Racism is a heavy charge, use it carefully

All around the world people are watching the United States Democratic Party’s televised presidential debates as keenly as Americans, looking for the candidate that could rid us of Donald Trump.

So far I can’t see one, though it’s still early days. With the field reduced to 10 for next week’s debate, there may be more time for one of them to shine. But at this stage, I’m more worried about the votes Democrats will not win if they persist in accusing Trump of racism.

The good newspapers and television networks are doing it too. They now routinely refer to Trump’s “racist” remarks and “racism” as though it was an indisputable fact. One of CNN’s moderators of the last debate used the word that way in a question to candidates.

Trump is many things — a bully, creep, economic disaster, a deluded narcissist impervious to facts, a constant embarrassment to a great office with his dumb tweets — but I don’t think he is particularly racist.

Racism is a heavy charge that used

to be used sparingly. Now it is liable to be levelled at any derogatory comment about a person or practices of a racial minority.

When Trump rounds on a congressman from Baltimore who has criticised conditions in detention centres at the Mexican border and Trump suggests the representative concentrate on his own “rat-infested” city, it is a typically low-grade retort unworthy of an office that’s responsible for Baltimore too.

But the reaction was one of horror mainly because the congressman is black, as is Baltimore predominantly.

Racist is the one word that stings Trump. He always responds to it, tweeting that he is the least racist person in the world or some such nonsense. What he means, I think, is that he deeply believes people should be treated the same regardless of the colour of their skin.

He probably would have said the same if the congressman had been white.

Trump is a product of the post-war civil rights era. His generation was imbued with the principle that “all men are created equal” (sexism had yet to be discovered). They are not so much insensitive to race as indifferent to it. Don Brash represents that view in this country.

They are aggrieved when they’re accused of racism because they honestly don’t think race matters. They often accuse their accusers of racism for bringing race into the debate.

I don’t care that Trump is aggrieved, I do care that a great many American voters will resent the terms Democrats are using for opinions and fears those voters may share.

The problem is that later in the 20th century, liberalism decided race did matter very much and “racism” came to mean just about anything a democratic majority thought or did that ignored the views, needs or culture of a racial minority.

Generations who grew up around the millennium have been taught that minority groups needed much more than equal rights to have an equal chance to succeed in life and play a full and fair part in society.

The difference was never better illustrated than in the Democrats’ first debate when California Senator Kamala Harris, who seems their best candidate so far, attacked front runner Joe Biden for opposing “busing” when he was in the Senate long ago.

Busing was used to forcibly integrate American schools in the 1970s. Back then it seemed universally regarded as a step too far but clearly not everyone sees it that way now. Harris, born in 1964, said it had enabled her to be where she is today.

Trump voters are disproportionately white and haven’t had a college education. Like Trump, who reportedly learned his trucker views as a youth on his father’s building sites, many of them have probably rubbed shoulders with more black Americans than those accusing them of racism.

The big worry for many people, in all Western countries in recent years, has been the scale of immigration. They fear they are losing their own country, or at least its dominant culture.

I don’t share that fear but I understand it. I think everybody does. I don’t think it’s fair to call it racist or white supremacist. It’s white insecurity.

Liberals need to meet that insecurity head-on, explaining how immigration enriches a society in numerous ways and doesn’t really threaten a dominant culture.

Very quickly immigrants become part of the same cultural fabric if they’re welcomed.

The word racism just gets in the way of the welcome, silencing natural fears until a politician is prepared to exploit them.

Let’s use it more carefully.

Leighton Smith is away on leave