Be patient with his post: there is a lot of ground to cover but the first obstacle to solving any problem is recognizing that there is a problem.

Of course some of us have known there’s a problem and have since long before the election of Trump, but now it has been brought into bright relief. Various polls have proven this in relation to preconceived notions about black people:

A poll from March and April by Reuters and Ipsos took a close look at this issue. It found that Trump supporters are more likely to say that, compared to white people, black people are viewed by Trump supporters as less intelligent, more lazy, more rude, more violent, and more criminal. About 40 to 50 percent of Trump supporters held at least one of these views, while fewer than 35 percent of Clinton supporters did.

About Mexicans:

First, the controversial comments that launched Trump’s campaign. At his very first campaign speech in 2015, Trump characterized Mexican immigrants as "rapists" who were "bringing crime" and "bringing drugs" to the US. A poll by Fox News asked voters back in July 2015 about these comments — and Republicans were much more likely to find them acceptable. About 70 percent said that, setting aside Trump’s wording, his comments were basically right, compared to 25 percent of Democrats. And a later poll by the Pew Research Center found about half of Trump supporters link undocumented immigrants to more crime than US citizens, versus 13 percent of Clinton supporters. [For the record Immigrants, documented or not, do not commit “more crime” than citizens.]

And about Muslims:

A poll conducted by Reuters and Ipsos in June and July looked at broad views on Islam, finding Trump supporters are more than twice as likely as Clinton supporters to have negative views of Islam. About 58 percent of Trump supporters said they have "somewhat unfavorable" or "very unfavorable" views of Islam, compared to 24 percent of Clinton supporters. There has also been polling on people’s views of one of Trump’s most controversial proposals: to ban all Muslims from entering the US. Again, Trump supporters are very likely to support this idea. According to a poll from June by the Texas Politics Project, 76 percent of Republicans support the idea, versus 26 percent of Democrats. Notably, 44 percent of Democrats said they "strongly oppose" the idea, while just 6 percent of Republicans did.

It’s no longer really a question of whether a significant portion of America is racist and bigoted or not, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, it’s now become a matter of just how racist they are and how far they willing to go to deny it or fight against it.

To that point, there are quite a few people who only seem to see racism coming from black people, minorities, and Democrats, but none from white people or Republicans. People like GOP pundit Jeffrey Lord, who argues that any mention or acknowledgement of race itself is “racist.” “We’re all just Americans,” he says, to which I wonder how he would treat someone from France or Bangladesh. And shouldn’t he really be saying, “There’s only one ‘race’, the human race, which includes all of us?” Nationalism is still an “-ism” isn’t it?

Lord is the kind of inverse bigot that Dinesh D’Souza has been for years, similarly arguing that racists are only the people who dare to pay attention to race issues themselves and that the “solution” to all our racial strife is to remove all references to race from the government and repeal the Civil Rights Act. Because apparently using government to document racism or try to stop racists is itself the crux of the problem and we should just let the free market solve it all.

The full extent of D'Souza's extremism becomes evident when he calls not merely for the abolition of affirmative action but also for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This extraordinary proposal is based on little more than dogmatic assertions about the virtues of private libertarianism. D'Souza believes that the government should be prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race but that private employers should be able to do so without penalty. In the end, he argues, the free market will create fair employment practices without governmental intervention. Why this is not likely to be the case can be demonstrated by enlarging upon an historical example that D'Souza uses to support his argument. He contends that the Jim Crow laws that were passed in the South around the turn of the century were resisted by private businesses, usually on the grounds that separate facilities were more expensive than integrated ones. Segregation therefore "represented a triumph of government regulation over the free market." There is some truth in this, but it fails to acknowledge what historians have found to be a pervasive pattern of de facto or customary segregation or discrimination during the period that preceded the Jim Crow laws. No law required cotton mill owners to hire only white machine operators and relegate blacks to janitorial work; and no law forced white unions to exclude blacks from membership. Even if they are not prejudiced themselves, owners of businesses are likely to adjust their employment practices to the prejudices of their communities, as well as to those prevailing among their work force. This was the reality in the "unregulated" white South before the era of Jim Crow and would to some extent be the case today if affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws were dispensed with.

Going without the protection of civil rights laws is a complete non-starter, but even with those laws on the books, can we actually count on elected government officials to consistently implement those laws as written? We certainly can’t expect that from Jefferson Beauregard Keebler, the grumpy racist House Elf.

So there’s that to consider.

Of course we always hear the argument about “black crime” whenever we talk about civil rights and justice, or police brutality. There is one chart from the FBI Uniform Crimes stats that is always used to justify this argument and rationalize police discrimination based on it. D’Souza would call it “rational discrimination” that is supposedly based on “data,” and not irrational fear or hate. But then again, is it truly “rational?”

