Instigator / Pro
13
1500
rating
16
debates
40.63%
won
Topic
#1266

Trump is not Racist: Change my Mind

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Better arguments
3
21
Better sources
4
14
Better legibility
2
7
Better conduct
4
4

After 7 votes and with 33 points ahead, the winner is...

oromagi
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
4
Time for argument
Three days
Max argument characters
10,000
Voting period
One week
Point system
Multiple criterions
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
46
1922
rating
117
debates
97.44%
won
Description

BoP is on con to prove Trump is racist, in present day, using examples from around 10 years ago, give or take. At least a couple of racist things are required to prove Trump is racist. I will pass on the first round. My opponent will pass on his last round. Good luck.

Raciism- Thinking one is superior to another race; discriminating against another race in a way that implies one is superior to another race.

Round 1
Pro
#1
Per the rules, I pass.
Con
#2
DEFINTIONS:

PRO has offered one definition to which CON objects on several grounds.

OBJECTION: No citation
OBJECTION: Wrong part of speech.  The resolution claims “racist,” an adjective but PRO defines “racism”, a noun. 
OBJECTION:  Misspelled
OBJECTION: Instigator traditionally defines terms
OBJECTION:  CON prefers a definition that is both more authoritative and specific to resolution than PRO’s customized definition.

Racist (adj) is (1) “constituting, exhibiting, advocating or pertaining to racism.”  or (2) (colloquial) “Discriminatory.” [They don't allow Muslims and gays to join the club? That's racist!] [1]
Racism (noun) is the (1) “Belief in distinct human races, and that they have different inherent attributes or abilities, and generally that some are superior and others inferior.” or (2) “The policy, practice or (e.g. government or political) program of promoting this belief and promoting the dominance of one race over others.” [2]
Race is “A group of sentient beings, particularly people, distinguished by common ancestry, heritage or characteristics.” [3]
Trump is “the 45th and current president of the United States.  [4]

RESOLUTION: Trump is not racist

CON is ignoring the “change my mind” clause as a rhetorical flourish. CON interprets the resolution to mean that if CON can demonstrate that over the last ten years or so, Trump has made some public distinctions between some people based on some physical characteristics, ancestry, or heritage on more than one occasion.  CON need not establish Trump’s thinking or true motivations or that racism is an important aspect of Trump’s character, only that he committed some acts that are generally interpreted as racist in nature.

  1. Is Anybody Entirely "Not Racist?"
Let’s note that PRO’s approach to the resolution is unusual.

PRO’s not looking to make an affirmative case or shoulder any part of the burden of proof  because an affirmative case would be very, very difficult to prove. After all, evidence of at least some racial bias, conscious and unconscious can be discovered in most human social interactions.  Recent studies suggest that racial bias develops in our pre-verbal infancy. [5] [6]  To argue that any individual is totally non-racist would be tough to prove and probably easy to disprove anecdotally. 

Mahatma Gandhi, for example, stands as one of the great anti-racist thinkers of the 20th century but wrote in his youth that because Indians shared Aryan roots with Europeans, Indians in South Africa should enjoy civil rights superior to those of the indigenous blacks. [7]  If even Gandhi is racist sometimes, can we really hope that Trump is always blameless in racial matters? 

  1. Birtherism
At the 2011 CPAC convention Trump revived an already discredited accusation that President Obama was not a US citizen.

"[Obama] came out of nowhere. In fact, I'll take it even further: The people who went to school with him, they never saw him. They don't know who he is. It's crazy."

Politifact rated the claim “Pants on Fire”- a complete and deliberate lie. [8]  Bill O’Reillwas skeptical that Trump even believed his own accusations. [9] 

However, the staying power of birtherism  is in that it conflates a number of popular racist folk tales- that a successful black man in America can’t be legitimate, that blacks are secretly Muslims, that illegal immigrants are taking good jobs from even the highest echelons.  The birth certificate itself was entirely beside the point.

Trump re-popularized the claim while simultaneously teasing a potential 2012 Presidential bid because it gave his candidacy a way to identify as racist, to rally racist support without having to declare any explicitly racist propaganda or explicitly racist agenda.

