Donald
Trump’s campaign has been the top story on most media outlets for the past few
months. He has made many inflammatory remarks, but only seems to gain
supporters after these statements. Many of these comments have been aimed at Mexican’s
and Muslim’s. But more recent news has shown an increase in racist behavior
towards black people from Trump and his supporters.
His twitter, which is generally his biggest platform for the many absurd comments he makes, retweeted fabricated statistical information in November regarding murder rates of black Americans. There was no apology or correction done by Trump to right this wrong he tweeted out to his 6 million followers. This occurred in November, but more racially charged incidents towards black individuals have been occurring during his campaign. The success of his campaign despite quite undeniable racist incidents is concerning and might tell us something about the racial climate of America today.
While doing an interview on CNN, Trump refused to renounce the support from David Duke. Duke is a former KKK leader and said voting for any other candidate besides trump is “really treason to your heritage.” Trump claimed he did not know who this man was and what he supported. It was eventually discovered this was not the truth. Trump had denounced this man back in 2000, calling him a racist and a bigot. Donald Trump knows where he is getting support. Here lies the problem. Both with Trump and politicians in general, do and say whatever will get them the most votes. One theory for why he lied is because many of his supporters are people who would support David Duke so he does not want to be quick to denounce the man and his message. That this might even be a possibility is scary, and tells a lot about where our race culture is today as well as the improvement we still need to go through.
It’s
concerning that events like these are happening at all, let alone at the events
of a potential presidential candidate.
Incidents like these make you realize how far the culture or our country
has to go.
Donald Trump, who has built an entire presidential campaign around racism and xenophobia, admitted he intentionally will say provocative or outrageous comments just to keep his audiences interested. He has reportedly admitted to saying these outrageous comments to gain attention, and I agree. I am convinced that almost everything he says is a publicity stunt, intended to get his name into discussion. It is almost comical to me how he takes issues (race for example) that should be serious, and manages to skew people's perception based on his own morals. It's discretionary to the individual on whether or not those "morals," are actually morals. In one mind, they are morals people live by. In my mind, they aren't and his "morals" alter the value of people who are not the same race as his own, white.
ReplyDeleteMany Trump supporters have stated that they support Trump because he will state his opinions without fear of the repercussions. They like him because he isn't a politician, he is only a businessman who isn't afraid of political backlash. I believe that many of his supporters use his platform and comments as a way to justify their beliefs. It is okay to be racist if Trump is also one. It is okay to mistreat others in the name of Trump's campaign. I believe Trump's campaign is like Yik Yak, a platform to hide behind without fear of repercussions. Trump's campaign has been an eye opener for many Americans to truly see the opinions of Americans and the work that needs to be done to fix its many issues.
ReplyDeleteI also think one of the major reasons why Donald Trump has become so popular is due to political correctness. I really think as a society we have done this to ourselves. We have become so concerned with political correctness that we don’t talk about real issues. I disagree with almost everything Donald Trump stands for but he has truly pointed out a flaw in American politics. When we become more concerned with offending people than we do actually fixing the problems we are facing then we have a problem. That is where we are at today and this is why we have one of the most misogynistic racially insensitive people leading the poles right now. He is the first person not to use political correctness and he as done it quite poorly. But people still flock to him because he is the only who claims to not be concerned with the politics of being pc. If we had other reasonable politicians who weren’t so focused on keeping everyone from being offended, then we would not have a candidate like Donald Trump today. An example of politicians being too concerned with political correctness is the issue of housing. Many African Americans have been forced into inner cities by housing discrimination. This problem hasn’t been fixed largely because people are concerned about making a generalization that all African Americans live in the inner city due to the fact that it might offend people because there are plenty of blacks who live in suburbia. Anther problem that hasn’t been solved is the achievement gap between whites and blacks. If we were to focus on improving African American education, we would close this gap and improve the education system all together. Instead we come up with ridiculous regulations and requirements like common core, which do nothing to improve education because politicians would like to say they are universally fixing education rather than fixing the places where the greatest problems lie. We do indeed need a candidate to who doesn’t hide behind political correctness when talking about the struggles of getting something done, but we also need someone who doesn’t rally people together like this to promote hatred.
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