Murder Race and Sex of Victim by Race and Sex of Offender, 2011 [Single victim/single offender] Race of victim Total Race of offender Sex of offender White Black Other Unknown Male Female Unknown White 3,172 2,630 448 33 61 2,810 301 61 Black 2,695 193 2,447 9 46 2,385 264 46 Other race 180 45 36 99 0 155 25 0 Unknown race 84 36 27 3 18 63 3 18 Sex of victim Total Race of offender Sex of offender White Black Other Unknown Male Female Unknown Male 4,304 1,834 2,289 87 94 3,760 450 94 Female 1,743 1,034 642 54 13 1,590 140 13 Unknown sex 84 36 27 3 18 63 3 18

If one divides the black murder offenders (2,447) into the black victims (2,695) you get a percentage of 90.7 percent. That’s the stat you can find people like Rudy Giuliani referring to on a regular basis. However, there are at least four problems with that argument. [One could could also take note that the rates for black and white killers versus male and female victims which is far more out-of-wack and question it as well — but I’ll leave that for another diary]

First, Giuliani never bothers to do the math on the 2,630 white offenders with 3,172 white victims shown here, which is 82 percent. So if most black people are killed by black people, then so are most white people killed by white people. That doesn’t really support the claim that black crime is so massively out of control compared to everyone else.

Secondly, this chart doesn’t include all murders: it only includes cases with a “single offender and single victim.” This means that the Dylann Roof shooting isn’t included in the chart, and neither is the shooting of five Dallas police last year, nor is the Jared and Amanda Miller rampage through Las Vegas, last month’s Route 91 massacre, the Pulse Nightclub shooting of 49 people last year, or the San Bernadino mass murder of 14 people in 2015, or the Isla Vista mass shooting that killed 6 people in 2014 since all of these had multiple victims and some had multiple offenders.

Data documented by Mother Jones shows that the vast majority of mass shootings are perpetrated by White Christian males as are the vast majority of domestic terrorist attacks but how all of that would effect the murder totals this chart doesn’t even begin to tell us. However, If you go through the Supplemental Homicide Report you can create a chart of all murders, even when there are multiple victims or multiple offenders. This produces a stat showing cases with white offenders/white victims of 92 percent and black offenders/black victims of only 83 percent—which is exactly the opposite of what Giuliani claims is the problem.

Race of Oldest Offender by Race of 1st Victim vis Supplemental Homicide Report

The third issue is that not all murder cases get solved so when you assume you know who 90 percent of the perpetrators are, you are assuming that about all the unsolved cases as well—and that’s not a fair presumption. As it turns out, when you include the “open” cases into the mix, the white/white percentage drops to 62.2 percent, and the black/black percentage falls all the way to 55 percent. This is largely because the rate of unsolved cases for white people is only 24 percent, while the unsolved cases of black murders is nearly twice as high at 40 percent.

There is an argument to be made that having almost half of your murder cases go unsolved leaves an unhealed trauma and wound among those families that go through these murders. Just like any form of PTSD, this unresolved trauma can eventually turn inward and lead to self-destructive behaviors, including self-medicating via drugs, involvement in gangs, and other issues. These are problems that we’re now also seeing in the Rust Belt and bread basket of America as the opioid crisis continues to rage, taking almost 20,000 victims per year. Yet when those same kinds of problems impacted minorities via crack and heroin for decades the inner cities’ answer to the problem was even more and more law enforcement with stiffer and stiffer sentences, which certainly didn’t help. In contrast now that it’s happening in the heartland, the response is that we need more treatment and compassion. One was treated as a crime problem, while the other is being treated as a health problem.

Just for the record: that’s what white privilege is right there—the maintenance of a benefit of the doubt. Empathy and compassion for some, but not for others. It doesn't require fear, hate, envy, nooses, or n-words, only a hesitation in your step when someone ethnic or just plain different is involved. Small little hesitations in choices, which might not even be deliberate or conscious: they all add up just as we see in the above polls about Trump voters reaction to his racial statements. That’s all it takes.

