The Return of Racial Amnesia
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By John Blake and Tawanda Scott Sambou,
After President-elect Donald Trump’s recent victory, some of his supporters celebrated by flying Confederate battle flags from pickup trucks and waving them at rallies.
But Trump’s victory may mark the resurgence of the Old South in another more sinister way: The return of “racial amnesia.”
That’s what some historians are saying as they watch a familiar storyline emerge. Trump’s triumph is now being roundly described as a revolt by white working-class voters; racism, sexism and religious bigotry had little, if anything, to do with it.
People making this argument are following a script first honed by another group of Americans who made history disappear. After the Civil War, “Lost Cause” propagandists from the Confederacy argued the war wasn’t fought over slavery — it was a constitutional clash over state’s rights, they said; hatred toward blacks had nothing to do with it.
It was an audacious historical cover-up — to convince millions of Americans that what they’d just seen and heard hadn’t really happened. It worked then, and some historians say it could work again with Trump.
“It’s already happening again,” says Brooks D. Simpson, a leading Civil War historian who teaches at Arizona State University. “A lot of people are saying we’re going to have to unite behind the new guy and forget what he had to say. People who feel that they are part of those populations targeted by Trump are going to be told by whites to get over it.”
There are some who say people like Simpson are sticking to another familiar script: Blame everything on racism and oppressive white men.
Their counterargument: If America is so racist, why did legions of whites who once voted for President Barack Obama vote for Trump?
Trump won not because of race, but because he paid attention to the economic anxieties of Rust Belt Americans, says Matt Vespa, the associate editor at conservative website Townhall.com.
How white America became good at forgetting
At first glance, comparing some Trump supporters to ex-Confederates may seem absurd, even insulting. But historians say both groups developed an uncanny ability to obscure the role race played in transformative events and to persuade millions of Americans to go along with the charade.
You don’t have to pick on the South, though, to spot racial amnesia. Racism is embedded in the daily lives of ordinary Americans in ways that many forget.
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