A Study of Colorblind Racial Ideology in White New Yorkers’ Support for Donald Trump

• In Event: 4161 - Uncovering the Ordinary: Everyday Mechanisms of Racism and Resistance

Abstract

Quantitative analyses of nationally representative election surveys convincingly demonstrate that many whites of all economic levels were motivated to support Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016 by a combination of racist resentment, perceptions of anti-white discrimination, anti-immigrant sentiment, and sexism. This data also reveals many white voters’ strongly held subscription to colorblind racial ideology, the dominant racial ideology in the United States since the Civil Rights era.

At first glance, these findings may appear contradictory: how can ‘colorblind’ white Trump voters argue that race and racism are unimportant in the United States while also contending that blacks and immigrants are problematic and that whites are the victims of racism? Furthermore, how can ostensibly colorblind whites justify their support for Donald Trump, a politician whose ascent to the presidency has been fueled by prejudiced rhetoric and discriminatory policy positions?
In this article, I describe my efforts to shed light on these questions through in-depth interviews with white Trump voters that I conducted during a small pilot study. My study finds that white Trump voters believe that Barack Obama’s election ushered in a new racial period in which people of color hold, enact, and spread overt hatred against innocent, colorblind whites.

As they defended the existing racial order and explained their resistance to racial justice efforts, the participants strategically melded assertions of anti-white racism; qualified acknowledgments of systemic racism against people of color; varied judgments of non-whites’ cultural characteristics (positive, neutral, and negative); and portrayals of black activists - centered on former President Barack Obama - as radical racists. These findings complicate survey-based analyses of white racial resentment and reverse racism and illustrate white Trump voters’ dexterity in employing colorblind racial ideology alongside other, seemingly conflictual, racial ideologies in their rhetorical defenses of white supremacy.

Author

• Adam Safer, Stony Brook University