Phillip Klinkner’s 2014 report to Western Political Science Assoc found that the trait that advocates for birtherism most closely corresponded to was a sense of racial resentment:

“The table indicates that birtherism is nonexistent among those in the six lowest six categories of racial resentment. After that, however, birtherism rises rapidly with increasingly levels of racial resentment. In fact, half of all birthers are located in the three highest categories of racial resentment, compared to only 22 percent of the total population.”

“If simple ignorance were the primary reason for birtherism, levels of birtherism should not have increased again after the release of President Obama’s birth certificate. Instead, they rose and as mentioned previously, they are as high as ever....In particular, when public figures made statements questioning President Obama’s birth certificate, levels of birtherism increased.” [10]

That is, even after the underlying accusation was disproved, the most racist elements continued to prefer the false information from public figures like Trump because birther now meant the same thing as racist.

  1. The Wall
During Trump’s 2015 Presidential announcement speech, he promised to construct a wall between the US and Mexico:

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” [11]

because

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Four years later, Trump has sabotaged summits with Mexican President Pena Nieto, forced the longest government shutdown in US history and declared a national emergency to pull funding from the Dept. of Defense budget but has failed to actually begin any kind of new barrier construction along the southern border. [12]

Simply building the wall or giving up on the project would either way cause the emblem of wall building  to recede from the polarizing conversation within the electorate- and for Trump, that polarization along racial fault lines is the primary goal, not any actual construction.  As Mimi Yang stated in The Trump Wall: a Cultural Wall and a Cultural War:

The essentialists inside the wall consider themselves defenders of American values and economic opportunities. The pluralists on the other side of the wall are enemies who disrupt American way of life and invaders who take away American jobs, and make the country “un-American,” euphoric term of “un-white.” The Trump Wall will be built on the US-Mexico border, a battleground where a black-and-white scheme places everyone in an “us-or-them” position. Such a dichotomous scheme energizes the populist supporters of the Trump Wall and boxes more than half of the population into the category of the less American or simply the un-American. “Americans” and “un-Americans” confront each other as adversaries.” [13]

During his February State of the Union address Trump claimed:

The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,” Trump said last Tuesday during his annual address. “Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.” [14]

Politifact found Trump’s claim entirely false:

Crime data shows that El Paso has not been one of the most dangerous cities in the nation.From 1985 to 2014, El Paso’s violent crime rate was significantly lower than the average for cities of comparable size.  Border authorities added fencing in the El Paso region in the late 2000s. In the immediate years before and after construction, the violent crime rate went up, contrary to Trump’s claim.” [15]

During a May 8, 2019, in Panama City Beach, Florida, Trump said

”I mean, when you have 15,000 people marching up and you have hundreds and hundreds of people and you have two or three border security... how do you stop these people? You can’t.”

At this point an audience member shouted 

“shoot them!” 

Trump responded by laughing and stating, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.” In response, the audience cheered.” [16]

Three months later, one of Trump’s “energized populists” traveled to El Paso to take arms in the battle laid out by Trump’s  rhetoric; shooting into a crowded Walmart, killing 22 and injuring another 24.  Posting just before the attack, the shooter wrote:

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion." [17]

There are many examples but our present purpose is just to establish that Trump is NOT "not racist," by any normal understanding.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/racist
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/racism
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/race
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
[5]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313321449_Older_but_not_younger_infants_associate_own-race_faces_with_happy_music_and_other-race_faces_with_sad_music
[6] http://www.rachelwu.com/Xiao_et_al-2017-Child_Development.pdf
[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#Civil_rights_activist_in_South_Africa_(1893–1914)
[8]https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/14/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-people-who-went-school-obama-nev/
[9]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-oreilly-spar-over-birther-issue/
[10]http://www.wpsanet.org/papers/docs/Birthers.pdf
[11]https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/
[12]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_wall
[13]https://csalateral.org/issue/6-2/trump-wall-cultural-war-yang/
[14]https://time.com/5522904/donald-trump-el-paso-wall/
[15]https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/feb/08/donald-trump/no-border-barrier-did-not-drive-down-crime-el-paso/
[16]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-laugh-immigrants-shot/



Round 2
Pro
#3
PRO has offered one definition to which CON objects on several grounds.
This isn't a negotiation, by accepting the debate you agree to the rules and definitions.

