If everyone in America had a bowl of Skittles and we were told that one of the orange ones would wind up being a blowhard racist sociopath trying to run for president, would we take a handful?
That’s our 2016 Presidential Election problem.
Donald Trump Jr. ruffled Twitter’s feathers when he posted an image comparing Syrian refugees to a handful of Skittles calling for an end to “the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first.”
This stems from Donald Trump’s call to temporarily ban all Muslim travel to the U.S. “until we can figure out what the hell is going on” last December.
Some conservative pundits and many voters have lauded this proposal as breaking the mold of the politically correct culture that Trump has blamed for the Orlando nightclub shooting and the rise of radical Islamic terrorism.
Let’s assume that the Republican nominee was just being politically incorrect and looking out for the best interest of America’s national security by cracking down on terrorism.
Anyone remember Dylan Roof?
He was a young man who was a white supremacist who has posed for photos waving the Confederate flag or donning a jacket with the Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa flags stitched to the torso.
Last year, he entered a historically black Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, attended a prayer meeting for an hour, and subsequently murdered nine parishioners.
After the massacre, Roof’s manifesto was leaked online, revealing his deep hatred of minorities. He also confessed to his friends that he wanted to “start a race war.”
The FBI defines domestic terrorism to contain three characteristics, with one of them being to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” Although Roof ultimately faced hate crime charges, some experts in the field call it an act of terror.
The following is an excerpt from Mic’s article “Why Wasn’t Dylann Roof One of Dozens Charged With Terrorism in 2015?”
Gary LaFree is the director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, and he leads a network that keeps a database of more than 140,000 acts of terror committed around the world since 1970. Roof fits all the criteria, LaFree told Mic. "We haven't released the data for 2015, but [Roof] will definitely be on it," he said.
Regardless of whether people want to call Roof a terrorist or not, he clearly intended to murder African-Americans at a black church to advance his white supremacist agenda, intimidate a civilian population, and bait people into engaging in a race war.
In essence, he committed an act of violence in order to draw attention to an extremist ideology—unlike the radical Islamic terrorists that the Donald constantly frets about and fulminates against.
If this isn’t about racism, then the only logical policy to enact is to also ban white people from coming into America, since Roof only proves we can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones. Or maybe we should bring back waterboarding and “much worse” to fight domestic terrorism caused by white Americans. Since Charleston was attacked, the only appropriate military response is to “bomb the shit out of” South Carolina’s largest city.
If we had a bowl of white men and we were told that some of them would be responsible for 64 percent of mass shootings in the U.S. since 1982, would we take a handful?
Unless Americans are prepared to apply this Muslim ban to everyone, then Donald Trump Jr.’s latest Tweet is just another display of bigotry under the guise of sticking it to political correctness.
Otherwise, making a sweeping generalization of an entire race based on the actions of a small group of people isn’t keeping it real; it isn’t politically incorrect; it isn’t brash, or bold, or unfiltered—it’s racism.
