Front Burner - Donald Trump, and the debate over the term “racist”

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

At a rally on Wednesday night, supporters of Donald Trump broke out in a chorus of "send her back!" chants, targeted toward Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born congresswoman from Minnesota. The chant came just days after the U.S. president took to Twitter, to attack four congresswomen of colour, suggesting they "go back and help fix the broken and crime-infested places from which they came." All of this has set off a debate in the media, on how to cover Trump and racism. On today's Front Burner, we talk to Adam Serwer, staff writer with The Atlantic, about journalistic objectivity, Trump, the media and the term "racist."

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. In the fall of 1998, an elderly woman known as the Cat Lady went missing. In the fall of 1998, an elderly woman known as the Cat Lady went missing. She had a very distinctive silhouette and very recognizable when you'd see her walking into town. A handkerchief on her hair, long overcoat, like somebody that lived on the street.

All police could find were her 30 cats shot dead. I always knew something had happened to her. To just vanish like that. Uncover the Cat Lady case from CBC Podcasts is available now. Hi, I'm Michelle Shepard, filling in for Jamie Poisson. Send her back! Send her back! Send her back! That's Wednesday night in North Carolina. A Trump rally exploding in chant, Send her back.

Her is Ilhan Omar, one of four women of color the U.S. president singled out in a tweet earlier this week. You know the tweet. The one that read they should, quote, go back to help fix the broken and crime-infested places from which they came. Today, a discussion with The Atlantic's Adam Serwer, one of America's leading political columnists. We talk about race, Donald Trump, and how the media uses the term racist. and how the media uses the term racist. Adam, I know you've been busy writing about this and covering the issue and the latest. I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

Well, thank you so much for having me. Let's start with what happened Wednesday night at the rally. What message do you think Donald Trump was hoping to send by leading a rally where supporters are chanting, send her back? Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screeds. Well, the president has already sort of attempted to distance himself from the chant. So you'll tell your supporters never to send her back? Well, I would say that. I was not happy with it. I disagree with it.

But again, I didn't say that. They did. I think that's a statement about how uncompromisingly ugly it was. But the truth is that the chant was simply something that the president himself had said earlier this week, which is, you know, he targeted for women of color in Congress who are all American citizens and told them that they needed to go back where they came from. Trump posted this message on Twitter. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came? If you're not happy here, you can leave.

And that's what I say all the time. That's what I said in a tweet, which I guess some people think is controversial. A lot of people love it, by the way. And this is such a textbook example of a racist remark that it is literally listed in the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission's standards for what constitutes a form of racial discrimination. So it's actually quite shocking to see an American president not only expressing these sentiments, but essentially encouraging a mob to repeat them. And I'm not sure that we've ever seen anything quite like that before. And just to remind people that the tweet was directed at the what's known as the squad and these

four leaders Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. We don't leave the things that we love. This is the agenda of white nationalists. This is simply a disruption and a distraction. I urge House leadership, many of my colleagues, to take action to impeach this lawless president today. So you weren't surprised, basically, with that this rally came as the fallout to that? I think that I was shocked, but I was not surprised. I mean, look, I don't want to understate the history of white supremacy in America. But I do think that we've never been in a situation where an American president has singled out a member of Congress, a refugee, a religious minority, a woman of color and said that they should essentially go back to Africa, which is, you know, she is a small American refugee. The message that he's sending is not for me, it's to every single person who shares an identity with me.

He's telling them that this is not their country. I mean, that's honestly shocking. Again, it's not surprising given where Donald Trump's presidential campaign began and what he has been like as a president in the White House. Look at my African-American over here. Well, you shouldn't be playing. You shouldn't be there. Maybe you shouldn't be in the country. You have to stand proudly for the national anthem. According to news reports, Trump described Haitian immigrants as having AIDS and said that if the U.S. accepted Nigerian immigrants, they wouldn't, quote, go back to their huts.

