"But what’s surprising about Trump’s strategy of racial provocation is that African-Americans have played a relatively small role in it."

Writes Kelefa Sanneh in "WHAT DO PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY DONALD TRUMP IS RACIST?":

When people call Trump racist, they are often thinking primarily of incidents... in which he has singled out Latino immigrants and their descendants. They are often thinking, too, about Trump’s series of remarks about Muslims... Or, for that matter, his portrayal of China as a menacing threat... But these days a wide range of prejudices are commonly subsumed within the expansive term “racism”; you might call a politician “racist” without meaning (at least not exclusively, or even primarily) that he is anti-black....

In general, though, Trump has had relatively little to say about African-Americans during this campaign. In December, he criticized Justice Antonin Scalia, who had suggested, during a hearing, that affirmative action might harm some African-American students by steering them toward colleges that are “too fast for them” when they might be better off at “a less advanced school—a slower-track school.” Trump seemed genuinely offended. “I thought his remarks were very tough,” he said. “I don’t like what he said.”...

Was Trump’s criticism of Scalia part of a grand plan to win over African-American voters? Perhaps not. One of Trump’s greatest political strengths is that very little of what he says sounds like the product of political calculation. (Of course, this, too, is one of his greatest political weaknesses.)...

Sanneh ends by wondering why Trump nevertheless polls so badly with African-Americans and posits the obvious: the Democratic Party has a tight grip on this voting bloc and Trump "has acquired a reputation as a racist."

Does it make a difference to black voters that this reputation has mainly to do with things he has said about Muslims and Mexicans? Or that he finds ways to talk of African-Americans as part of a threatened “we,” and not part of a threatening “them”? 

Apparently not.

ADDED: In the NYT, there's Charles M. Blow with "Why Blacks Loathe Trump." The most interesting thing in the way Blow made a show of his knowledge of the connection between black people and Islam but then had to do a correction:

[Trump] has scandalously maligned Muslims, apparently not realizing that it’s estimated that approximately one-fourth of the 3.3 million Muslims in this country are African-American. Indeed, the Muslim faith has deep roots in the black community because many Africans brought to this country as slaves were Muslims. The signs are everywhere. For instance, I spent my earliest years in the rural community of Kiblah, Ark., an area homesteaded by former slaves following the Emancipation Proclamation. In Arabic, kiblah is the direction in which Muslims pray toward Mecca....

Correction: August 18, 2016
An earlier version of this article imprecisely referred to the word “kiblah.” It is the direction in which Muslims pray toward Mecca and not derived from the word “ka’aba.”