"Donald Trump's racism is a strategy and he did not invent it": Ian Haney López, expert on law and racial divisions in the United States
Ian Haney López claims to have the solution to the question that awakens many in the United States: how to reply to the scandals of racial edge fueled by President Donald Trump?
According to this expert on law and race from the University of California, Berkeley, the answer is to portray Trump as a con man who seeks to divide American society.
"Racism is being used as a weapon by a president who represents the interests of billionaires like him," says Haney López in an interview with BBC Mundo.
The political exploitation of racial divisions is an issue that Haney López investigates since before Trump's entry into the 2016 electoral race.
His book Dog Whistle Politics warned in 2014 that conservative politicians were resorting to disguised racial codes to lure white voters into pro-wealthy policies.
Now it launches a new book, Merge Left ("Unite to the left") with a call to the meeting of races and social classes to change the political dynamics and "save America".
The following are excerpts from the telephone dialogue with Haney López, whom his faculty presents as "one of the nation's leading thinkers on how racism has evolved since the civil rights era."
Viewed in historical perspective, how divided is the US along racial lines today?
America is deeply divided in terms of a sense of deep racial conflict.
What Trump is saying to his supporters is: "You are in danger! You are in danger from Muslims who are secret terrorists ... we should ban all Muslims."
Or it says, "You are in danger from immigrants and refugees crossing the southern border… We need to build a wall."
It's a very strong message of racial threat, bringing to the fore levels of white supremacy and white supremacist violence that this country has not seen in decades.
Then you see people marching in Charlottesville chanting slogans of white supremacy. You see mass murderers who target communities of color and invoke Donald Trump and his warnings of a racial invasion as inspiration.
They are very deep racial divisions.
And this is precisely what Trump and the Republican Party want: for the public to think that our country is being torn apart in terms of a conflict between racial groups, so it is more difficult to see that the real threat comes from the very rich.
That has been their strategy: make workers fear each other, so they can hijack the economy.
Are you saying that Trump uses racism as a strategy?
The whole thing is a hoax.
We have to be smart about Donald Trump's racism: First, it is a strategy and he did not invent it.
It's a strategy that the Republican Party adopted 50 years ago during the civil rights era.
As the U.S. moved toward racial equality, that caused anxiety for a number of whites.
And the Republican Party said, if we add fuel to that sense of anxiety, we can get voters to support the Big Business Party because they feel they are under racial threat.
Second, Donald Trump is setting us up.
He wants us to believe that we only have two options: call him racist and by implication call his followers racist so as to deepen the sense of racial conflict, or try not to say anything about his racism so as not to offend anyone but At the same time we let him transmit messages of racial threat and nobody responds.
That's the trap Democrats think they are in.
But there is a better way: define what you are doing as a strategy and say that this is not about white racism.
This is Donald Trump as a scammer. Their game is to cause racial hatred and then turn around as society burns and loot the banks.
The problem with this is that you attribute intentions to the president ...
Absolutely.
But he denies being a racist ...
That is part of the deception. Before the 1960s, Americans spoke of white supremacy openly.
But the civil rights movement proved this to be immoral, unfair, and a lie.
Did politicians stop talking about the superiority of whites? No. They just changed the code.
They started saying things like "we need to protect the silent majority, the true Americans, the heart of America."
On the surface is there any direct reference to race? None. But in the public imagination that encoded as white people.
Or think of Donald Trump, who says, "We need to stop an invasion of illegal aliens." Any direct reference to race? No.
He says, "we have to make America great again." Any direct invocation of white superiority? No.
But underneath all that language is a very powerful history of racial and white menace as a threatened group.
It's a story that allows Trump to stoke racism and then turn around and say, "I am innocent, I am the least racist person in the world." That is part of the rhetoric.
He surrounded himself with people who have practiced this strategy for a long time: Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, Paul Manafort, who started with this kind of racist politics in the south ...
Donald Trump studies how to stoke racial hatred and then puts it into practice.
The president points out, for example, that unemployment among Latinos or blacks is at historic lows in the US, not only as proof that he is not a racist but that he governs for the majority ...
Of course. What do you expect me to say? What represents the interests of the rich? This is not how politics works.
There are billionaires like Donald Trump who stand up and say, "I'm here to represent the worker, trust me."
And, when you trust him, you have billionaire tax cuts and a destroyed social safety net, attempts to cut healthcare, violence against communities of color ...
If you look at what he does instead of what he says, Donald Trump represents a government by and for the rich.
According to polls, the vast majority of Republicans deny that Trump is racist and even almost half of Latinos think so. How can they all be wrong based on what you say?
Precisely because what counts as racism is a very political idea.
Racism is a 400 year old institution. It takes many different forms. It has structured our society and we are quite divided on what is racism and what is not.
So it's true, something like 90% of Republicans deny that Trump is racist, and in doing so they deny that they are racist themselves.
It is a mistake to try to convince them that they are racist. Much better is to convince them that Trump is a con man who uses racism against them and against us.
Many Latin American countries struggle with political leaders whose main strategy is to stoke social division while hijacking the government for themselves and their cronies.
(Jair) Bolsonaro in Brazil is fueling racial division and hatred because he is going to protect some white-skinned Brazilians? No, in the same way that Donald Trump is not here protecting the whites ...
But an important difference is that Trump has a great political party behind him, something that Bolsonaro lacks. Why would one of the two largest parties in US history, which was instrumental in outlawing slavery, line up behind a president you and others consider racist?
Because the Republican Party itself in the 1960s made the decision that they would rely on racism to win votes. This is a story that many people do not know, but it is very well documented and I wrote about it in my book "Dog Whistle Policy".
Republican presidential candidates have won the most white votes in all presidential elections since 1968.
Today, the Republican Party gets about 90% of its support from white voters and 98% of Republican elected officials are white. This occurs in a country where whites are around 62% of the population.
And if you look at who has been elected in the Republican Party, they campaign in styles that are very similar to Donald Trump's, not so outrageous but similar in the sense that they rely on messages that people of color are threatening and unworthy.
The party supports Trump because Trump is the party.
Do you think the president is trying to change the idea of what it means to be an American, for example to leave Latinos out of that definition?
Of course. But the broader strategy is to say that some people do not deserve and that is why we need to dismantle government programs that transfer wealth from the rich to the rest of society.
The superficial assault is that Latinos are not American.
"Illegals are crossing, they are robbing you, they are invading our hospitals, they are invading our schools ...". That is the rhetoric.
But underneath that is a policy agenda that says: "Cut benefits, social security, health care, funds for schools, for clean water, for our cities, for our rural areas."
The political agenda is narrowed on government programs that require high taxes on the rich.
If we can convince Americans to view the poor as threatening, dangerous, and fundamentally different from us, then we can break the collective will to care for one another. That is what happens.
