A fascinating new report has revealed some important information of which you may not be aware: If you touch a hot stove, you might get burned. Water is wet, fire is hot, and most Americans believe race relations in our country got worse after Donald Trump was elected.
OK, so maybe the latest national survey from the Pew Research Center didn’t tell us all the obvious shit I put in my lede (the first paragraph of a story, for the nonjournalists), but it did reveal the obvious: 60 percent of Americans believe that Trump’s election has led to worse race relations in the U.S. No. Fucking. Shit.
If you needed a funded survey to tell you that race relations in the U.S. got worse once Trump was elected, I want to ask where you’ve been for the last 12 months. You clearly have not been reading The Root.
We have told you about racist incidents, given you examples of racism, discussed hate crimes and anything that even remotely resembled or could be considered a hate crime. We’ve talked about lynching, including a very high-profile instance of a biracial 8-year-old boy in New Hampshire who was nearly hanged in New Hampshire.
We warned you that the racists were coming to Charlottesville, Va., two months before the white nationalist tiki-torch rally that resulted in Heather Heyer’s death. We told you about a similar one planned for Murfreesboro, Tenn.
If you weren’t already aware that there was a problem in America, you just have not been paying attention.
If there is any question that needs to be answered, it’s who the fuck are the 30 percent of people who think nothing has changed in race relations since Trump got in to office. We need to find those people and publicly shame them.
And with that group, we need to find the 8 percent who say race relations have actually gotten better since Trump got in to office. Undoubtedly they are white nationalists who feel emboldened by their idiot of a president and his lax attitude toward white supremacists and white nationalist ideology.
The point is: No duh, people.
We know that race relations have gotten worse. We see it every single day both in the acts of violence that play out across our TV screens and in the racist policies that continue to get enacted in our various branches of government.
We don’t need another report to highlight this for us. What we need is a substantive plan to fix it. Don’t bore me with your talk of impeachment. Let’s talk real action.
Because if things don’t change soon, our nation is going to continue to drift further back in time.
And although I do prefer to sit in the back of the bus, I like that it’s my personal fucking choice.