Hej Hedda!
Did you get a copy of the book on active learning that I left in your
postfack?
Herewith a clear voice from a Latino politician.
Warm greetings from Carolina Rediviva
Azril
____Why Is It Still Controversial to Call Trump a Racist?Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez told Anderson Cooper that there’s “no question” where Trump
stands; Cooper appeared confused
[image: Go to the profile of Rolling Stone]
<https://medium.com/@RollingStone?source=post_header_lockup>
Rolling Stone <https://medium.com/@RollingStone>Follow
Jan 7
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 60 Minutes. Photo: CBS

*By Ryan Bort*

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/alexandria-ocasio-cortez/> (D-NY) took a
break from clapping back against conservatives on Twitter
<https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ocasio-cortez-fires-back-775459/>to
sit down for a *60 Minutes* interview with Anderson Cooper
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/anderson-cooper/>. The freshman
congresswoman’s appearance on America’s highest-rated news program, which
aired Sunday night, was the first extra-Internet opportunity for
Ocasio-Cortez to broadcast some of her policy beliefs to a national
audience. As was revealed in a teaser clip posted Friday, these include a
70 percent marginal tax rate on the wealthy, which was bandied about online
throughout the weekend. But for all of her talk about tax rates, universal
healthcare and a Green New Deal to combat climate change, Ocasio-Cortez has
mostly abstained from taking on the president directly. When Cooper asked
her why, she explained that she treats Trump as more of a “symptom of a
problem.” Part of this problem, she went on, is racism in America. Cooper
then asked her to state the obvious.

“The president certainly didn’t invent racism,” said Ocasio-Cortez, “but
he’s certainly given a voice to it, and expanded it, and created a platform
for those things.”

“Do you believe President Trump is a racist?”

Ocasio-Cortez could hardly believe the question. “Yeah,” she said, shaking
her head. “No question.”

“How can you say that?” asked Cooper.

Cooper seemed to be asking Ocasio-Cortez to elaborate not so much because
he doesn’t believe it to be true, but as a way to allow the new Democratic
star to flesh out the claim to Americans who may still be grappling with
the idea. “When you look at the words that he uses, which are historic dog
whistles of white supremacy, when you look at how he reacted to the
Charlottesville incident, where neo-Nazis murdered a woman, versus how he
manufactures crises, like immigrants seeking legal refuge on our borders —
it’s night and day,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

As a real estate developer, Trump worked to keep black people out of his
properties
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html>.
He maintained that the Central Park Five — five minority teenagers
convicted for a 1989 rape they didn’t commit — were guilty
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/opinion/why-trump-doubled-down-on-the-central-park-five.html>
despite
DNA evidence exonerating them. He pushed a conspiracy theory that President
Obama was born in Africa. Several people associated with *The Apprentice* have
claimed Trump made racial slurs while filming the show
<https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-omarosa-710286/>,
and in 2018 former contestant Omarosa Manigault-Newman released a tape of
campaign aides seemingly discussing how to handle a recording of their boss
saying the n-word, should it be made public. His career in politics has
been based almost entirely on the idea that Muslims are terrorists and
Hispanic people are criminals threatening to “infest” the United States.
The list goes on and on, and on.
<https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-revoke-passports-717750/>

And yet, Ocasio-Cortez’s matter-of-fact contention that Trump is a racist
has been treated as if it was a bold pronouncement. “She went there,”
tweeted Jon Cooper, chairman of the Democratic Coalition. Most of the
headlines responding to the interview have keyed on her calling the
president a racist rather than what she laid out regarding the Green New
Deal or her proposed tax rate. Right-wing media has been crying foul and
tweeting pictures of the president taking selfies with black people
<https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1082069525649149953> to show he
isn’t repulsed by them. In a matter of hours, the media is probably going
to start asking Ocasio-Cortez’s colleagues in Congress to respond, just as
they did last week when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said Trump is a
“motherfucker”
<https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tlaib-trump-motherfucker-774901/>
Congress
will impeach.

Regardless of Trump’s record, the idea of the president being racist is
still an incendiary concept for many Americans. Since the civil rights
movement, the United States has been in denial of its foundational racism. To
admit that the person American chose to represent the nation is a capital-R
racist would constitute a betrayal of American exceptionalism. As long as
there is even a sliver of plausible deniability that Trump is a white
supremacist, the mainstream is going to find any way it can to live inside
of it, lest it admit something deeply uncomfortable. The compulsion to keep
playing dumb is why Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez to elaborate on her response
to a question he shouldn’t have even had to ask in the first place. It
shouldn’t take a recording of Trump saying the n-word for America to accept
that he’s racist.

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