If the U.S. accepted Nigerian immigrants, they wouldn't, quote, go back to their huts. President Trump allegedly asking, why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? But I think it is shocking because it's probably the first time we've ever seen an American president do something like this. And you, as you said, it's literally textbook racist. And yet you've seen Trump himself and many of his supporters this week say they don't consider it racist. And yet you've seen Trump himself and many of his supporters this week say they don't consider it racist. It doesn't concern you that many people saw that tweet as racist and that white nationalist groups are finding common cause with you on that point. It doesn't concern me because many people agree with me. And all I'm saying, they want

to leave, they can leave now Now, it doesn't say leave forever. Well, look, this is a kind of cognitive dissonance that is very native to the United States. This is a country, after all, that was founded on the idea that all men are created equal, but that sanctioned the existence of property and man as part of its founding documents. So there's always a way in which the people who are the sort of standard bearers of white supremacy in American history have said, you know, in fact, that's not what we are. When you look back to the Confederacy, the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens gave a very famous speech on the eve of

the Civil War saying that the cornerstone of the Confederacy was that the African is not equal to the white man, and that slavery is the fundamental institution of the Confederacy. And then after the war, when he's sitting in a cell in Massachusetts, he says, actually, that, you know, that speech was incorrectly reported. It's fake news. I never said that I don't have any problem with black people at all. And we were fighting for freedom, not slavery. And then when you go to, you know, the end of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 60s, you have white southerners who are framing their battle against integration as a fight against an overreaching, even fascist federal government. More than 6,000 flock to the Rump Convention to join in the protest against the president's civil rights program. conventions to join in the protest against the president's civil rights program.

Thirteen southern states are represented in the uproarious session which precedes the nomination of Governors Thurmond of South Carolina. These uncalled for and these damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called civil rights. So there's a way in which this inversion of history, where the people who are trying to uphold the exclusion of people of color from the polity always frame their actions as reacting to aggression. In a country where the founding creed is that all are created equal, to justify bigotry in a country whose founding principle is this, you have to be able to somehow tell yourself that that's not what you're doing. The nays are 240. The nays are 187. Members in the House of Representatives have just voted in favor of a resolution condemning comments from President Donald Trump.

The resolution received the votes of just four Republican members of Congress. Just a short time ago, Senator Lindsey Graham spoke. I don't think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back. If you're a racist, you want everybody from Somalia to go back because they're black or they're Muslim. That's not what this is about to me. Let's pivot the discussion a little bit towards how the story has actually been covered. And journalism is often said to be perhaps poorly written, but the first draft of history. And it often says more about the society we're living in broadly, how it's reported.

What's your take generally on how the mainstream media characterized his tweets, and then also the rally? Well, so I think, you know, there's a big debate going on right now within the American media about whether to characterize the president's remarks, you know, go back to where you came from, as racist. And I'll just give you, we pulled, we pulled just a few phrases, I'll just give you a couple examples of what we've seen from both this week, but also in the last couple of years. Racially tinged, racially charged, racial flare up, racial overtones, racial stumbles, racially insensitive and racially infused politics. Expanding menu of euphemisms that you've just listed is sort of a testament to the fact that we are really talking about racism, but we are afraid to say it because the nature of controversy in American media and the conventions of objective press coverage dictate that if a powerful person contests something that may seem obvious, you can no longer state as fact, you have to say he said, she said. And the problem with this is that we all actually know what's going on here. The divide is not over whether Trump is being racist. It's about whether his prejudice is justified. And so

the press, in fact, makes judgment calls about labeling certain things all the time, and they don't consider it editorializing. But it's editorializing here because there is a controversy between Trump supporters and Trump opponents about whether what Trump is doing is good. And to label it racist would mean to say that it's bad in simple terms, which is why reporters are apprehensive about doing it. But in a fundamental way, there is why reporters are apprehensive about doing it. But in a fundamental way, there is actually no disagreement between Trump supporters, between Trump opponents,

or even the media about what exactly is going on here. It's just about how to describe it. There was a similar debate, you know, more than 10 years ago about whether the New York Times should refer to waterboarding as a torture technique. In fact, it had previously referred to waterboarding as a torture technique. American law referred to waterboarding as torture. But the moment that the Bush administration contested the idea that waterboarding was torture, the New York Times, consistent with the conventions of objective press coverage in the United States, had to pull back and say what some people call torture. And I think that that is, had to pull back and say what some people call torture. And I think that that is, you know,