Lastly on this subject, the murder rate isn’t really a good general indicator of the overall crime rate because the most common and prevalent crime is actually larceny. There are over 5 million occurrences of larceny every year for which 671,250 whites were arrested in 2014 compared to 271,788 black people—which is a 2.4:1 ratio. Yes, the black murder arrest rate is higher by about 1000 and the robbery arrest rate is higher by 10,000, but if we’re treating this like a competition is that gap truly high enough to claim blacks are “more criminal” when they’re about 400,000 larceny arrests behind? And also 70,000 burglaries and 5,000 rape arrests behind? I don’t think so. When you look at all arrests the total is 6 million white to 2 million black, that’s not “more.” Particularly when Bureau of Justice studies indicate police tend to arrest black people twice as frequently for the same exact offense, and if we take that into account the black arrest rate falls right into their general percentage of the overall population. What we’re seeing here isn’t more crime, it’s less benefit of the doubt.

IMO in general trying to determine any of this by arrest rates is a bad bet all around because most crimes don’t get solved, the average overall “clearance rate” (which is when police identify a probable suspect for a crime) is only 47.4 percent. For murder it’s 64 percent on average — although as I note above that’s racially skewed too — and for property crimes which are much more prevalent it’s only 20 percent, larceny 23 percent, burglary 18 percent. We don’t really know “who dunnit” most of the time. People who pretend they know this, most often don’t have the actual numbers but they probably do have an agenda. And usually that agenda is racial.

Basically D’Souza and Giuliani’s excuse that we don’t need to look at seeking justice and police reform and pull back from the “broken windows” strategy of over enforcing petty crime in urban settings and reprioritize away from the war on drugs because of “black crime” is a complete crock. Yes, of course there is an urban black on black crime problem, but there’s also just as much of a rural white-on-white crime problem—yet somehow that never comes up in the discussion. The Bureau of Justice Statistics documents that the rate of violent victimization between whites and blacks is virtually identical when controlled for poverty and wealth. So perhaps we only see it more clearly in urban areas because of the density of the poverty as compared to rural American and there’s a likelyhood that the crime rate in all areas would significantly improve if we were to seriously address the still growing wealth and income gap

Even without going to extremes like D’Souza, you can see this “just don’t talk about racism” sentiment from so-called “mainstream” people like former Sen. Rick Santorum.

x x YouTube Video “It won’t change until individuals who look like [Nina Turner] and I decide that enough is enough,” CNN contributor Bakari Selleres pointed out. “And so many people confuse patriotism and prejudice. And what we saw on display [in Charlottesville] was so much prejudice. And I hope that individuals, especially white evangelicals in American decide to stand up and say enough is enough.” Conservative CNN contributor Rick Santorum (R-PA) recoiled at the idea of talking about racism. “You see, that’s the kind of talk that really, I think, causes problems,” he opined. “That says somehow or another, if you’re white, you’re somehow racist… I don’t know anybody who has spoken [in favor of white supremacy] but then to say this is larger problem is just — I would just say we have problems of racism in this country. But tying that to white supremacists, I think is a whole different thing.” Turner disagreed: “Two hundred and fifty years worth of slavery, almost 100 years worth of Jim Crow in this country. The fact that the systems in this country still treat black folks… as second class citizens. And part of what the [Sen. Rick Santorum] doesn’t want to face is also part of the problem… nobody has said that all white people are racist.”

Racism isn’t monolithic or absolute. It exists on a spectrum of different varieties and different forms.

For some people simply bringing up the subject of racism is the same as saying “all white people are bigots,” which simply isn’t the case. That couldn’t possibly be true. It’s as ridiculous a proposition as saying, for example, that the vast majority of black people are lazy, excuse-making, chip-shouldered, complaining, criminal America-haters. Or that Mexicans are rapist, drug-trafficking job stealers who bring down our wages. Or that Muslims are terrorist sympathizers who cheered the fall of the twin towers, and are also America-haters, while immigrants are just plain bad generally, and contribute nothing to America—except the European ones, sometimes. Yes, there are some specific cases where some of these tropes are true about one individual here or there. But not for everyone, or even a significant majority of each particular group. Taking the worst representative example of any broad group and making them the standard by which to judge everyone you can tangentially link to that group by is exactly the core of bigotry and racism. It’s also chronically lazy. Finding the truth about individuals takes time and effort, and putting in that effort is the responsibility we must take on, because when we shirk that effort bad things happen. Discrimination happens. Honest people are treated like criminals, sometimes innocent people get killed not because of who they are or what they did — but because of who someone else thought they were.

