A prominent Georgetown University professor on Wednesday doubled down on the liberal narrative that racial animus fueled President-Elect Donald Trump’s successful campaign.
Michael Eric Dyson, author of “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” said on CNN that Trump is the manifestation of white voters enraged over the election of President Obama.
“Let’s be honest, a lot of the response against Obama was for no other reason than he was a black man.”
“Let’s be honest, a lot of the response against Obama was for no other reason than he was a black man,” said Dyson, who also is black. “If you don’t like Barack Obama as a black man, there are not too many other brothers you are going to dig.”
Dyson noted that Trump questioned Obama’s American birth. That came against the backdrop of white anxiety during the Obama years, reflected by racist epithets that the Obama family endured, Dyson said.
“So that kind of racial animus came above board because Obama provoked it, because his presence there brought a lot of consternation to people who thought, ‘We shouldn’t be involved in this kind of thing as an American citizenry. We want a president who looks like us, not like him,'” he continued.
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“New Day” anchor Alisyn Camerota pushed back, asking if it is possible that people voted for Trump not because of that issue but overlooked it because they thought he might be better for business.
“Ah, your faith in the American citizenry is pretty high … I don’t think people overlooked that,” Dyson said. “I think he ginned up the racial animus. I think he appealed to the worst instincts in our nature.”
Co-host Chris Cuomo suggested that “race-neutral” concerns over issues like the Islamic State, rising health premiums, and an uneven economic recovery predominated. Dyson rejected the notion, saying that African-Americans long have been subjected to terrorism — at the hands of the “vicious police forces of America that have victimized us and the way in which white supremacy operates.”
Dyson also rejected Cuomo’s suggestion that he was making a false equivalency between police violence and international terrorism.
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“Even those components you say are ‘race-neutral’ have a racial segment to them because the way black people and brown people experience them [is different] than the larger community,” he said.
Dyson’s analysis reflects a dominant thesis on the Left that has not changed much since the election. Before Election Day, Democrat Hillary Clinton and her allies saw a “basket of deplorables” making up a large part of Trump’s base. The only major adjustment to the theory is that before the election, liberals thought the racist base was too small to put Trump in the White House — and now they believe it is larger than they originally thought.
Dyson never explained how a nation as filled with racial animus as he describes could have voted twice for a black man. Trump won many majority-white counties that twice voted for Obama. If race motivated those voters to cast ballots for Trump, why didn’t they also vote against Obama?
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