When Donald Trump talks about black and Latino people, he does something unusual — he uses the word “the” before the names of these racial and ethnic groups.

Here’s what he said Wednesday night during the third and final presidential debate against Hillary Clinton (emphasis added):

We don't take care of our veterans. We take care of illegal immigrants better than we take care of our military. That can't happen. Our policemen and women are disrespected. We need law and order, but we need justice too. Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store. They have no education, they have no jobs. I will do more for African Americans and Latinos than she can ever do in ten lifetimes. All she has done is talk to the African Americans and to the Latinos.”

It’s fair to say this is intentional. He did the same thing in the second debate, on October 9:

“I’m going to help the African Americans. I’m going to help the Latinos, Hispanics. I am going to help the inner cities. [Clinton has] done a terrible job for the African Americans.”

That night, viewers started using the hashtag #TheAfricanAmericans to mock the awkward phrasing and muse about what it might reflect about Trump’s relationship to nonwhite people.

It turns out there’s an official opinion on this. After the October 9 debate, linguist Lynne Murphy of the University of Sussex weighed in on Trump’s use of “the” in a piece for Quartz. In her view, it might function as coded language that signals his separation from the groups of Americans he’s talking about:

“The” makes the group seem like it’s a large, uniform mass, rather than a diverse group of individuals. This is the key to “othering”: treating people from another group as less human than one’s own group. The Nazis did it when they talked about die Juden (“the Jews”). Homophobes do it when they talk about “the gays.” ...I doubt it’s an accident that Trump talks about ethnic groups in the same way that we talk about foreign governments and armies. If that “the” treats ethnic groups as some monolithic cabal, that might ring true with the conspiracy-theory mind-set that characterizes some of his core audience — the audience that Trump has been priming to see and make trouble at polling places “in certain areas.”

Read Murphy’s entire piece at Quartz and follow her tweets about linguistics at @lynneguist.

“Othering” could fit into a larger pattern: Trump talking about racial minorities for the benefit of a white audience

It’s understandable that many have seized upon Trump’s unusual speech patterns here, because voters don’t have much other material to work with when it comes to his views about race in America. He has stated repeatedly that African Americans live in “the inner city,” which he describes as a hellscape of violence, where education is across-the-board terrible or nonexistent. He’s expressed his enthusiasm for the revival of stop and frisk, a policing program that illegally discriminated against black and Latino people. But he has not made any detailed policy proposals.

So if he’s not actually proposing solutions for racial equality — and in fact supports a program that a federal court has said deprives nonwhite people of their rights — why does he keep insisting that he’ll come to the rescue of people of color?

Murphy’s theory about dog-whistling lines up with the fact that many of Trump’s supporters are white, and many have expressed racial resentment. Vox’s German Lopez summarized some of the polling in September:

The findings suggest a great majority of Trump supporters hold unfavorable views of Muslims and support a policy that bans Muslims from entering the US. Most of them support proposals that stifle immigration from Mexico, and they agree with Trump’s comments that Mexican immigrants are criminals. And many — but not a majority — say that black people are less intelligent and more violent than their white peers

And the linguist is not the first to make the argument that when Trump talks about nonwhite people, he is actually talking to white people. Vox’s Dara Lind wrote in August that the real audience for Trump’s “black outreach” has always been wavering Republicans:

Donald Trump — and, particularly, some of his more enthusiastic supporters — isn’t exactly a plausible messenger of post-racial harmony. Trump’s used the ethnicity of a federal judge as a character flaw. His campaign routinely ejects nonwhite people, including supporters (and local Republican officials), from his rallies. David Duke is running for Senate because Donald Trump has made white supremacy great again. It’s enough to make any Republican who believed that racism was over in America feel vaguely queasy. Crucially, though, these are voters who believe that racism is a matter of intent — not effect. They don’t necessarily need to see their party get more diverse to believe that it’s doing the right thing. When Trump tells white voters that he is reaching out to black voters, that soothes their biggest concern: He’s not trying to divide the country along politico-racial lines ...This is why Trump’s "pitch" to black voters, which focuses on how terrible inner cities are ("You're living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed") is appealing to suburban Republicans. They may not all agree on whether African Americans are morally deserving of their high-crime surroundings and poor economic prospects, but they certainly tend to be united in blaming generations of Democratic political leadership for allowing those things to happen

With all that in mind, while only Trump can say for sure why he embraces this verbal tic, you can rest assured that you’re not alone if it sounds wrong to your ear — in a way that goes beyond grammar.

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