While presidential nominee Donald Trump gets a bad rap for attracting racist and xenophobic supporters, that doesn’t mean Hillary Clinton supporters are any better.
A recent Reuters poll asked 7,800 Americans to rate black people on a series of personality traits, ranging from their intelligence to their lawfulness. Roughly 1/3 of Trump supporters described black people as “less intelligent” than whites, compared to 1/5 of Hillary Clinton supporters. Among ALL people interviewed, 22.5% suggested white people were smarter than black.
A staggering 40% of Trump supporters believed black people were lazier than white, compared to 25% of Clinton supporters who felt the same. The data shows that while Trump supporters are overwhelmingly the most racist, Clinton supporters are still in hot water.
What’s interesting about this particular poll is the kind of questions that were asked. Unlike most major polls that ask how people feel about “race relations in the US”, this poll directly asked people to rate a racial group. These kinds of direct answers point out a key racial component that is otherwise not widely addressed.
PERSONAL ACCOUNTS OF RACISM
To find out if these statistics hold any weight, there is a Tumblr page called “Bernie Bro Who?”, a pro-Bernie Sanders page, that compiles all of the offensive tweets that come from Clinton supporters, as an attempt to shed light on their opinions using first person accounts. Many comments are anti-Semitic, racist and sexist, as you can see for yourself.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
The division between Republican and Democratic candidates have often used a divisive propaganda of splitting people in the US right down the middle. Where the Democrat would believe themselves accepting and compassionate, the Republican would view themselves as traditionalist and protective. But the lines are very blurred more often than not, and the 2016 presidential election has brought a lot of mixed feelings out from under the rug.
Even Bernie Sanders supporters, who are by far the least racist group of those polled, still registered around 20% who believed black people were either more violent, less lawful, less intelligent or had less work ethic than white people. The presidential election has brought a more important issue to light than which candidate a person supporters: racism is still a problem in the United States today.
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