If it’s wrong to prejudge white people—and for the record, of course it is—it’s also wrong to prejudge all African Americans, Mexicans, Asians, Jews, Muslims, LGBT and immigrants as being monolithic and identical. We should all know this automatically, but unfortunately, we all don’t. Some of us would simply rather play it safe when there’s a question of doubt, and not take the chance that the worst possibilities about someone of a particular ethnic background or group—as we’ve all been well indoctrinated—isn’t true in the specific instance of the person standing in front of us. It doesn’t require hate for this to happen. All it really takes is a little fear, cowardice, and laziness. If we don’t all have the courage and the conviction to take the time and effort it really takes to find out who someone really is, and who they really aren’t, then the default is an ongoing, longstanding tendency for people to presume the worst is true then play the safe bet, or attack or self-segregate, avoiding involvement with people they don’t know, don’t understand, or don’t agree with. If we don’t engage each other, if we don’t engage with those with whom we specifically disagree and instead simply retreat into neutral corners, then nothing gets solved, nothing gets better, nothing gets fixed.

We have to do better, and we can’t just rely on the mystical magical free market that D’Souza expects us to blindly trust. Not while we see it fail miserably and continue to implement lending discrimination as it did with companies such as Countrywide just a few years ago.

The Department of Justice today filed its largest residential fair lending settlement in history to resolve allegations that Countrywide Financial Corporation and its subsidiaries engaged in a widespread pattern or practice of discrimination against qualified African-American and Hispanic borrowers in their mortgage lending from 2004 through 2008. The settlement provides $335 million in compensation for victims of Countrywide’s discrimination during a period when Countrywide originated millions of residential mortgage loans as one of the nation’s largest single-family mortgage lenders. Surprisingly enough before Donald Sterling became infamous for dictating that his girlfriend couldn’t date black guys, he was involved in a housing discrimination case.

Los Angeles Clippers owner and real estate mogul Donald T. Sterling has agreed to pay a record $2.725 million to settle allegations that he discriminated against African Americans, Hispanics and families with children at scores of apartment buildings he owns in and around Los Angeles. The settlement, which must be approved by U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer, is the largest ever obtained by the Justice Department in a housing discrimination case involving apartment rentals, officials said. If approved, the settlement would also resolve a pair of lawsuits by former tenants of Sterling who alleged they were discriminated against because of their race. Who’d have thunk it, eh? This is important because it’s a method of implementing deliberate housing discrimination and red-lining against blacks and other minorities who have continued to be segregated into economic deserts, where jobs are scarce and opportunities are limited. "Redlining" just sounds like an an old-timey term, a practice that exists only in history and our re-tellings of it. The word has particular roots in the 1930s, when the government-sponsored Home Owner's Loan Corporation first drafted maps of American communities to sort through which ones were worthy of mortgage lending. Neighborhoods were ranked and color-coded, and the D-rated ones — shunned for their "inharmonious" racial groups — were typically outlined in red. This government practice was swiftly adopted by private banks, too, during an era of massive homeownership expansion in the U.S. And the visual language of the maps became a verb: To redline a community was to cut it off from essential capital. To be redlined was something even worse. The federal government eventually retreated from the practice, and it was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act in 1968. But black communities have warned that it still exists in subtler and changed forms, in bank tactics that have targeted these same neighborhoods for predatory lending, or in new patterns like "retail redlining." Some of the persistent redlining, though, still looks an awful lot like the original. And we have the proof that even African Americans who graduate from college still suffer from double the unemployment rate of others. At age 33 and boasting an Ivy League graduate degree, Kitama Cahill-Jackson never thought he’d end up a security guard. But after years of layoffs and coming in second in job interviews, the Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker took the job. Cahill-Jackson dreamed of a career as a news producer. But now, after years of unsuccessfully searching for journalism jobs, he said he can’t even look at the news. “When I got to work at 4:30 in the morning, I would listen to NPR. I don’t listen anymore because it makes me sad. That’s the career I didn’t have,” he said. “I don’t read the paper because it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart that I put on this uniform every day and come in here, and I’m not seen as a professional. I worked so hard academically, and for all of that, to work at a job that only requires a GED.” ... Recent black college grads ages 22 to 27 have an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, more than double the 5.6 percent unemployed among all college grads in that demographic and almost a threefold increase from the 2007 level of 4.6 percent, before the Great Recession took its toll on the U.S. economy. More than half of black graduates, 55.9 percent, are underemployed. Specifically, Kitama Cahill-Jackson may be having such difficulty because his name just isn’t white enough. Tahani Tompkins was struggling to get callbacks for job interviews in the Chicago area this year when a friend made a suggestion: Change your name. Instead of Tahani, a distinctively African-American-sounding name, she began going by T. S. Tompkins in applications. Yvonne Orr, also searching for work in Chicago, removed her bachelor’s degree from Hampton University, a historically black college, leaving just her master’s degree from Spertus Institute, a Jewish school. She also deleted a position she once held at an African-American nonprofit organization and rearranged her references so the first people listed were not black. The dueling forces of assimilation and diversity have long battled for primacy in the American experience, most acutely among African-Americans. It’s not clear that assimilation has gained an edge here in the waning days of the decade, but the women’s behavior — “whitening” the résumé — is certainly not isolated. Ms. Tompkins and Ms. Orr were among the more than two dozen college-educated blacks interviewed for an article about racial disparities in hiring published last week on the front page of The New York Times. A half-dozen said they had taken steps to hide their race, or at least dial back the level of “blackness” signaled in their résumés. That seemed startling somehow, maybe because of the popular perception that affirmative action still confers significant advantages to black job candidates, a perception that is not borne out in studies. Moreover, statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in this jobless environment compared with whites, as that article reported. We all know that the economic opportunities open to your parents and family are one of the strongest indicators of the future success of the following generations. A family without a college graduate is less likely to produce college graduates, and consequently they are less likely to access the higher income required to escape red-lined urban job deserts. Now we see the opposite: college graduates taking blue-collar jobs just to survive while still dealing with an enormous school debt. Even though we continue to claim that “only in America” can someone rise to great wealth in a single generation, that actually isn’t so much the case anymore as the U.S. ranks at 17th in the global prosperity index. Compared to other top 20 countries, the US has seen marked stagnation in prosperity over the past decade. Its Prosperity Index score is no different in 2016 than it was in 2007. American stagnation has occurred in a favourable global environment, with global prosperity reaching its highest point in the past decade in 2016. This means the US is in decline relative to emerging and advanced economies alike. Prosperity gains in both Germany and China, for example, have outpaced American gains since 2007. Americans’ experience of relative decline is fuelling their support for populism, which can further erode the country’s prosperity. Despite a few individual exceptions such a Oprah, Kanye West, Jay-Z, or even Ben Carson who have managed to break through the white ceiling, America’s overall prosperity has been stagnant at best for at least a decade. Generally speaking, minorities who’ve been strategically denied opportunities open to others for generations during Jim Crow, and who continue to have to deal with a deficit as a result of private industry discrimination as shown above, will continue to lag behind. Poverty rate by race U.S. Poverty Statistics - Race While the poverty rate for the population as a whole is 12.7% the rate varies greatly by race. Blacks have the highest poverty rate at 22.0% and Non-Hispanic whites the lowest at 8.8%.



