Why Trump's Remarks Were Racist

 Yesterday, Trump gave a floundering, angry, at times incoherent panel interview with the National Association of Black Journalists. He was pulled off stage by his campaign about half way through. I would not expect him to venture much beyond Fox and Newsmaxx from here on out.

The comment that drew the most outrage was suggesting that Kamala Harris wasn't always Black but only "became Black" when it suited her political ambitions. I think maybe that people are assuming that most people understand why that's racist, and maybe they shouldn't. So, a brief explainer.

At the core of racism is the idea of race essentialism. This posits that race is biological, ascribed at birth and central to a person's abilities and identity. You are who you are because of your race.

Now, there is a brand of left wing identity politics that would seem to mimic this belief, but it's subtly different. Identity politics suggests that how a society sees you determines who you are. We know now that the biological component of race is literally skin deep. However, being Black in America will lead you to being treated differently than if you were White. What does NOT happen is that if you are born Black you are suddenly freighted with a bunch of attributes based on your race.

Trump's attack on Harris obviously suggests that he literally cannot grok the idea of a multiracial identity. It's the reason why he can't understand multiracial identity that's important: he sees race in stark binary terms and you are either "one of us" or "one of them." Asians - the so-called model minority - are often claimed (when convenient) by Whites; Jews come and go from "us" when they want. These stark racial divides are the core animating belief of racism.

If you understand that race is fundamentally an evolutionary adoption of melanin to Vitamin D deficiencies, then the idea of race as a driving understanding of the world has to recede a lot. If - like Trump - race is everything and race is immutable, then Harris' biracial identity seems like a fraud. It's the same "cheating" as Biden dropping out after their convention.

There is one reading of Trump's comments (there are always layers of awfulness to this fucker), where he's simply ignorant of the idea of biracial parentage. That's really bad. 

The more accurate one, I think, is that Trump's understanding of race essentialism is driving these attacks on Harris' dual ethnicity.

Oh, and I have zero confidence that the High Priests of Bothsides in our nation's media are equal to the task of explaining this.