OBJECTION: Wrong part of speech.  The resolution claims “racist,” an adjective but PRO defines “racism”, a noun. 
OBJECTION: Semantics.  A racist is simply someone who performs racism.  *straight from google*-- racist- a person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another.
racist- prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

The only difference here is "racist" has "a person" in front of it.  Everything else is the same.

OBJECTION:  Misspelled
OBJECTION: Semantics.  This is poor conduct.

OBJECTION:  CON prefers a definition that is both more authoritative and specific to resolution than PRO’s customized definition.
OBJECTION: DOES NOT USE PROPER GRAMMAR--"the" needs to go before "resolution."  
My definition sums up all the definitions so it is simple and easy to go off of.

Is Anybody Entirely "Not Racist?"
Perhaps this makes sense.  However, the definition points out that a racist is one who thinks he is superior to another race.  So I am arguing that Trump is not an individual who thinks he is superior to the other race.  You have to proove he does think that.

Birtherism:

Politifact rated the claim “Pants on Fire”- a complete and deliberate lie.
Just an eloquant display of unbiased sources that is basically universally known as a second CDC or PEW research.

Bill O’Reillwas skeptical that Trump even believed his own accusations. [9] 
Not exactly my go to guy on political intelligence.

However, the staying power of birtherism  is in that it conflates a number of popular racist folk tales- that a successful black man in America can’t be legitimate, that blacks are secretly Muslims, that illegal immigrants are taking good jobs from even the highest echelons.  The birth certificate itself was entirely beside the point.
This is a complete opinion.  I would argue that "popular racist folk tales" are besides the point, and that the birth certificate was the point.  Either way, it doesn't get us anywhere.  Trump believed that obama's grandmother said Obama was born in Kenya.  Trump has also admitted since then that Obama was in fact born in the U.S. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjHPDzUOe2U)

I believe his birth certificate is fake, and I'm not racist.  Just because Obama is black does not make it racist.  Identity politics at its finest.

The Wall:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
--And some, I assume, are good people.
This is not racist at all.  He even says "they're not sending their best...", which implies there is great people and mexico's best, but their not sending them.

Simply building the wall or giving up on the project would either way cause the emblem of wall building  to recede from the polarizing conversation within the electorate- and for Trump, that polarization along racial fault lines is the primary goal, not any actual construction.
This is complete bogus.  Trump has tried multiple times to get 5 million dollars in boarder wall funding, he has tried to compromise, but has never gotten the votes needed.  As a result, he has declared a national emergency.  That's how much he cares about border security.  There are many legal processes he has to go through to get the money he needs, so to say he is trying would be an under statement.

The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,” Trump said last Tuesday during his annual address. “Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.” [14]
So Trump is mis-informed on statistics.  He likes to exaggerate.  Every politician lies, it's not some abnormal thing.  What he exaggerated was El Paso, in around 1993, had their highest rates of crime, and then it gradually went down.  

”I mean, when you have 15,000 people marching up and you have hundreds and hundreds of people and you have two or three border security... how do you stop these people? You can’t.”

At this point an audience member shouted 

“shoot them!” 

Trump responded by laughing and stating, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.” In response, the audience cheered.” [16]
And this is racist..how?  It seems like they were laughing and joking because after all its a Trump rally.  He was talking about how a wall would prevent people from crossing the border wall in herds.


Three months later, one of Trump’s “energized populists” traveled to El Paso to take arms in the battle laid out by Trump’s  rhetoric; shooting into a crowded Walmart, killing 22 and injuring another 24.  Posting just before the attack, the shooter wrote:

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion." [17]
So a shooting is Trump's fault?  You are blaming Trump for a mentally insane guy.  Trump does not support violence against immigrants.  In fact he spoke greatly about immigrants and loves them.  In fact, why don't we play a game called RACIST OR NOT RACIST?  I will give you a series of statement, and you determine if they are racist.

(In response to that El Paso shooting) “In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.  These sinister ideologies must be defeated.”

