… Cognitive dissonance, first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950s, occurs when conflict emerges between what people want to believe and the reality that threatens those beliefs. The human mind does not like such inconsistencies: They set off alarms that spur the mind to alter some […] Read more »
Trump didn’t introduce racism to conservative politics — but he’s cultivated and amplified it
There’s nothing new in American politics about the racial hostility President Trump has demonstrated this week. … In recent years, though, it’s been rare to see an elected official as prominent as the president of the United States make as overt an appeal to racial politics as Trump’s in recent […] Read more »
Latinos strongly reject racist attitudes and language
President Donald Trump’s incendiary language over the weekend triggered yet another media and public firestorm on the issue of race. His attacks targeting four non-white congresswomen and telling them to go back to their “home countries” led critics, including some prominent Republican observers, to call upon the president to retract […] Read more »
Polls show sour views of race relations in Trump’s America
Even before President Donald Trump’s racist tweets toward four Democratic congresswomen of color, Americans considered race relations in the United States to be generally bad — and said that Trump has been making them worse. On Sunday, Trump tweeted that the congresswomen should go back to the “broken and crime […] Read more »
The strategy of Donald Trump’s racism
As you might imagine, I have some pretty serious disagreements with “the squad” on issues of real importance (at least to me). But no policy differences could justify Donald Trump’s disgusting, racist, go-back-where-you-came-from diatribe. Indeed, President Trump initially cited no issue differences. It was straight out, inexcusable bigotry and xenophobia. […] Read more »
It’s not just Trump. Many whites view people of color as less American.
President Trump is facing a strong backlash for telling four progressive Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to where they “originally came from.” … As I noted in an earlier Monkey Cage post, within the social-science literature on intergroup relations, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto’s theory of social dominance argues that […] Read more »