a reflection of the realities of American journalism, which is that if you want to be viable as a money making journalistic institution, sometimes you have to avoid antagonizing powerful people. And we don't really put it that way, because it's a little embarrassing, right? Because what you're saying is the truth actually becomes subordinated to, you know, the realities of politics. And when people, when reporters say, well, we don't want to make a value judgment, we're not going to come down on a side here. You are, in fact, assisting those who are trying to say something is something it's not. This is a bit of a tangent, but on language, when you mentioned waterboarding, it reminded me of when I used to report in Guantanamo and we'd have tours and we would be led by the public relations commander. And they would say that we would have to call it a detention facility because it wasn't a prison and that interrogations were actually referred

to as reservations. And, you know, a lot of the media actually covered it as that. And there were a few of us that pushed back because it was just such, just cloaking the reality of what was happening. I also went to Guantanamo. And I think that that was sort of the euphemisms of the Bush era war on terrorism were sort of excellent journalistic training for not simply conceding issues of language to power. And I think that for the rest of the political press, didn't necessarily learn that lesson because they weren't confronted with it as directly.

Language does evolve in the way that we use it and we cover it. And what was really interesting this week is we talked about the euphemisms that were used early on. Racially charged language. I want to read this to you. Making such provocative and racially charged comments. Targeting elected women of color in a racially charged tirade. But actually within the span of the week, we saw something change from the time when Trump sent his original tweet, how it was being described, to later in the week where CNN, NPR, Washington Post all of a sudden stopped using the euphemisms and started calling the comments racist. Doubling down on racist tweets. Speaking out against President Trump's racist tweets.

Hiding high now over how the whole saga over his racist tweets is playing out. Why do you think that happened? And why do you think it happened so quickly? Well, I think a couple things happened. One is that the euphemisms were so ridiculous as applied to something as baldly racist as go back, that news outlets were getting justifiably pilloried for attempting to figure out ways around describing the obvious, because it seems contrary to the mission of journalism, which is to give people the facts, to avoid the facts when they are clear and obvious because someone might get mad at you. And I think both that and the fact that there was some statements from some Republican members of Congress about the fact that this was a racist statement that gave objective journalists cover to describe these remarks for what they really were.

And so they would start with sort of having racist in quotes, and then eventually the quotes would come out of the headline. You know, again, this is not necessarily about truth, but controversy. Once there is a great enough consensus to call something by a particular term, then journalists feel comfortable doing it. It's completely understandable as a journalistic convention because journalists want to reach diverse audiences who do not agree with each other on everything. But in this case, it shows an obvious way for power to manipulate the process of delivering truth to readers and audiences. to manipulate the process of delivering truth to readers and audiences. And why do you think, Adam, that this tweet, these comments were so substantially different from other similar comments that we've seen with Trump as president or even before?

So I think, you know, when you go back to Donald Trump's original announcement of his candidacy when he's talking about illegal immigration from Mexico. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. I think the veil that this was actually about illegal immigration and not about people in the United States who are not white is sort of ripped off by this go back remark. Because, you know, in some cases, the women that he told to, quote unquote, go back, their families have been here longer than Donald Trump's have.

And they are all American citizens. So at that point, it becomes clear that the president's remark is not about illegal immigration. It's not about people breaking the law. It is about the citizenship of people of color in the United States being conditional in a way that the citizenship of white people is not. And I think that crosses a clear line beyond what the average American is willing to accept. And I think for that reason, the response was stronger than it has been in the past. Well, and as we've been talking about, this was a fairly blatant example. But there are others, whether it be Trump or someone else, who it's a little more in the gray area.

And before coming on, we asked those at CBC who look at our journalistic standards how we should deal with this here and when it comes to specifically labeling something as racist. I'm just going to read you what they said. Our guidelines to CBC journalists is that it's not our role to make the decisions on whether something is racist or not. We report objectively on what it is. We reflect and characterize the views of people who are weighing in on the particular issue.

