"Writing about gender differences within the Latino vote is inherently thorny terrain. There’s a long-standing, racist stereotype..."

"... that associates Latino men with machismo — and, as we all saw for the past six years, Trump’s political brand was built partly on an exaggerated macho sensibility. Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told me that there is a risk of reducing Latino men’s support of Trump to being about machismo — which takes 'a pervasive social dynamic' and makes it into 'an attribute of Latino culture.' 'Patriarchy is a problem across racial groups,' he says, though he adds: 'It’s also fair to say if you’re a man in a low-status group, masculinity may become more important to claiming high status.' A better place to start might be jobs.... Trump’s image as a straight-talking businessman was definitely part of what appealed to my dad. He liked that Trump was a graduate of the Wharton School and that the former president grew up with men similar to those who worked with my grandfather...."

From "Trump, My Dad and the Rightward Shift of Latino Men/Why are Latino men moving away from Democrats? And how can liberals win them back? For me, it’s a topic that hits close to home" (WaPo).

"On the plus side for Democrats, persuadables agree 'on ending racial discrimination, on the negative impact of divide and conquer tactics, on the value of working together, on the reality that African Americans face greater obstacles than whites.'"

"On the negative side of the ledger, according to the report, these middle ground voters 'have concerns about "reverse racism" and discrimination against whites;' a sizable majority agree 'focusing on race doesn’t fix anything and may even make things worse;' and 'persuadable adults believe that people of color who cannot get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.' In other words, these persuadable voters provide fertile ground for conservative appeals to racial resentment.... [Democratic p]oliticians, according the report, should say 'our opponents point the finger for our hard times at blacks, new immigrants and Muslims' instead of saying 'our opponents are racist against blacks, new immigrants and Muslims.' Why? 'Framing scapegoating as tied to economic concerns allows audiences, including whites, to see that their well-being is tied to rejecting racial resentment.'"

From "Does Anyone Have a Clue About How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Racism?/Moderates and progressives have a lot to lose by ignoring each other on this crucial question" by Thomas Edsall (in the NYT).

Edsall quotes lawprof Ian Haney López, who has recommended "cross-racial solidarity as the key to both racial justice and economic fairness" and received pushback from progressives, who tend to be "wary of any alliance with working and middle class whites." Haney López says that "racial justice activists" resist "the race-class approach" because they don't like the way the Democratic Party elite always seem to be telling them to "subordinate their concerns to larger goals."

Here's a highly rated comment from over there:

It boils down to this. Racial resentment IS American politics. America was born of racial resentment, built from racial resentment and is still divided by racial resentment.

Framing the resentment along economic lines gives people an excuse to view the resentment as being nonracial. But is just that, an excuse. The core motivation is race, more specifically white privilege. No one want to be called a racist.

The whole package is then wrapped in the flag as a patriotic position. Actually, it is because America has always been about race.

Which side is full of resentment — the left or the right? The people who think in terms of economics or the people who think in terms of race? Reading that comment, I wasn't really sure, but I presume the commenter is perceiving resentment as a quality possessed by the side he's not on. Isn't that how it always goes?

I looked up "resentment" and got halfway down a rathole labeled "ressentiment." I'll just point it out. Just so you know I know it's there.

"This Is How Trump Convinces His Supporters They’re Not Racist/Trump garners support from both those who would be seduced by flagrantly racist appeals and those who would be offended."

An article in The Nation by Berkeley lawprof (former UW lawprof) Ian Haney-Lopez.

Haney-Lopez may not have written that headline, but I must begin by saying that the word "garner" is perfectly silly. It may be hard for some people to believe, but "get" is a legitimate word and not merely slang. So get smart! (You don't garner smart.) I believe that Jeb Bush might have won the GOP nomination if it were not for his strange need to say "garner" for "get."

See? I'm for clear speech. And the topic under discussion in Haney-Lopez's article is unclear speech — words that racists hear as meaning what cannot be said outright but that can be explained away as not racist at all. Haney-Lopez wrote a book called "Dog Whistle Politics" and thinks Trump's rhetoric is different from the "coded" racism we've seen from other politicians.

The nuanced language of dog whistling traditionally sought to hide the underlying racial manipulation from two audiences: potential critics of such an appeal, including political opponents as well as the media; and the target voters themselves...

Trump seemingly couldn’t care less whether his critics perceive and decry his racial fearmongering. 

Seemingly. We don't know how much, if at all, Trump cares. I appreciate Haney Lopez's professorial precision about what we know and don't know. The old "couldn’t care less" formulation asks us to imagine the least possible caring, in other words, zero care. I'd assume Trump cares at least a little — an apt occasion for the questionable "could care less" — but that he cares more about some other things. Or as we say using The Word of the Week, "sacrifice": Trump sacrifices his interest in protecting himself from being accused of racism in order to serve the higher goal of... of what?!

