Is Trump Racist?

Shock! Horror! Have you heard the latest? Trump is a racist! 

Much of the media is now accusing Trump of being a racist. We cannot look into the mind of Trump to determine whether of not he is but we can certainly accuse him of exercising racist political policies and of appealing to the racism of others so to garner support for himself. 

Not for Trump and his white nationalist base the crudeness of the ‘nigger hater’. They deny they are racially prejudiced, yet go to some length to blame minorities for almost every social evil under the sun such as murder, rape, prostitution and vice, drug pushing, robbery, bad housing and low wages. The “Love it or Leave it” slogan of Trump means forced deportations by ICE and soon will also lead to “voluntary” repatriations which the “respectable” racists will begin to advocate.

White nationalists and racists aren’t born that way, so their beliefs must come from how they interpret the world around them. Hatred of blacks and belief in white supremacy is built into American culture and the persistence of this racism is the legacy of slavery. Why does racism exist? Partly, it is a relic of the ideology justifying the enslavement of one group of people by another that should have ended with the emancipation. 

We urge white workers to cast off the outworn ideas which only cause suffering for their fellow workers. Racial antagonism is bound up with the general conditions of capitalism. Like the other evils of capitalism it will only disappear when capitalism itself has been replaced by a social system in which all human beings will be able to move freely over the earth and live in harmony because their interests will be identical.

The World Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS), basing its principles on the fact that workers the world over have a common interest, is opposed to all racialism and to all nationalism. We are opposed to all legislation to prevent the free movement of workers, whether in search of jobs or fleeing from oppression. The WSPUS case on race is to treat human beings as individuals and work for a society where the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need” prevails. It emphasises that in modern capitalism the alternatives really are sanity or savagery, harmony or hatred

We members of the WSPUS await the time when the hate and fanatic prejudices of the rub which rub against the humanist sensitivities of reasonable minded people like salt in an open wound, and will be swept aside by brave calls for one world, one people, one mutual interest. 

The WSPUS stands for a system of society based upon the principle of each individual having access to what they need, as a pre-condition of social activity. That is, securing for each human being the clothes, food and housing they need, as well as the cultural and social goods of life, should be the first priority of any sane society. Of course, each person getting what they need means that different people will get different things. People are, of course, born with different needs, so it is not a question of everybody getting the same.

 What members of the WSPUS propose is a different world. Wherein everyone could have more than enough of the things they require, so they need no longer fear to lose it; where meeting and exploring our different needs becomes a past-time and an end in itself; where without conflicts of power and dominance – because we co-operate voluntarily and democratically – there is no limitation set on, nor distortion of, our endeavour to understand what it means to be a part of the human race. In short, socialism will allow us to be treated as unique individuals, rather than as a bureaucratically allocated “race” on a census form. Socialism will be co-operative with no economic reason for racial or other antagonisms. There will only be the common task of using the natural resources of the world for the benefit of those who live on it.

We do not put forward our diagnosis of society merely because it is right, but because in the conclusions we draw from it are the humanitarian assumptions of remedying the ills of extant society. We are keenly sensitive to social suffering, but we refuse in lieu of our own remedy to accept what we hold to be harmful soporifics based on a faulty diagnosis. To act other than we do would be to impugn our own humanitarian aims and falsify the reason for our existence. To the ideals of other parties we offer the ideal of the universal brotherhood of mankind. Others have paid lip service to this ideal. We have acted upon it and not to act on what you believe is not really to believe it at all. 

The WSPUS is advocating that the only solution that will enable people of different “ethnicities” to live in peace is socialism. And capitalism should be eradicated without further delay to enable us to enjoy the beautiful things of the world without fear. American novelist Alice Walker said “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” The World Socialist Party agrees with this and when a united working class recognise their own immense potential power they can transform society through conscious unity by abolishing capitalism.