The problem with Donald Trump’s so-called ‘inner city’
It should be well understood by now that men like Donald Trump do not use the term “inner city” with any degree of historical analysis or sociological bent.
As soon as Donald Trump opened his mouth and the words “inner city” yet again poured out like toxic waste comes out of an unsupervised factory, I knew it wouldn’t be very long before writers would pen words chastising those who would call attention to the very common fact that, yes, black people do not exclusively live in the inner city.
It should be well understood by now that men like Trump do not use the term “inner city” with any degree of historical analysis or sociological bent but rather use the term in much the same manner that the police who patrol these inner cities use their authority in interaction with the community as a battering ram.
In the context of Trump’s remarks, the term reflects a deeply racist belief system and mode of expression that, even in this America, with an African-American president, is excused as being “honest” or “off-the cuff.” To put it plainly, coming from the mouth of Donald Trump, the term “inner city” is much like his discussion of “radical Islam” and his “bad hombres” remark during last week’s final presidential debate. The latter comment is an obviously toned-down version of his earlier remarks on Mexican and Latin American immigrants, when he notoriously called them murderers and rapists.
Donald Trump says to black voters: ‘What do you have to lose?’
Additionally, the term “bad hombres,” or bad men, was recently used to describe a victim of a police shooting which, rather ironically, did not occur in any of the “inner cities.” It actually occurred in a rural area and was not plagued by Trump’s or the general white imagination as an area filled with crime and violent black people just waiting to kill each other. When Trump speaks of the “inner city,” he is likely trying to link the pathology of blackness to a city like Chicago that — when examined on the nightly news or in the most sensational headlines and stories — probably looks and sounds like a gang war zone to outsiders.
Trump is trying to speak in code to not only his white Republican brothers and sisters but to those “good” white liberals who are too afraid to experience life in the “inner city” without pricing out those who were born there. He is speaking to those white liberals who are too afraid of experiencing an authentic blackness, even as they make their claims to be allies.
Those who say in essence “we do indeed live in the inner city” and “you should be wary of distancing yourself from the inner city” run the risk of inadvertently validating Trump’s coded racist diatribe and dog whistling. Agreeing with Trump that black people living in what is colloquially referred to as “the ‘hood” are perpetually poor and are in need of saving, as he basks in the glow of the “welfare queen” stereotypical image of a single black mother, fail to realize that most “welfare queens” share the same skin tone as his wives and daughters.
Yes, there is poverty; yes, there is violence; yes, there are criminals; and yes, there are drugs in these black communities. What is quietly denied is that there is poverty, violence, crime and drugs in the most lily white of communities. In fact, there are so much of these criminal elements that if police officers would enact stop-and-frisk in white communities, we might actually see a fairer representation of the American population in jails and prisons — rather than enacting a New Jim Crow justice system that filters out white criminals as it concentrates intently on “the inner city” existing both in Trump’s and the larger American consciousness.
Donald Trump is simply saying exactly what most Republicans (and more white people than you think) believe about blackness and “the inner city.” He, of course, is loud and on public record, whereas his Republican cohorts prefer to quietly cut funding to schools and programs in said areas. But which one is actually worse? Which one has a debilitating effect on the communities: Trump, or those who agree with what he says but don’t advertise it?
Just remember, those people might not ever use the term “inner city,” but you better believe that they walk in step with the same racist rhetoric and beliefs espoused by Donald Trump.
