While Carson was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University medical school, located in one of the nation’s poorest and most troubled big cities, he took little interest in urban issues. In his ill-fated primary campaign, he railed against “social engineering,” a swipe at efforts to open housing in mostly well-to-do, overwhelmingly white communities to minority home buyers and renters.
.. Trump’s selection of Carson echoes Ronald Reagan’s choice of Samuel Pierce as his HUD secretary. Like Trump, Reagan had lashed out against inner cities and pledged to slash social spending. Like Trump’s supporters, the majority of Reagan’s voters did not live in cities. And like Trump, he had little support among African Americans. But like Trump, Reagan wanted a black face in a high place for a little legitimacy in a post-civil-rights-movement White House. And, like Trump, Reagan had pledged to loosen housing and financial regulations.
.. HUD was an easy target for Reagan, as it is for Trump. It had been created by Lyndon B. Johnson at the peak of his Great Society to meet the huge demand for affordable housing in American cities and to grapple with the ravages of mass suburbanization, nearly complete racial segregation and capital flight from cities, all of which had been heavily bankrolled by the federal government.
.. In 1968, HUD took on the additional responsibility of “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” the gargantuan task of undoing decades of discriminatory real estate and home-lending practices.
.. None of these missions was popular: Republicans criticized HUD as a meddling “big government” agency. Southern Democrats railed against its civil rights goals. And suburban whites fiercely resisted even modest efforts to open the housing market to racial minorities.
.. the department became a bastion of crony capitalism, particularly under Republican presidents.
.. real estate speculators and politically connected developers, who sold shabby houses to desperate buyers at above-market prices, backed by inflated appraisals
.. One of Pierce’s assistant secretaries resigned when it came out that HUD staffers had helped him type and proofread his book, “Privatizing the Public Sector.”
.. Staffers directed money to Republican-connected lawyers, consulting firms and developers. One of the dozens swept up in the resulting investigations by federal prosecutors and Congress was Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort , who had successfully lobbied for about $43 million in federal subsidies for a shabby New Jersey housing complex. He received $326,000 in fees
.. Like Pierce, Carson is shaping up to be a token black Cabinet member. Trump has not appointed any other black officials so far
.. We don’t know much yet about how Carson will run HUD, but his lack of experience with urban policy, his bromides about socialist planning, his indifference to fair housing and his calls for individual boot-strapping don’t bode well for the future of metropolitan America. And in a climate of privatization and deregulation, championed by the country’s new real estate developer in chief, Carson’s inexperience could be a serious liability.
The Roots of Implicit Bias
even well-meaning people frequently harbor hidden prejudices against members of other racial groups.
.. Critics of this notion, however, protest what they see as a character smear — a suggestion that everybody, deep down, is racist. Vice President-elect Mike Pence has said that an “accusation of implicit bias” in cases where a white police officer shoots a black civilian serves to “demean law enforcement.” Writing in National Review, David French claimed that the concept of implicit bias lets people “indict entire communities as bigoted.”
.. But implicit bias is not about bigotry per se. As new research from our laboratory suggests, implicit bias is grounded in a basic human tendency to divide the social world into groups. In other words, what may appear as an example of tacit racism may actually be a manifestation of a broader propensity to think in terms of “us versus them” — a prejudice that can apply, say, to fans of a different sports team.
.. But we also found that people could overcome these biased instincts if they engaged in rational deliberation. When people had the chance to reflect on their decision, they were largely unbiased
.. We need not resign ourselves to a future of tribalism. On the contrary, our research suggests that people have the capacity to override their worst instincts
Trump Campaign: ‘Platform for White Supremacists’?
When I was growing up, white supremacist meant, first of all, those in the South who opposed equal rights for African-Americans: the right to vote, to swim in a public swimming pool, to enroll in the University of Mississippi. White supremacists may have ranged from openly terrorist to legally elected segregationists, but in terms of their beliefs, there was a very clear idea of what the term described. Internationally, apartheid rule in South Africa was a variant of white supremacy. So too was European colonialism, by then in its final throes.
.. Drum by defending him, in part by noting that the charge of “white supremacist” was in danger of becoming so broadly used as to become meaningless.
.. left-wing academia. There we encounter a definition of white supremacism, drawing on “critical race theory,” in which the term can refer to a political or socioeconomic system where white people enjoy a structural advantages over other ethnic groups. The term no longer means hatred of non-white groups or any effort to discriminate against them. Basically it has been stretched to mean that almost any institution where whites predominate—race-neutral or not—is racist.
.. It is evident in Jennifer Palmieri’s striking charge of “white supremacism”—unsupported by anything said by Donald Trump, or for that matter ever published on Breitbart, despite the tens of millions of words posted on that site.
..
The United States is entering into period of demographic transformation, where whites, politically and demographically dominant for all of the nation’s history, will become a smaller majority, and perhaps then a plurality. Whether this transformation will be assimilative or anti-white, peaceful or violent, remains to be seen. Those in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party throwing around loose charges of “white supremacism” are certainly doing nothing to make it go smoothly.
Scott
Trevor Noah: Let’s Not Be Divided. Divided People Are Easier to Rule.
my stand-up shows back home are a place where we can push away the history of apartheid’s color classifications — where black, white, colored and Indian people use laughter to deal with shared trauma and pain. In South Africa, comedy brings us together. In America, it pulls us apart.
.. but because I am neither black nor white, I was forced to live between those lines. I was forced to communicate across those lines. I was forced to learn how to approach people, and problems, with nuance. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have survived.
.. Instead of speaking in measured tones about what unites us, we are screaming at each other about what divides us — which is exactly what authoritarian figures like Mr. Trump want: Divided people are easier to rule. That was, after all, the whole point of apartheid.
.. But when our nation stood on the brink of civil war, Mr. Mandela spoke to white South Africans in a language that soothed their fears and reassured them that they would have a place in our new country. He spoke to militant black nationalists in a way that calmed their tempers but did not diminish their pride.
.. Mr. Trump’s victory has only amplified the voices of extremism. It has made their arguments more simplistic and more emotional at a time when they ought to be growing more subtle and more complex. We should give no quarter to intolerance and injustice in this world, but we can be steadfast on the subject of Mr. Trump’s unfitness for office while still reaching out to reason with his supporters.
.. We can be unwavering in our commitment to racial equality while still breaking bread with the same racist people who’ve oppressed us.