The poverty rate for Blacks and Hispanics is more than double that of non-Hispanic Whites. While the poverty rate for the population as a whole is 12.7% the rate varies greatly by race. Blacks have the highest poverty rate at 22.0% and Non-Hispanic whites the lowest at 8.8%.The poverty rate for Blacks and Hispanics is more than double that of non-Hispanic Whites. The poverty rate situation was actually worsened recently as a result of the housing market crash of 2008 because companies like Wells Fargo specifically targeted African-Americans for sub-prime loans that eventually exploded under their feet and took away their homes even when their credit was strong enough to qualify for normal prime rate. In sworn court testimony, [Beth Jacobson] described watching loan officers comb through heavily African American areas such as Baltimore and Prince George’s County, forging relationships with churches and community groups to sell their members shoddy mortgages. She says she processed loans for homeowners with sterling credit ratings with higher interest rates than they needed to pay. And she says she pumped out millions of dollars in mortgages to people with no paperwork and low incomes, becoming Wells Fargo’s top-producing loan officer. The machine made her rich — the questions came later. Now, she has recast herself as a crusader for consumers in a battle that has pitted her against the system she once pushed. … Wall Street had just figured out how to generate enormous pools of money that could be used to extend these mortgages to people with low incomes or poor credit. Many of them were minorities who traditionally had been unable to qualify for a loan. The trade-off was that they paid higher interest rates and often accepted adjustable terms. The mortgages were so popular that they spawned a boom in lending that in turn fueled the country’s economic growth. Home­ownership soared among blacks and Latinos, a fact celebrated at the time by banks and consumer advocates. Thousands of African-American and Latino famillies lost their homes and a significant portion of their net worth when the great recession came, while Wall Street walked away with their homes and massive bonuses for their “cleverness” — and the racial wealth gap has contineed to explode. Minorities are told that this is their own fault, even though other hands helped construct this situation quite deliberately for generations. They’re told they should be able to bootstrap themselves to prosperity, but at the same time the rust belt is suffering and can’t seem find any of that bootstrap magic for itself. That’s supposedly their claim for why they voted for Trump, is it not? These are daunting challenges, and even if you can argue that white supremacy and racism isn’t the sole cause for all this, it also certainly doesn’t help any portion of the situation.