We use language to describe and attribute and keep our coverage framed against the validity of the allegations. We take care to examine each case individually as context is important and assess it against the debate it has provoked. In the case of the Trump tweets, we have reported what he said and reflected the views and outrage of those who feel what he has said is racist. And even while his comments have been widely condemned as racist and dangerous, the comments by Trump were swiftly condemned for being racist. What are your thoughts on this response? I mean, I think this is a

standard approach. Again, I understand why news outlets do this. They want to be able to inform people who like Trump, and they feel like they can't do that if they alienate them. That point of view, what is contained in the CBC's guidelines, was shared, I think, this week by various other news outlets. And I saw you on Twitter commenting on the NPR's Vice President for Newsroom Training and diversity, Keith Woods' post. And he wrote that he thinks journalists should not be in the business of moral labeling. I watch the news and listen to the news and I read the Twitterverse every day.

I think that there are some imbecilic things that are tweeted out. I think there are some pathetic things that are tweeted out. I think there are some despicable things that are tweeted out. I think there are some pathetic things that are tweeted out. I think there are some despicable things that are tweeted out. Why shouldn't I be able to say those things, given the standard? Yeah, I think it's, look, I mean, I think Mr. Woods, you know, he acknowledged that what we consider objective journalism in the United States has actually been shaped by economic and racial perspectives. I mean, the exclusion of black reporters from the mainstream press for a long time slanted coverage in a particular direction. And I think, you know, he's honest about that. But he also says

that this is still the best, the best way to handle it is not to make these value judgments. The problem with that approach that I see is his suggested workaround in the piece was that Trump's remarks echo that of of avowed racists throughout history. And while that is true, it is still kind of a value judgment and no small. But but what's distinct about it is that these people, you know, and again, as I mentioned with the vice president of the Confederacy earlier, some of these people would actually contest that they are self-avowed racist, but they are dead. So there is no way to anger them or any constituencies that they might represent because they no longer exist. The argument that Mr. Woods is making really sort of underscores the point that I am making, which is that this is not about facts. It is about public consensus and the fact that journalistic objectivity is really a moving target where you have to sort of figure out a way to balance yourself in between two competing perspectives and is not necessarily about the facts as they exist. Well, and I guess it becomes

even more tricky when you consider that what everyone interprets as racism is going to be completely different depending on who you are and who is it that gets to make that call. Right. I mean, and look, journalists make value judgments all the time. It is only when those judgments are contested by one faction or another that they become controversial and we have to become extremely careful about it. You know, so again, this is difficult. It's a tough call. It's, I understand why these journalistic traditions exist. I do not fault mainstream media organizations for seeking to adhere to them, but I am saying that it does not necessarily serve the facts as much as it serves the market interests of these outlets. statistics within newsrooms, the question of diversity is far from being resolved. And certain outlets are much better with it than others. And overall, newsrooms remain places that tend to lack diversity in terms of both class and race. And I just want to end with talking again about the rally.

It was horrible to watch. I mean, it was really, really hard to watch that. And it felt like something that America has not seen in a long time or maybe ever. Do you agree with that? And where do you think this is heading? I couldn't tell you where this is heading. I do think the president's use of his moral authority in that way is unprecedented. But I honestly don't know where we go from here.

The only thing I can say is that how we respond to this is going to define us as a country for a very long time. Adam, I really appreciate you being here. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. We mentioned earlier that Trump tried to distance himself from the Send Her Back chant at his rally. Well, in the Oval Office on Thursday, he also said this. Why did you stop them? Why did you ask them to stop saying that? Well, number one, I think I did. I started speaking very quickly. He did not quickly shut it down. Have a listen.

Send her back! Send her back! And she talked about the evil Israel. That's all for this week. And I have to say, I've really enjoyed being your guest host. And I'm very impressed with this team here, those who do the heavy lifting. They are Matt Amma, Chris Berube, Imogen Burchard, Elaine Chow, Levi Garber, Shannon Higgins, and Ashley Mack. Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design. Our music is by Joseph Chavison of Boombox Sound.

The executive producer of Frontburner is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Michelle Shepard. Thanks for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back.

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