When Donald Trump first announced that he was running for President, I thought it was a joke, as many others did. I laughed, and sometimes I still laugh at what a mockery he's making out of the Republican party. However, with every other Republican having dropped out of the race, it can no longer be considered funny.
Trump has single-handedly changed the entire aura of this election season, and he has defied every pattern any political scientist could think of. It's comical, in my opinion, when I hear people say I don't understand why so many people are voting for him. Ladies and gentleman, I can. I understand completely why he has gained so much momentum, because we've seen it happen previously in history.
Many people were shocked at Donald Trump and his racist remarks. How can a nominee for president say all these horrible things and still have all of this support? Because America is still racist. Point blank. Period. Black Americans have been trying to tell people how America remains unjust, but everyone (mostly white Americans) believed that we were pulling this out of thin air. Racism has been occurring institutionally and structurally since our nation began, but because slavery and Jim Crow laws have been abolished, everything is fair and equal, right? Wrong.
Donald Trump is popular because he is speaking the language that many white Americans can understand. They're awful people. The reason you're unemployed is because of them. They're taking our country away from us. We need to keep them out. This rhetoric is nothing new. If you look at the demographics of Trump supporters, the majority of them are low-income white males who feel like our country has become too much of a melting pot.
Back during the Jim Crow, the same rhetoric was being pushed. Many of the lower class white southerners who were without jobs were told that the reason that they were jobless was because of the colored people who lived down the road. Stirring up this anger caused some of those lower income individuals to form mobs and go around causing violence against innocent blacks (i.e. lynching, raping, brutal beating, etc.).
Trump has found a way to tap into that same anger, and many of these people feel as if they finally have a candidate who understands them.
It's funny that when a black American is unemployed, they're lazy and a bum, but when a white American is unemployed, it must be because people are taking something from them. That, my friends, is the definition of white privilege. And that is what Donald Trump has based his campaign around. He's tailored his message to match the core values of the entitled white Americans. This doesn't surprise me one bit.
Racism is a touchy subject, and many people in this country want to deny it still exists. Between past (nationally televised) cases of police brutality and this election season, however, it's extremely hard to deny how racist our country still is.