Yet It is amazing how when anyone simply brings up racism as a contributing factor to the above, some people get severely bent out of shape at the suggestion some white people just might have been doing something wrong for a couple centuries or so, and how it’s unfair to spread that blame to “all white people.” But they don’t have much of a problem at all when someone does the exact same thing to African Americans, Mexicans, and Muslims. Yes, of course it’s awful to be repeatedly accused of racism without just cause, but then it’s also pretty fracked up to be accused and treated like a criminal, a terrorist, or an “illegal invader” time and time again. You might call this being “selectively racism tolerant” when it’s happening to someone else, but not so much when it’s your own social/ethnic group. It’s not that everyone is a participant in this, but the problem is when it happens some people seem unable to recognize it, or empathize with the people it’s happening to. And worse, even when someone does recognize it and comment on it, they get attacked for simply pointing out fact and reality. By just bringing up the subject, they get accused of “playing the race card.”

Apparently when someone like Eric Holder or Barack Obama simply attempted to do merely that, simply point out the truth or uphold our civil rights laws, you have people like these brought to us by the Trump administration and Fox News who say anyone who ever even talks about racial injustice is a “race-baiter”:

The denial is strong with these ones, and it could strongly be argued that since the Civil Rights Act and 24th Amendment (which barred poll taxes), as well as the Voting Rights Act of ‘68 (which de-constructed the overt walls of Jim Crow and segregation), not all of the bricks that made up that wall were cleaned up. We thought the job was done, but just like passing laws against burglary and murder has never completely halted those crimes in their tracks, neither has racism or discrimination been “eliminated” simply because some civil and criminal penalties now exist for them.

Quite the opposite, actually. Now, potential civil rights criminals do all they can to avoid incriminating themselves. They deny everything and they blame everyone else for their own actions and words.

Although it may no longer be as obvious and well-displayed as a sign on a soda fountain or “whites only” bathrooms, those old sentiments still exist. But for years now the act of openly expressing them could be met with great social and legal consequences, meaning that people can no longer afford to be upfront about how they really feel. They’ve had to function using euphemisms and dog whistle; they couldn’t be explicit, meaning that all the remaining stones from the bigoted wall of the slavery and Jim Crow eras are still strewn about our feet, in perfect position for us to trip over. They ‘vejust been hidden behind denial and obfuscation, as was described by Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

It was Nixon who devised and pursued what came to be called the Southern strategy. This was, in the admirably concise wording of Wikipedia, an appeal “to racism against African-Americans.” Nixon was hardly the first Republican to notice that Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation had alienated whites both in the South and elsewhere — Johnson himself had forecast that Southern whites would desert the Democratic Party. ... This realignment did not exactly start with Nixon or end with him. Barry Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (although he had supported other civil rights bills), but the GOP in general then was unencumbered by a Southern constituency and its leadership often favored civil rights. After Nixon, though, there was no turning back. In 1980, Ronald Reagan — ever the innocent — went to Mississippi and the Neshoba County Fair to tastelessly proclaim his belief in “states’ rights.” Nearby, three civil rights worked had been killed just 16 years earlier, protesting one of those bogus rights — the right to segregate the races. Reagan never acknowledged any appeal to racism. Racists took it as a wink anyway.

There are clearly people who still felt the same way about racial issues before the ‘60s as they did after the ‘60s, into the ‘70s and ‘80s, and even now. But during that time they learned to tamp it down and conceal it, which in turn caused them to grow more and more resentful of being clamped down. As we began to see the rise of Obama, they just couldn’t contain themselves anymore with their claims that he was an “Indonesian Muslim welfare thug-in-chief,” despite all common sense to the contrary.

These people’s frustration at being socially forced to be “politically correct”—which boils down to not being a bigoted jerk in public—seems to have reached a breaking point. Now we have people who, because of their frustration over the fear of being accused of bigotry, go out of their way to make outrageous racial statements while claiming “they aren’t racists” because they simply haven’t donned hoods—yet.

Now they deliberately say things that are designed to push the edges and boundaries of polite conversation right to the brink while attempting to maintain a thin film of racial deniability. This is where we find social/racial agent provocateurs like Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopolous, and the hordes of Reddit and 4Chan trolls of the so-called “alt-right.” They go out of their way to specifically “trigger liberals” by saying edgy stuff, and Trump happens to be a master of trolling people and pushing their buttons. This is a game to them, just as it is to Trump. Steve Bannon made this quite clear on 60 Minutes.

Bannon: Trump triggers Liberals and makes them irrational.

And that’s exactly why the racists, the alt-right trolls, and the racism deniers and deflectors all love him. He speaks their language.

