Donald he became president. I am particularly
Donald J Trumps rhetoric on race: Non-whites as brutes.Word count : 2029 (including citations, excluding bibliography)Course : American History beginning to endDate : 24-1-2018Name : Jules de BontStudent number : 10595015After Obama became the first African American President, some people were under the naive impression that race was no longer an issue in the US. This notion was shattered by the election of Donald J. Trump, who made countless racially charged comments during his election campaign.
This continued after he became president. I am particularly interested in a specific theme that keeps reappearing in Trump’s statements, which is the rape or assault of white women by black or brown (non-white) assailants. I will argue that the statements made by Trump can be connected to a long tradition of racial discourse in which non-whites are portrayed as brutes who target white women (the black brute stereotype). I will do this by briefly summarizing the history of the portrayal of non-whites as brutes. Then I will discuss three examples of Donald Trump perpetuating this stereotype. The first is an ad he published in 1989 in the wake of the rape of Trisha Meili in New York City, where he lived at the time.
The second one is the speech he gave when he commenced his presidential campaign in 2015. The third is a speech on immigration he gave in Youngstown, Ohio when he had been president for some time. By picking statements he made over a time span of almost 30 years, first, as a citizen, then, as a presidential candidate and finally as President of the United States it will become clear that Trump has had fostered this racist ideology for a long time. Although the notion of blacks being hypersexual had always existed under white supremacists, even before slavery, it emerged in a new way around the 1900s in the South of the United States to justify the practice of lynching. The idea that blacks had uncontrollable sexual urges was partly inspired by the view of Africa as a promiscuous place. Early European colonizers interpreted, among other things, the lack of clothing and polygamy of Africans as indicators of heightened sexuality.
During the period after Reconstruction, the idea of blacks being hypersexual resurfaced in a particularly devious way. Southern racist demagogues promoted the idea that freed blacks were raping white women in large numbers to justify the practice of lynching. This was necessary because while the notion that blacks were intellectually inferior could support the argument that they were unfit for self-government it couldn’t justify the horrible practice of lynching. Lynching could only be justified by portraying blacks as wild animals with unchecked sexual urges. Consider this description of the events preceding a lynching by George T. Winston “When a knock is heard at the door, the Southern woman shudders with nameless horror.
The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal. A mad bull or a tiger could scarcely be more brutal. A whole community is frenzied with horror, with the blind and furious rage for vengeance.” Newspapers often spread false stories about black seducing or raping young white girls . The cause of these animalistic practices was the destruction of the racial hierarchy that had been in place for centuries under the slave system, according to whites supremacists. They argued that blacks had a dual nature.
On the one hand they were childlike, which required paternalistic oversight by whites, but on the other hand, they were animalistic. When they were enslaved, blacks were docile, but after the system of slavery in the South was destroyed by the Civil War and Reconstruction, blacks were freed and their animalistic nature took over. This, according to racial propagandists, caused blacks to give in to their uncontrollable sexual urge to violate white women. All of this resulted in the notion that lynchings were necessary to counter the criminal sexual urges of blacks.