Trump tells a story of how blacks at his rally punched guys dressed in KKK outfits.- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOYMFkFgPzk

These next quotes are related to Charlottesville--

"Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."

“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me."  You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,”

"I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”

“Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

Not Charlottesville

(After the synagouge shooting in Pittsburg) “There must be no tolerance for anti-Semitism in America or for any form of religious or racial hatred or prejudice.” — October 27, 2018

(In SOTU adress in Feb. 2019) “I want people to come into our country, in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally...I want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally.”

(Also in SOTU) “Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways. I want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally.”


These quotes are just a portion of Trumps anti-racist rhetoric.  He also chose a black women to win 1M$ on the apprentice and blacks to his cabinet, would a racist do that?

I have proven Trump is not racist.  Ask yourself: Do you truly believe after all the great things he has done for blacks(including economy), that Trump is racist?





Con
#4
DEFINTIONS:

PRO dropped CON's three most important objections to his personalized take on defining the word "racism"
  • PRO asked CON to instigate- therefore PRO should be at liberty to define terms.
  • A proper definition ought to employ the same usage as the resolution.  We are debating whether an adjective applies to subject: why is PRO defining nouns related to the adjective rather than the adjective itself?
  • CON is citing on-point, specific definitions linked to a popular, well-edited source, Wiktionary.  PRO invented his own customized but sloppy definition. 
VOTERS must decide whose definitions are more likely to yield an objective conclusion.  We need not get into PRO's misapprehensions in semantics and grammar.

I. Is Anybody Entirely "Not Racist?"

PRO concedes the debate.  CON argued that because some racial bias is inherent to most human social interaction, nobody is entirely "not racist."  PRO agrees:

"Perhaps this makes sense."
PRO and CON agree that racial bias is inherently human. Trump is human and therefore, PRO and CON agree, racist.  CON wins this debate.

PRO argues that CON must prove that Trump thinks racist thoughts but that's an absurd standard of evaluation.  Nobody can read minds.  Nobody can prove with certainty what another person thinks.  

Consider:  Just this summer, Trump's Dept. of Justice convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment James Alex Fields Jr for committing 29 hate crimes during the Chancellorsville :Unite the Right Rally" in 2017.  Trump's Attorneys General and staff are not required to read minds in order to determine if someone is racist: Trump's Govt. convicts people of racism based on the perpetrator's words and deeds. [1]

Is PRO really arguing in good faith that Trump can convict others of racism based their on words and deeds but is himself immune from the same sort of evaluation and for him alone the standard of proof must require some supernatural performance of mind-reading magic?    

No.  We can and should judge Trump according to the content of his character- by what he says and does just like we do with any other American.

II. Birtherism

PRO argues that popular racist folks tales are beside the point but almost all scholarship on the subject says otherwise.  Hughey's article in "Qualitative Sociology," 

"First, these narratives provide a glimpse into how a specific ideal type of “hegemonic whiteness” aligns with authentic citizenship. This ideal may become reified
through narrative practices that emphasize inter-racial boundaries of whites versus potent nonwhite symbols (e.g.: Obama) and intra-racial white distinctions of proper and deficient forms of whiteness. These boundaries help to create and/or maintain white racial cohesion in two main ways:

“(1) through positioning those marked as ‘white’ as essentially different from and superior to those marked as ‘non-white’, and
(2) through marginalizing practices of ‘being white’ that fail to exemplify dominant ideals”.

Such meaning-making processes are neither abstract ideals that float above actors’ heads nor functionalist mechanisms that operate within the black box of the mind to ensure white racial cohesion.  Rather, these boundaries operate as socially shared rules that constitute a system of racial classification that help guide the pursuit of interests, the formation of identities, and the drama of interaction. The above Birther narratives indicate how moral concepts synthesize with inter- and intra-racial distinctions to mark hard work, honesty, and responsibility (and ultimately authentic citizenship) as the exclusive and essentialist domain of certain racialized
factions. These boundaries are the product of different political, cultural, and social traditions that created whiteness as an ongoing crisis. Today, whiteness qua true US citizenship is reforming and realigning—both in terms of recent legal maneuvers and the informal sense of belonging—with Nativist, xenophobic, Christian, embattled working-class, and hyper-masculine practices that stake claim to objectivity, morality, and truth. [2 [bold emphasis mine]
PRO actually writes

"Trump has also admitted since then that Obama was in fact born in the U.S.  I believe his birth certificate is fake."
PRO's own words demonstrate that PRO knows the truth ["admit" "in fact"], but maintains the falsehood as an article of "belief." 