In the age of Trump, all this has grown even worse. Those who would accuse anti-racism advocates of being racist themselves have increased in their racial resentment, growing in number and intensity, perhaps because as Rep. John Lewis says “Trump has made them comfortable to put on their hoods.“ This now goes far beyond the trigger trolls of the alt-right. We’ve started to notice blatantly racist attacks and violence becoming more and more commonplace. It’s not just a few “isolated incidents,” either. It appears like a dramatic and disturbing trend, as noted by the Souther Poverty Law Center.

The number of hate groups in the United States rose for a second year in a row in 2016 as the radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) annual census of hate groups and other extremist organizations, released today. The most dramatic growth was the near-tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups – from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year. The growth has been accompanied by a rash of crimes targeting Muslims, including an arson that destroyed a mosque in Victoria, Texas, just hours after the Trump administration announced an executive order suspending travel from some predominantly Muslim countries. The latest FBI statistics show that hate crimes against Muslims grew by 67 percent in 2015, the year in which Trump launched his campaign. The SPLC found that the number of hate groups operating in 2016 rose to 917 – up from 892 in 2015. The number is 101 shy of the all-time record set in 2011, but high by historic standards. “2016 was an unprecedented year for hate,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow and editor of the Intelligence Report. “The country saw a resurgence of white nationalism that imperils the racial progress we’ve made, along with the rise of a president whose policies reflect the values of white nationalists. In Steve Bannon, these extremists think they finally have an ally who has the president's ear.”

Here are some specific examples, because sometimes seeing the numbers fails to express how shocking some of these events are. The most common is when someone does or says something clearly racially biased, and then immediately claims they “didn’t mean anything racial” by it. This begs the question: what else could they have possibly meant?

‘Put the panic back in Hispanic’: Alabama high school student says his racist sign is ‘not meant in racial way.’

NY couple asks black neighbor to agree Confederate flag’s ‘not racist’—and are gobsmacked when he won’t.

“You’ll hear all these people that gathered down South that are blacks,” said Barber, who grew up in Georgia. “What about their Black Lives Matter flags? That’s pushing back on the white people. Us white people, we retaliate by, ‘Hey, we got a Confederate flag and whatnot.'” Although his reasons were admittedly a form of racial retaliation, Barber and his 30-year-old fiancée, Becca Lee, insisted they were not racist. “We are not a racist couple, and we own the flag,” Lee said. “I don’t judge people. I don’t care what color skin they are — if they need defending, I’m going to defend them. That’s what a Southern belle does.” The reporter said his neighbors then tried to prove their point by asking a 13-year-old black neighbor playing nearby to validate their feelings. “Are you opposed to the flag at all?” Barber asked the teen. “Do you have a problem with the flag, as a black person?” “Yeah, it is offensive to me,” the teen said. “This is the flag of people who want to bring slavery back.”

And then there are those incidents where there is absolutely no ambiguity at all:

In the column of being so sensitive you cut your nose off to spite your face, we have this example.

A Mississippi school has banned To Kill a Mockingbird because of its use of the n-word, which is completely missing the point because the word isn’t the problem. It’s the damaging actions that are justified by those who use the word in context of the story.

And lastly, there are signs that some racists have begun to renounce their ways and apologize, as George Wallace did 30 years later:

Former neo-Nazi and National Front organizer Kevin Wilshaw reveals he’s Jewish and gay after abandoning the hate group.

It’s not just that all these things are happening with increasing frequency, because frankly they’ve been happening for decades. It ranges from the illegal actions of the FBI in COINTELPRO against the Black Panthers in the ‘70s, to the bombing of the M.O.V.E tenement in Philadelphia, to the police shooting of Yula Love in 1979, to the beating of Rodney King, the police murder of Ron Settles, Black Secret Service Agents being discriminated against by Denny’s way back in he ‘90s, black farmers being blocked from access to government loans staring in the 80’s as shown in the Pigford suit, and on and on.

None of his is really new. It’s just considerably more obvious now—because Trump.

The reason I say that America is a “racist nation” isn’t simply because we have a few racists here and there acting out. It’s because we seem completely befuddled about how to handle them and how to address systemic and structural inequalities in our justice and economic systems. We seem to have completely run out of solutions. Protests in the streets are too much. Protests in the stadiums are too much. Legislative solutions elude us. We can’t even restore the Voting Rights Act to full effectiveness while a bogus “voter integrity commission” supports efforts to further disenfranchise minority voters with surgical precision and gerrymandering further dilutes our vote and robs of us of our voice.

