You Are Still Crying Wolf

How seriously are we meant to take an article on Trumpist racism that includes:

"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.

It's not just that Alexander chooses as the first words following Trump's most famous racist quote "note how totally non-racist this statement is", but also the degree to which his logic insults the reader's intelligence. Mexicans "include some of the best people" (note that Trump didn't say that --- he said that their best people don't come here), just not the ones who come here illegally (note that Trump didn't say that --- he's talking about all Mexican immigrants). Alexander's own paragraph isn't even coherent on this point!

I also disagree with that section but why do you feel it affects the article as a whole? For that matter, I disagree that the article is about "trumpist racism"; that's just a symptom of what it talks about.

The whole article is like this. It's just a sequence of showily contrarian takes that fall apart when you read them closely. The author is counting on you not doing that, just like Steve Bannon is counting on Americans to just take his word for it when he says he has nothing to do with the "alt-right".

You're just nit picking on his writing at this point (the part about "best people"). Instead, if you think it doesn't hold, can you explain how Trump's quote would be categorically different than the 2 other quotes he has in that section?

I wanted to point that bit out, too. There's a stack of problems with the original statement that his comments ignore to come to out-of-the blue conclusions.

1. "Sending." This isn't Castro's boat lift. No one's sending anything. As a general rule, you have to have bigger ambitions than your options to emigrate.

2. "Their best" == you. Or perhaps he means "not even sending you".

3. Yes, the immigrants are poor and poverty is associated with crime. The other half of that is that illegal immigrants are more likely to be victims, especially since they often feel that they cannot report crimes.

4. "Some, I assume, are good people." Maybe. Although I have never met one. Or heard of anyone who thinks they're good people. Ok, I admit, they're literally Mephistophiles incarnate.

Although the article is mostly pretty good, I have no idea how the author reached the conclusions he did here.

The author reads more into Trump's words than he actually said, but I agree with the sentiment. I never thought that what you call Trump's "most famous racist quote" was racist at all.

In immigration you never get a representative set of the source nation's citizens. Sometimes you get lucky, like the US around WW2 and you get mostly the intellectuals and people who are well of. It's no secret that Syrian refugees in Europe are disproportionately physically able males. And sometimes people look back at some immigrant influx and decide to make a movie called Scarface.

Shutting any discussion of that topic down as "racist" speaks not well of America.

That seems like a super weird comparison? There's some odd local conclusions being drawn/methodology being used but it doesn't seem to me to be the point of the article. Mostly what it gives is a run down of how else you can perceive these things about Trump.

What the author seems to be concerned with is: How does a guy that is blatantly evil in many ways in the eyes of so many people actually get a large percent of the vote? How did we get there?

It's making a pretty solid case that there is a lot of either baseless or unnecessary attacks against Trump's character which dilute the actual issues. Or maybe I'm extrapolating from what I believe is already the case, but it does give some other perspectives.

It doesn't matter that these perspectives "fall apart", the author isn't actually defending Trump. When you talk about perspective, it could be written by a bowl of soup and still be valid.

"Picking on his writing"? Look at the article we're talking about. It's the rhetorical equivalent of a game of Operation.

It's a super weird comparison if you grant the author's premise and don't read critically. But the author has selected a tendentious premise; there is no setting on the "charitable" knob that allows Alexander to downplay or ignore instances of overt racialist rhetoric from Trump, since the whole point of his piece is to immunize Trump from charges that he's a racialist candidate.

I mean, for fuck's sake, he tries to claim that Trump is less racist than Mitt Romney. There nobody in the world who believes that, except for Alexander's readership, who want badly to believe it.

> It's no secret that Syrian refugees in Europe are disproportionately physically able males.

What? I never heard that before, so took exactly on minute to Google "Syrian refugee demographics" and found that this myth originates with Ben Carson.

In fact about 49.5% of Syrian refugees are male, and only 21.8% of them are males ages 18-59.

https://www.factcheck.org/2015/09/stretching-facts-on-syrian...

I don't know the author but I'm sensing you do and that's causing some bias. My read of it was that the "racist" label is being applied too quickly, too liberally and too often. The question of whether Trump is racist matters less than the issues that arise when a label like that becomes a weapon.

That article just cites UNHCR data [1], which is for immigrants registered in middle east (not immigrants in Europe). That's a completely different set of refugees than those that managed to arrive in Europe.

Numbers for Europe look different. Lukily eurostat (the statistics department of the European Commission) has a great statistics tool. [2] shows that about 60% of Syrian refugees registered in Europe are male (a bit less in the last three months, more in the past). Of these males, about 50% are between 18 and 34 years old (again, it was more extreme, is becoming more normal in recent months) [3].

Compare this to the Syrian population (for example with data from the CIA world factbook), and you find that the people arriving in Europe are more likely to be male, and more likely to be young males, than the average Syrian population. It's not the gigantic trend that some people make out, but that's why I said "disproportiantely", not "exclusively". In any case it's no myth but a very real trend.

1: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php

2: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMA...

3: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMA...

Men between the ages of 18 and 34? Otherwise referred to by the Obama administration as enemy combatants[1] I'm not sure what it says about a conflict when the people most likely to be able to defend their homes leave, while their families remain. 1: http://www.juancole.com/2012/05/how-obama-changed-definition...

I'll make the observation that people have increasingly been conflating nationalism and racism. If Trump wanted to single out Hispanics or Latinos, he had the vocabulary to do so--identifying a country of origin and its people is not sufficient for racism.

Folks've gotten sloppy, and it's costing them in these sorts of arguments, you included tptacek.