In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Post-Racial and Post-Ethical Discourse of Donald J. Trump
  • Robert E. Terrill (bio)

In 2008, when Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States, many heralded the arrival of a post-racial era. Some were cautious, others seemed to throw caution to the wind, but there was a widespread appreciation, or anticipation, that something new was happening with regard to the role of race in U.S. politics. Daniel Schorr, for example, on National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) All Things Considered, reported that “post-racial” was “the latest buzz word in the political lexicon”; Matt Bai, in the New York Times Magazine, wondered if “black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream”; writing for Forbes, John McWhorter acknowledged that “nothing magically changed when Obama was declared president-elect” but went on to argue that “the election of Obama proved, as nothing else could have,” that racism against African Americans in the United States is no longer “a serious problem.”1

The 2016 campaign bore some similarities to the 2008 campaign. Hillary Clinton again faced a popular challenger for her party’s nomination, for example, though this time she remained the frontrunner throughout. The Republican nominee was, again, a late-middle-aged white male who proudly declared that he does not follow the party line. And race, again, played an important role. But it would have been difficult to conclude that we stood at the threshold of a post-racial utopia. The campaign season was [End Page 493] marked by a constant stream of evidence to the contrary, both in popular culture and in campaign discourse itself. To provide a full account would require a much longer essay than this one, so I will focus only on the first few weeks of March 2016, which may be representative.

The month began in the wake of the Academy Awards, which were marred by a list of nominees that, for the second year in a row, included no people of color. The same weekend as the Oscars broadcast, a Catholic bishop denounced the actions of fans at a basketball game in Merrillville, Indiana, who waved pictures of Donald Trump and chanted “Build a wall!” to taunt their Latinx opponents.2 At about the same time, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan praised Trump for allegedly refusing donations from Jewish groups. And Trump faced some backlash after he did not immediately distance himself from a statement made by David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to listeners to his radio program, that “voting against Donald Trump ... is really treason to your heritage.”3 On March 6, during a televised Democratic debate, candidate Bernie Sanders said that white people “don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto.”4 On March 9, at a Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, an African American protestor was sucker-punched by a white male Trump supporter.5 The next day, at a news conference hosted by the Minneapolis chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an African American couple voiced their exasperation at finding on their placemat at Joe’s Crab Shack a photograph of a black man being hanged, accompanied by a comic-style speech balloon containing the words: “All I said was ‘I don’t like the gumbo.”6 The March 14 issue of the New Yorker featured cover art, drawn by Chris Ware, depicting an African American crossing guard holding up a stop sign between a police car occupied by two white officers and a small group of African American children.7 On March 20, George Will appeared on Fox News Sunday to warn that the Republican Party was in danger of becoming “the party of white people.”8

In the gap between what some feel is a colorblind ideal and the clear evidence that it has not come to pass, there have arisen several different types of post-racial discourse. In this essay, I will describe three of these discourses. The first two have become relatively common, and share between...

pdf