The 2 answers I can extract from Haney Lopez's column are: 1. To provoke the media into giving him free coverage, and 2. There are a lot of racist voters out there to stimulate.

What I want to say is that Trump doesn't completely sacrifice his interest in being seen as a nonracist. He's just setting the balance in a different place. At one extreme, you have people so afraid of saying something that could be interpreted as racist that they won't speak publicly at all. Among candidates, who must speak, many lean heavily in favor of platitudes of inclusion and steer clear of anything that could be portrayed as racist. Others go ahead with issues — like voter fraud or dependence on welfare — that will set off the racism detectors of people like Haney-Lopez. It's hard for people like Haney-Lopez to believe a candidate would go any further than that, but Trump has, and strong, outraged cries of racism have not turned him back. He just adds his condemnation of "political correctness," takes the hits, and runs with it, to the great puzzlement of onlookers.

It's like the movie monster who can't be stopped by bullets. What are you going to do now?

"In the 1980s and 1990s, the politics of crime turned distinctly punitive and remained racially coded."

"Hillary Clinton’s reference to 'superpredators' when talking about crime (which has come up repeatedly in the current campaign) was made in 1996. On the campaign trail and in office, Bill Clinton worked to shore up his 'tough on crime' credentials. As the legal historian Ian Haney Lopez writes, 'Clinton flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally impaired black individual, Ricky Ray Rector,' and he advocated for a number of federal measures, including [the] federal 'three strikes' law."

From "From Wallace To Trump, The Evolution of 'Law And Order,'" by Marquette polisci prof Julia Azari at FiveThirtyEight.

That reminds me: At Sunday's Democratic candidates town hall, Hillary Clinton got a question from a black man named Ricky Jackson, who'd spent 39 years in prison, some of it on death row (and won freedom through the work of the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati).

Ricky Jackson did not bring up the horrible Ricky Ray Rector case and the racial politics of 1996. I don't know who screened or wrote his question for him, but it was a tame invitation to justify the death penalty in light of the cases of innocence we've seen. The only racial element to Jackson's question was the visual, Jackson himself. And Hillary had a nice opportunity to express empathy for him and balance that with a demand for excellent judicial process and some targeted outrage over real crime (without using the word "superpredators").

What she did was take a hard shot at state courts: "[T'he states have proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials that give any defendant all of the rights a defendant should have, all of the support that the defendant's lawyer should have."

State courts are incapable of giving any defendant a fair trial? Not only are all state court trials unfair, it's impossible for state courts to give a fair trial! That's a ridiculous statement. Presumably, she'll walk it back if confronted, but clearly, she had no compunction about stirring up anxiety that the courts that hear the vast majority of criminal trials are hopelessly unfair. That doesn't relate only to the death penalty, but to everyone who's convicted, now and in the future, in state courts.

But federal courts — federal courts are different. She doesn't discourse on the reason. (I'm familiar with it. It's a topic I teach. But it doesn't go so far as to portray the state courts as always and forever unfair.) She supports the death penalty — though she's still "struggling" with it — for "terrorist activities" — but maybe that's a "distinction that is hard to support." Note the weak hedging, even after the intemperate trashing of state courts.

Here's a Salon article from last July, "Bill Clinton’s gutsy apologies: Now he owes one to Ricky Ray Rector," quoting Margaret Kimberley at The Black Commentator:

[R]icky Ray Rector became world famous upon his execution in 1992. Then Governor Bill Clinton left the campaign trail in January of that year to sign the warrant for Rector’s execution. Rector’s mental capacity was such that when taken from his cell as a “dead man walking” he told a guard to save his pie. He thought he would return to finish his dessert.

I try to remember this story when I am told that all Black people love Bill Clinton or that he should be considered the first Black president. Clinton wasn’t Black when Rector needed him. He was just another politician who didn’t want to be labeled soft on crime.

AND: By the way, what's the historical origin — in American politics — of the stock argument that a candidate is "soft on crime"? Was it George Wallace in 1968?

Lawprof Ian Haney Lopez talks to Bill Moyers about "dog whistle" politics.

Via FireDogLake which teases with the usual What's-the-Matter-With-Kansas cant: "Author and legal scholar Ian Haney López tells Bill that dog whistle politics is 'the dark magic; by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests."

Ian Haney Lopez's book is "Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class." (Ian Haney Lopez was a lawprof at the University of Wisconsin Law School years ago.)

"What's the Matter with Kansas?" is a stock term — nicked from Thomas Frank's 2005 book "What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" — to refer to a favorite proposition of liberals and lefties, that non-affluent conservative voters have been duped.