Racial Animus Quotes

In the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black office seekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors.

Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist…. He was the first Southerner to become President after the Civil War…. He loved Birth of a Nation … He was able to fire many African Americans in the government and to stop hiring them…. In terms of race, he represents the very worst in terms of qualities and prejudices.

Donald Trump is either a racist or peddling to it, and both are frankly unacceptable and make him unfit to be president of the United States.

Before Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a majority conservative party with a white nationalist fringe. Now it's a white nationalist party with a conservative fringe.

Ronald Reagan is the President who is more responsible than any for the fact that white racism is both tolerated and even fashionable again in America.

Pent-up white racism did fire Mr. Trump's candidacy, and he happily fanned the flames.

The nativism behind the push to repeal or amend the Fourteenth is ugly and obvious.

I'm not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist.

The Republican Party - that was the end of the Republican Party. What Pete Wilson did with the xenophobia and the negative attitude, all this sort of anti-crime backlash.

All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks.

To be clear, no one is saying there weren't any legitimate economic grievances in Trumpland, nor is anyone claiming that the economy played no role whatsoever. The point, however, is that it wasn't the major motivating factor for most Trump voters - or, at least, that's what we learn when we bother to study those voters. Race trumped economics.

When you have somebody like a Donald Trump - he made no bones about trying to disprove Barack Obama's Americanism in trying to make him out to be some foreigner that was born in Kenya. I thought that to be very racist.

White people who voted for Trump decided to invest in a president who underwrites white supremacy in the guise of populism.

Yup, the whole birther movement was racist.

In a way, you might say that David Duke is the son of Willie Horton. Duke is more overt, of course, but he's really just pushing the same buttons and sending the same coded messages that the Horton ads did so effectively for the Bush campaign last year.

The Tea Party was regularly smeared in media as a violent, bigoted, 'astroturf' movement hellbent on opposing the first black president because of his skin color rather than his big-government policies. These classifications were made without evidence, and there were many more.

Trump's racism has clearly driven his policy decisions during his first year in office - from his Muslim ban and his despicable treatment of DREAMers to his ruthless ramp-up of immigration raids and the callous termination of protections for Haitians and Salvadorans who fled natural disaster and violence.

Let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.

You had eight years before President Trump, a situation where the opposition party basically ran in opposition to the president on a platform of thinly based racism. That doesn't mean that the politicians themselves were outright racist, but when charges of birtherism came up, no one repudiated it.

American history has always had elements of what we now think of as Trumpism - Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Father Coughlin. It's not as if these things haven't always existed, and they were powerful. The big difference is Trump is president.

Donald Trump has shown us his dark heart, has shown us his racism.

Most hatred is based on fear, one way or another.

There's certainly an attitude in some measure of the conservative movement that I believe won't accept the legitimacy of any Democratic president, and I think Obama did fall victim to that - witness the 'birthers.'

Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.

There's a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that's directed at me [and] directed at the president. You know, people talking about taking their country back. There's a certain racial component to this for some people. I don't think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there's a racial animus.