The Weenie Washington Post

The WashPo almost gets it, almost goes there.  It has a story about the racist fan boys of Donald Trump, but the headline writer and the journalist bought into the use of "racialist."  Why not use a term that already exists?  That is, racist.  These folks are not nationalists, but white supremacists.  They want white people to rule, and minorities to go to the back of the bus. 

Trump has been playing to this crowd since he started the campaign (what he said about Mexicans) and before with the birther nonsense.  In his most recent, post-Bannon, post-latest pivot speeches, Trump continues to be flaming racist--telling African-Americans (the Blacks, as he calls them) that they are all the same, with lousy job prospects, with lousy life prospects, with no insurance (actually, Obamacare has made a big dent in the un-insurance problem among African-Americans).

Since Trump has no problem pandering to the racists, why should media outlets soften the coverage of it?  Yes, this story does a good job of showing who is the core of the Trump "movement," but it pulls back.  No need to pull back.  It is not politically correct to call white supremacists racists--it is just accurate. 

As a scholar of ethnic conflict, I honestly cannot remember ever using or even reading "racialist" in my 20 plus year career.  But that is what the white supremacists do--keep coming up with new names.  What remains the same is a nostalgia for a time where minorities "knew their place", before multiculturalism taught tolerance, acceptance and even celebration of diversity.  I guess it sucks to be on the wrong side of history--this country is becoming increasingly diverse.  They fear this perhaps because they project too much--that the diverse groups will rule just as oppressively as the whites did when America was "great."

So, perhaps the WashPo story is a mostly good one--reminding us of the the awful stuff that is out there and that favors a Trump win--but I wish they had just been a wee bit more direct.  Trump and his core supporters are not racialists but racists, that their nationalism is white supremacy.  And as a white American, I feel I should be apologizing to non-white Americans for the hateful ideology spewed by the candidate nominated by the GOP.