President-elect Donald Trump ran on a fundamentally racist platform.

President-elect Donald Trump promulgated the idea that Mexicans are rapists, blacks are trapped in inner cities, Muslims are terrorists and that America could only be great “again” by becoming what it was in the 1950s when all manner of de facto and de rigeur racism was common.

That is probably why noted and admitted white racist groups supported his candidacy, celebrate his election and congratulate themselves for winning.

For the media, this presents a special kind of problem for which modern media is poorly equipped.

.@criener I'm actually close to deciding that media's style guide choice to never call something racist is rationalized white supremacy — Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) November 9, 2014

I said over two years ago that media style guides precluded major newspapers from calling something racist.

Then I asked around and professional media people told me that there isn’t a style convention on this matter so much as an informal culture. The general rule, I was told, is to never call anything racist and certainly to never call anyone racist. At best, they might quote someone calling something or someone racist.

The implication is that there is no such thing as objectively racist. Racism, according to many mainstream media producers and gatekeepers, can only be subjective.

There is a lot of research on this.

The most cited and widely recognized is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s theory of colorblind racism in which there is racism but no racists. It is worth noting Sarah Mayorga-Gallo’s etymology of the term, attributing first usage to Grace Carroll Massey, Mona Vaughn Scott and Sanford M. Dornbusch’s 1975 article. But, recent scholarship tends to start with Bonilla-Silva.

Using a variety of survey and discourse analysis methods, Bonilla Silva (also later writing with Tyrone Foreman and David Embrick) traces the discursive moves that whites use to de-center racism in their everyday race talk. This discursive distancing takes several forms. Whites attribute race to some unknown other. Sometimes they locate race and racism in biology or nature, attributing any racism to a deity or natural order. The most common tactic, according to research by Teun a van Dijk, is whites using euphemisms.

Perhaps you see where we are going.

Media had, at some point, produced a culture that normalized using euphemisms for racism and racists.

One question, of course, is if this has always been the case.

We have a lot of literature on “colorblind” and “media”. Bonilla-Silva is back with Austin Ashe in a book on media (2014). But, the article doesn’t focus on media usage. It’s argument is about how media promoted the idea of colorblindess after President Barack Obama by using stereotypes, selective inclusion of post-racial imagery, and shaping narratives of post-racial progress.

There is additional research on colorblindness across different media types like sports and reality television and news coverage. Each of these use some version of Bonilla-Silva and Ashe’s level of analysis: on stereotypes and ideologies.

Eileen Walsh gives us some empirical data on race and gender “code” language in media. She finds two dominant media archetypes in coverage of Obama and Clinton during the 2008 election. Each archetype attempts to mitigate language about gender and race to conform to post-racial and post-feminist hegemonic notions of progress.

Fundamentally, I am less interested in a contextual discursive question than I am in some measure of the change in media norms. And, I am mostly interested in these data because they should provide insight on how and why mainstream media was woefully unprepared to cover a professionally racist presidential platform like Donald Trump’s and why they continue to be ill-equipped for what promises to be an aggressively, blatant racist political platform.

I decided to look at the frequency of the words “racism” and “racist” in the New York Times.

Not bad.

This graph suggests that the New York Times has, as one might hope, become a lot more comfortable talking about racism and racists over time. It is also worth noting the steep increase after 2008, which is when the U.S. elected President Barack Obama who is black.

Now, let’s talk proportions. How much of the news in the New York Times does this represent?

Well, at its peak “racism” appeared in 1.5% of articles published in 2016.

How about “racist”, as in “that fool talking about he won’t rent to black people is racist”?

1.32% of articles published in 2016.

At an historical high, the most coverage that “racism” and “racist” got in the New York Times clocks in at less than 1.5% of total news coverage.

But, maybe the New York Times just isn’t into identity politics. In New York City. It might be like “Friends”.

Let’s take a look at a comparative concept, gender.

Okay, that’s interesting. I am actually intrigued by the the 1960-1990 time period. But let’s stay on task. An historical high for the term “gender” is 2.52% of all stories published in the New York Times so far in 2016.

Now, let’s add “sexism”.

Sexism clocks in at a full .43% of all stories published so far in 2016 in the publication of record

For the record, when you do a combined search (think intersectionality) of “racism” and “sexism” you get an all-time high of .03% of articles. That’s in 2016. .

So those are some interesting enough patterns.

But, the theoretical proposal and question of interest is the frequency of euphemisms for racism.

I used a semi-scientific list of euphemisms from a cursory re-read of the above literature and a search of ironic “oh really” tweets of recent coverage about Trump.

Not bad, not great. It is what it is. But then I did “racial”.

The very stupid “racially tinged” was up next

I move that even .03%, or 25 articles in 2016, are too many to have this useless, meaningless term.

Then I went with “racially motivated”, as in “millions of white people were racially motivated to vote for a white supremacist”.

I don’t do it here but if you take the raw numbers for each of the euphemisms for racism, they outnumber the number of articles that use “racism”.

The favored term, by far, of this brief textual analysis dictionary is “racial”.

What is “racial” and why would a major media organization favor it over “racism”?

It could be about part of speech. Racism is a noun. Racial is an adjective. As a writerly person, adjectives are more colorful in prose.

But, it is also true that nouns tend to move action better are certainly more useful in the old school “5 Ws” of journalism construction: who, what, where, when, why.

An adjective modifies a noun. Maybe it is less threatening to say that a person, place or thing has some characteristics related to race than it is to say the person, place or thing is inherently characteristic of racism.

The issue there is the definition of “racial” — of or about race — isn’t at all what racism is. Racism is not about race. Everybody has race. And, that’s not how we’re using it. Racism is about racial hatred, animus rooted in racial superiority beliefs that often justify the unfair allocation of resources, both cultural and material.

Do you catch that?

Racial describes race.

Racism describes animus and stratification.

They are not interchangeable.

Racial, being related to race, is not what President-elect Donald Trump means when he says a Mexican judge cannot fairly adjudicate his legal case or Muslims are inherently violent or blacks are morally inferior.

He is describing animus rooted in beliefs of racial superiority.

If the media cannot call that racism, will they be able to cover President-elect Donald Trump?

And while they figure it out, how bad will the lives of racial people get while racism hides behind euphemisms?

Time will tell.

But will the New York Times?

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, and Austin Ashe. “The End of Racism? Colorblind Racism and Popular Media.” The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America (2014): 57.