We need new solutions, and we need new strategies. If the first thing is to recognize the problem, the second is to start fixing it. Criminalizing racism is not going to do the job; social shaming of racists is important but also imperfect as they build resentment of these “safe spaces” and begin to counterattack with ironic diversions and derision. We can’t just wait for all the old bigots to die off, as we now have the likes of james O’Keefe and Tomi Lahren to deal with it.

It seems almost hopeless. Of course it’s not, it’s just incredibly daunting. We have to recommit ourselves to fixing the Voting Rights Act. We have to redouble our efforts on police reform and gerrymandering reform. We have to come up with new innovations such requiring that public defenders offices be granted equal staff and resources to district attorneys, so that the rights of all defendants will be guaranteed attentive and competent protection regardless of their economic status. If police know that every persons rights will be vigorously protected, yes, there will be a “Ferguson Effect” — they’ll be less likely to brutalize, beat and kill almost 2,000 people every year.

Police internal affairs departments need to be made independent and not part of their parent departments, so complaints and charges against problem officers are treated as a law enforcement and public integrity issue thereby more effectively combating the rampant police corruption we’ve seen in places like Chicago. Currently it is treated as an employee issue with their union handling the heavy lifting and covering for the problem officers so their bad actions are just get swept under the rug until finally some unarmed teenager is bleeding out from a gun shot wound to his cerebellum, or a father is left choking from an unauthorized neck hold while spitting out with his last dying words: “I can’t breathe.” And even with all that violence, they still aren’t solving the murder cases involving black victims.

We need to come up with new strategies and techniques for identifying systemic discrimination in hiring, lending, and housing—perhaps using the civil rights testers of the past, but also social media surveillance to identify individuals who may pretend to play fair but are really undercover bigots treading in the dark waters of sites like the Daily Stormer or Breitbart.

We also need to be more careful. We need to listen was much as we talk.

Not everyone who disagrees with us on social justice is automatically a bigot or a racist. We have to be as patient with them as we would hope they would be with us, and give them a fair chance to explain their point and perspective before the “r-word” starts getting thrown around. And we need to give them a chance to fully understand our view as well. The main thing we need in this fight is more allies, not more enemies.

The bigots are evolving into multiple forms. You have the racism skeptics and the deniers such as Ditka and Nugent, the reversalists such as Lord and D’Souza, the statistical excuse makers such as Giuliani, the trigger-generating trolls such as Milo and Lahren. You have the sweet little n-word-screaming cheerleaders, the eighth graders throwing rocks at black and Latino kids, high schoolers chanting “Trump Trump Trump” at black kids and “build the wall, build the wall” at Latinos. There are clueless little Confederate flag wavers who fail to realize that even Robert E. Lee himself didn’t wish Americans to linger on monuments and flags that symbolize the strife, discord, treason, support for slavery, and ultimately the white power movement of the KKK’s century and a half long reign of lynching and terrorism. There are the teenagers trying to lynch an 8-year-old black kid in the GOD DAMN 21st CENTURY, the neo-Nazis marching in the streets armed with AR-15s, deliberately ramming their motorcycles and cars into a crowds of peaceful protestors and beating them bloody with PVC pipes. And then you have Dylann Storm Roof murdering a set of Christian worshippers who welcomed him to their Sunday prayer meeting without hesitation or complaint.

There’s a spectrum at work here, a variety of people with differing views, perspectives and tactics, yet all with the same ultimate goal: maintaining and implementing white supremacy and privilege. If we’re going to move America forward, if we’re going to successfully battle all of these varied tactics, then we need to adapt. We need to change. We need to not just react, or even overreact, in knee-jerk triggered outrage.

We need to be strategic. We need to be informed. We need to understand their tactics and be ready to deconstruct and battle against them. We need to be smart.

We need to win.

And when we do, that’s when, finally, America will be a truly free nation. Free of bigotry. Free of hate. Free of fear. Free of racism.

It won’t be easy. It won’t be absolute, and there will always be virulent pockets of resistance. It probably won’t be fun, or even safe, at times. But it’s worth the struggle, and it’s worth the fight. America can be the nation it was always destined to become. Perhaps, with Trump ripping the band aid off our centuries-long unhealed scab of discrimination which began with slavery, flowed through to Jim Crow and continued ultimately to Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Willie Horton, George Zimmerman, and now the pathetic mewling of Chris Cantwell ...

Perhaps now we have a chance to come to grips with who and what we’re dealing with, and finally move the country forward into what it always intended to be ...

The land of the free.

Let me address a point which is an overarching theme here that I think I need to clarify as I did in this comment.

When I say “America is Racist” I’m not just talking about specific people having racist ideas or intent, I’m talking about a much larger problem with many of our social structures and institutions functioning in a racist manner, because that’s partly how they were constructed.