Don’t fall prey to forces trying to make us afraid of the ‘other’

The recent rash of videos showing white people lashing out against blacks and Hispanics isn’t just because everyone now has a camera in their pocket.

While there has always been plenty of racism in this country — in everything from housing to employment — the effects of Donald Trump’s toxic rhetoric cannot be overstated.

The enmity toward people of color ranges from the conspicuous wearing of a red “Make America Great Again” hat to calling the police on black people doing nothing more menacing than sitting at Starbucks or barbecuing at a park.

At first glance, a group of white men calling the police on a group of five black women on a Pennsylvania golf course for allegedly playing too slowly seems unconnected to Aaron Schlossberg, a New York attorney videotaped berating Spanish-speaking employees and customers and threatening to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a Manhattan restaurant near the Mexican consulate. Parroting the kind of language heard at Trump rallies for the past two years — baseless accusations of Latinos living off welfare, being in the country illegally and “refusing” to learn English — Schlossberg felt no qualms about lashing out against people he perceived as “other.”

Russian meddling and homegrown anxiety have escalated matters as well.

According to an analysis of about 3,500 Facebook ads that were created by the Russianbased Internet Research Agency (the outfit currently under investigation for having sought to influence the 2016 presidential election), USA Today found that the “company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.”

In fact, USA Today found that more than half of the ads made public last week by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence specifically referenced race.

The divisive racial ads released so far started in 2015, ramped up significantly prior to Election Day and continued through May 2017.

Researchers now believe it wasn’t economic worries but whites’ social anxiety about being displaced by the so-called tsunami of people of color that triggered the turn toward Trump.

In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — and based on an analysis of voter surveys — University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz argues that Trump’s success was and continues to be due to dominant groups feeling threatened by change.

“Political uprisings are often about downtrodden groups rising up to assert their right to better treatment and more equal life conditions relative to high-status groups,” Mutz wrote.

In essence, we are being manipulated to feel targeted by “the other” — making wealthy whites feel as threatened by a minimumwage worker speaking Spanish as Spanish speakers feel threatened by ICE.

And by the way, you don’t need to be an immigrant to be scared of ICE — the agency has mistakenly detained and deported at least 2,840 U.S. citizens since 2002.

Bottom line: There are political forces actively working to divide us. As soon as this becomes clear to more people, we might have a shot at not giving in to the impulse to hate the “other” as much as we’re told they hate “us.”