Explicit Bias
May 29, 2018: The day Starbucks closed its stores for implicit racial bias training; Roseanne Barr made a racist tweet; ABC, in reaction, canceled her show; CNN held a live feed of a Trump rally in Nashville, with a lower-third saying they were waiting to see if he’d address Roseanne’s racism—which, of course, he didn’t, while CNN once again gave him a live TV podium; and a Southwest Airlines employee confronted a woman flying with her biracial son, asking her to prove the child was hers.
May 30, 2018: The day President Trump said nothing about racism, and instead demanded that ABC apologize about “HORRIBLE [sic] statements made and said about me.” Trump’s non-response to Barr’s racial slur echoed his two-day delay in responding to white supremacists killing a protester in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, 2017. The lack of immediate condemnation is a coded dog whistle to his followers, acknowledging and encouraging their racism and bias.
In an infamous 1981 interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained how Republicans coded racism into their campaign rhetoric:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
It’s happening again, in coded terms, in the predominant television ads for Republican House races: according to a study published in USA Today, they focus overwhelmingly on immigration. In case you have missed all the news stories and facts about how gigantic a problem immigration is, don’t worry; you haven’t. Immigration is not a gigantic problem. But it does code to the language of us-versus-them, or, more specifically, “us white people” versus “everyone else.”
Yet there’s a flip that has happened in America. Once-coded language is becoming uncoded; racist people feel there is no longer a need to code. That’s why Barr can tweet what she tweets. While implicit bias is increasingly addressed, explicit bias has been normalized. A lasting artifact of the Trump presidency—in addition to future instability and further redistribution of wealth upwards—will be that people no longer fear the social stigma of being openly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic. Prior to Trump’s candidacy, some Americans may have felt these things, but said them behind closed doors. Today, they feel safe saying them in the open.
ABC’s cancellation of the Roseanne show does nothing to change this. Her right-wing supporters have rallied to her defense, with false analogies about when Jimmy Kimmel compared Trump’s hair to an orange orangutan. Why, they demand, is it wrong to compare an African American woman to an ape, and fine to compare Trump to one? These are the people who counter “Black Lives Matter” with “white lives matter too, you know.” It’s rather impossible to explain the difference to them. Believe me, I have tried.
Despite the fleeting, toothless condemnations of racist language from a few members of the Republican party, it is quite impossible to feel that Trump supporters are anything but racist—either overtly through explicit bias, or covertly through implicit bias, although that implicit bias may be unconscious or, more accurately, just something they don’t care to confront.
The evidence is there, even if Trump supporters choose not to look at it. For the rest of us, we have to call it out loudly and repeatedly. History shows us that nationalist, nativist, racist fervor is nearly impossible to contain once it is unleashed…and if it can ever be contained, it will take the work of an entire generation.
[alert type=alert-white ]Please consider making a tax-deductible donation now so we can keep publishing strong creative voices.[/alert]
Author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Leipzig is the founder and CEO of MediaU, online career acceleration. MediaU opens the doors of access for content creation, filmmaking and television. Adam, Cultural Daily’s founder and publisher, has worked with more than 10,000 creatives in film, theatre, television, music, dance, poetry, literature, performance, photography, and design. He has been a producer, distributor or supervising executive on more than 30 films that have disrupted expectations, including A Plastic Ocean, March of the Penguins, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Dead Poets Society, Titus and A Plastic Ocean. His movies have won or been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, 11 BAFTA Awards, 2 Golden Globes, 2 Emmys, 2 Directors Guild Awards, 4 Sundance Awards and 4 Independent Spirit Awards. Adam teaches at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Adam began his career in theatre; he was the first professional dramaturg in the United States outside of New York City, and he was one of the founders of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where he produced more than 300 plays, music, dance, and other events. Adam is CEO of Entertainment Media Partners, a company that navigates creative entrepreneurs through the Hollywood system and beyond, and a keynote speaker. Adam is the former president of National Geographic Films and senior Walt Disney Studios executive. He has also served in senior capacities at CreativeFuture, a non-profit organization that advocates for the creative community. Adam is is the author of ‘Inside Track for Independent Filmmakers
’ and co-author of the all-in-one resource for college students and emerging filmmakers
'Filmmaking in Action: Your Guide to the Skills and Craft' (Macmillan). (Photo by Jordan Ancel)
Previous Article
How the Digital World Is Rejuvenating Poetry
Next Article
The Impermanence of Live Performance