaffirmed their opposition to racism when Trump was elected and the media tried to convince America that he was the Führer, who was going to bring back slavery and put Hispanics in catapults to launch them back over the southern border.

But, what would the left do without its narrative? It would be lost and bereft, intellectually vacuous, hellbent on fighting racism by impeaching the racist president named Donald Trump.