  • CON submits PRO's own words as another example why Trump perpetrated the birther lie to begin with- the truth quickly ceased to be relevant to the claim's racist resonance.
As Fortune magazine pointed out  last month, Trump's recent "go back to your countries of origin" tweet-rants directed at 4 non-white Congresswomen in July are a renewal of the same racial dividers in time for the 2020 election.

"At the heart of Trump’s latest criticism Sunday is the same ugly nut of the birther movement: a suspicion that people of color, and especially Americans from immigrant families, are somehow less authentically American. It's a conspiracy theory that can be traced further, too, finding its roots as far back as mid-19th century nativism and the idea that immigrants—and their children—cannot have the interests of so-called "native" Americans in mind." [3]
III. The Wall

  • Pro asserts that referring to Mexico's people collectively as rapists is not inherently racist.  Mainstream political scholarship thinks otherwise:
"Consider Trump's now infamous remarks about Mexican migrants:  they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists.  In other words, they are a source of physical, moral, and sexual pollution of the radicalized body politic.  What is the solution?  Purification by... means of a 'big beautiful wall,' a protective skin that would seal off the Southern underbelly of the national body from renewed "infection." [4]
  • PRO calls CON's speculation that Trump is postponing wall construction to preserve the issue as racist iconography in 2020 "bogus."  Perhaps, but Trump just blew off yet another deadline tomorrow without explanation:
"The Department of Homeland of Security is delaying the construction of more than 40 miles of bollard wall along Arizona's southern border, according to an opposition brief filed late Tuesday by the Trump administration in a lawsuit challenging the wall.  Construction was scheduled to begin August 22, but is now slated to begin in early October or later ...Why the administration decided to wait is unclear....A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment." [5]
  • PRO fails to see how a white crowd laughing at the murder of 15,000 brown people on the border might be construed as racist.
  • PRO fails to see how a subsequent mass shooting targeting brown people on the border might be received as alarming to peace-loving people.
  • The President of the United States is the United States' first diplomat as well as the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces.  When that Commander identifies an enemy target and laughs approvingly at the suggestion of violent response then that official has extended a certain degree of tacit approval for that violent response on behalf of the US and in spite of the lack of official process.
  • Wikipedia reports that the El Paso shooter's manifesto
"promotes the white nationalist and far-right conspiracy theory of The Great Replacement."  [6]
  • The Guardian reports that "the Institute for Strategic Dialogue , a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, has found that the once-obscure ideology has moved into mainstream politics and is now referenced by figures including US president Donald Trump" who the ISD now lists as one of top ten propagators of the ideology. [7]
  • Most analysts have little trouble calling Great Replacement theory racist propaganda when it inspires the shooters at Christchurch and El Paso.  Why should the theory's most influential promulgators, such as Trump, enjoy immunity from the same accusation?
CON OBJECTS to every citation of Trump as evidence disproving Trump's racism.  The Washington Post has documented at least 10,796 false claims made by Trump during his first 869 days in office, making Trump officially the least honest politician in history. Trump is simply an entirely unreliable source regarding his own motives and ideology. [8]

Let's conclude remembering that PRO conceded that everybody is a little racist- even Trump.
  
Round 3
Pro
#5
Debating takes a lot out of me.  I just don't have the time for it right now.  I concede.
Con
#6
Thanks to Boat for the concession.

extend my arguments to R4.  Per rules, I pass on R4.

Thanks to voters for their kind consideration.

Round 4
Pro
#7
You dont have to pass round 4.  Finish it when you would like.
Con
#8
Thanks, Boat.  For those voters who typically reward concession with conduct points, pls. note that Boat wrapped this up quickly.   And thanks again to all voters.