Omarosa and Trump's racially coded language

For those that have been following the escapades from the Trump White House, perhaps none was more intriguing than the revelations, last week, from the president’s supreme cheerleader Omarosa Manigault Newman, who had been the primary voice for his black supporters; in fact, some wags suggested that she might be his only one.

So it was shocking that Manigault Newman kept tapes of the president using disparaging racial terminology,  and also the book that she recently authored, where she describes him as a racist and a misogynist -- and even more startling was the response from White House spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders who said that “she could not guarantee that Mr. Trump had never used the N-word” as reported in The New York Times.

What the president said, in his tweets, spoke volumes about coded language that white Americans use for black Americans -- the use of the term “that dog” both disparaged both Manigault Newman’s race and gender in a way that was “deeply racial” said Eddie S. Glaude, Jr, the chairman of the African-American studies department at Princeton University, noted the Times.

Extending the insult to a “low life” is suggestive of blacks more than whites, even though it is more than evident that whites can both be and act like low lifes. But as Glaude noted, by extension the tweet also questions her intelligence and that “it’s important to understand the legacy, the history of the attack on black intelligence as a way of justifying our dehumanization.”

In fact, the president said, Manigault Newman, was “vicious, but not smart,” to underscore his point.

For many black professional women, they are called “bossy” and “sassy” when they are only being assertive in their roles -- yet when a white woman, has done this in the past, such as Leona Helmsley, they were honored, and not vilified.

“One person who's faced these words is Michelle Obama, who has been described as uppity and sassy even as she was simply fulfilling her role as first lady.”

Trump took that even further with Manigault Newman, by calling her “deranged.”.

Coded language in American political and social life has been part of the contemporary landscape for several decades, and as an example, appeals to “law and order” were code words for keeping blacks in a subjugated state, or in their place, to use the parlance from another generation.

“Central to the discussion of racial politics is how coded language is used to talk about race, particularly by conservatives. Nonetheless, coded language has not always been the norm. Starting with the civil rights movement of the 1960s most race baiting rhetoric has moved into the realm of implicit coded language. Much of this changed in 2015 when businessman Donald Trump made the announcement that he was running for President. Suddenly it was as if the code meant less, it did not go away, but Trump and his supporters found it less necessary to use it,” noted Adam Bruno in a paper he presented at Valparaiso University in 2017.

Commenting on the race baiting of Richard Nixon and Alabama Governor George Wallace,  and its catapult into American politics, he said that  in 1968, when “Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Independent George Wallace. This election featured the beginning of “law and order” rhetoric and the birth of the “southern strategy”; two major aspects of coded language that became a central part of American politics.”

Stepping ahead to “2015, a CNN segment over a word turned into an awkward, dramatic confrontation. When host Erin Burnett asked why the word "thug" isn't an acceptable way to describe predominantly black protesters and rioters in Baltimore, City Councilman Carl Stokes responded, "Come on. So calling them thugs? Just call them ni**ers."

Burnett, who is white, didn't seem to understand the history that made the word offensive to black Americans. Stokes, who is black, reacted to Burnett's comments with a blunt description of how many black people interpret "thug" when it's lodged against them,” said Vox in 2016.

In its starkest terms, "Current racial code operates by appealing to deep-seated stereotypes of groups that are perceived as threatening. But they differ from naked racial terms in that they don't emphasize biology — so it's not references to brown skin or black skin, says “Ian Haney-López, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.”

With Manigault Newman, it’s clear that Trump knows the difference, for as Haney-López said: "It allows people to say, 'Hey, I'm just criticizing the behavior, not criticizing a racially defined group.”

Looking back to the 2016 presidential campaign, we have Trump In his campaign announcement speech, where he infamously said, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. ... 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."

Haney-López explained, "He's saying, 'Focus on the behavior. Focus on the fact that I'm willing to concede that some might be good people. And let me off the hook for trading in racist stereotypes, because I'm not talking in biological terms about monolithic groups. I'm not saying every Mexican is a rapist. I'm just saying a lot of them are.' That's the move."

In large cities, such as Chicago, where we reside, and in nearby cities like Detroit, we have another example: “After white flight out of cities and into suburbs in the 1950s and '60s, the American public and politicians began to associate inner-city life with race. As a result, terms like "inner city" and "urban" have been widely adopted to refer to black people — but they have also been used by prominent figures to refer to high crime and poor work ethic in a way that effectively connects crime, violence, and laziness with black Americans.”

The economic and social disinvestment in Chicago’s South and West sides, crime withstanding have contributed to an overall loss of opportunity for many long term black residents, who first moved there as part of The Great Migration, in search of freedom from the segregated Jim Crow South.

Fast forward to Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, in 2014, who said the following: “"We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with."

Who can forget Ronald Reagan invoking the “welfare queen”  in a speech, as his wife Nancy, laughed, and applauded, as he described the former, driving in her Cadillac to collect a welfare check, in a no-holds taken attack on all poor black Americans, but especially those who purportedly misused the system.

Even the fact of crime in America’s large cities takes a turn, where “The single most common response to concerns about racial disparities in police use of force and the criminal justice system is, "But what about black-on-black crime?"

The question raises the disproportionate levels of crime in black communities — particularly the thousands of homicides each year in which the offender and victim are black — to, on its face, argue that people should worry about black-on-black crime before they worry about police brutality.

But it's also playing on a racist idea: that black people are all criminals, so they deserve to be treated differently. The idea is that since crime is higher in black communities, police are justified in going into these places and essentially doing as they wish.”

Trump’s exploitation of the societal divisions that some Americans have retained, even after the social revolution of the 1960s, is more than a diversionary tactic, that some have called it. Trump has rallied a base of discontent, which has now come to the surface in an ugly and confrontational manner.

With the demonstration of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va, last year, that resulted in the death of a counter demonstrator,  the president was reluctant to assign blame to the former, and would only say that both sides were to blame; and, this year, on the anniversary of the event, he said that he condemned all forms of racism, in a nod, perhaps, to the dubious term, “reverse racism” showing how he is appealing not only to his critics, but using racial code to address his overwhelmingly white base of support.

Matters also came to a last year, when Trump fumbled to remember the name of Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in a mission in Niger, in a condolence call with his widow, Myeshia Johnson, where he amazingly said, “he knew what he was getting into,” and to make it worse, referred to Johnson, not as her husband, but “your guy,” implying that black couples don’t marry, but simply cohabitate.

Congresswoman, Frederica Wilson, called him out, on these remarks, and he sent retired Marine General, and now Chief of Staff, John Kelly, out to shield him from the subsequent media attacks. Then he uttered the, by now, infamous “empty barrel” remark about the congresswoman, that demeaned her as a black woman, in power, not talking about her racial characteristics, but her intelligence.

There seems to be a long list of strong and intelligent black women that the president seems to have a problem with, such as journalist April Ryan, Rep. Maxine Waters, former Ambassador Susan Rice, and television anchor Jemele Hill; so adding Manigault Newman to the mix is just another part of being Donald Trump.