Even if you bought for a minute that Black prosecutors in New York are targeting former President Donald Trump because he is white, his characterization of their motivation is way off base.
“I’m under investigation,” Trump said during a Florida rally hours after his indictment in New York last week on charges that he made hush money payments to a porn star to silence her before the 2016 election about their alleged tryst.
“This time it’s a civil investigation by another racist in reverse who also campaigned on, ‘I will get Trump, I will get him.’ This was her campaign. Her name is Letitia James, and she proclaimed while campaigning quote: ‘I look forward to going into the Office of the Attorney General every single day suing him and then going home,’ before she knew me.”
Weeks earlier, Trump took to his social media platform to rail against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, tying the prosecutor to billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a Democratic mega donor.
“Bragg is a (Soros) Racist in Reverse, who is taking his orders from D.C.” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “I beat them TWICE, doing much better the second time, and despite their DISINFORMATION campaign, they don’t want to run against ‘TRUMP’ or my GREAT RECORD!”
There was lots of stuff wrong with that post, but let’s start with the “racist in reverse” part: There is no such thing.
Reverse racism does not exist.
Follow along. That is not to say that a Black person cannot be racist. That’s not what’s being said here.
What is being said is that the idea of reverse racism is a false concept. Racism either exists or it doesn’t. People are either racist or they’re not.
You don’t just get to “reverse” it and put it on some other ethnic group. It doesn’t work that way.
The opposite of racism is tolerance.
Look it up.
The same thing goes for “reverse discrimination.”
Opponents of affirmative action and corporate diversity initiatives like to cry “reverse discrimination” when they feel like red-blooded, American white people are getting the shaft.
They have declared war on “woke” culture, and taken a hard line against the Black Lives Matter movement because anything that doesn’t put their kind first is “reverse discrimination.”
But once again, it doesn’t exist. It’s another false concept. There is either discrimination or there is not.
The opposite of discrimination is inclusion.
Again. Look it up.
It’s like saying “irregardless” when what you mean is “regardless.”
If you think someone is a racist, then just say you think that person is a racist, and then we can have the debate. But don’t say the the person is a “reverse racist,” because then you’re just being ignorant.
Another problem with this “reverse racism” and “reverse discrimination” notion is that the terms unwittingly define racism and discrimination as things that white people do to everybody else.
When white people use the terms “reverse racism” and “reverse discrimination,” invariably what they mean is that a non-white person is being racist and discriminatory against them.
Of course, Trump — who also called Bragg an “animal” — takes the racism debate to another level. Despite debasing “s---hole countries,” trying to ban Muslims from entering the country and telling us that demonstrators at a white supremacist rally were “very fine people,” Trump has yet to see anyone who resembles a racist when he looks in the mirror.
“I am the least racist person that you have ever met,” Trump said to CNN’s Don Lemon, a Black man, during a 2015 interview.
“I am the least racist person anywhere in the world,” Trump told reporters in 2019 during a White House news conference.
“I am the least racist person in this room,” Trump said in 2020 during a presidential debate. “Not since Abraham Lincoln has anybody done what I’ve done for the Black community.”
This is the part of the column that is set aside for uncontrolled laughter. Because Donald Trump actually said that. Out loud. About himself.
There’s no reversing that.
