In a post-election analysis, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns described Corey Stewart, the Confederate-sympathizing Virginia Senate candidate, as a “Trump-style racial provocateur.” This was only one of hundreds of recent examples of journalists employing what Adam Serwer has called “a ludicrous and expanding menu of complex euphemisms for describing racist behavior.”
An October 22 headline in the New York Timesclaimed that “Trump and G.O.P. Candidates Escalate Race and Fear as Election Ploys.” How exactly does one “escalate race”? The article didn’t say, although it did note that “Mr. Trump and other Republicans . . . have attacked minority candidates in nakedly racial terms.” A Washington Postarticle by Matt Viser on how Republicans were “stoking racial animosity” used the word “racism” twice. But Viser also twice used “racially tinged,” employed the phrase “race-based,” and modified the word “racial” in more ways than I thought possible, speaking of “racial insults,” “racial undercurrents,” “racial animosity,” “racial fringes,” “racial attacks,” “racial connotations,” and “racial fears.”
Why the semantic somersaults when it comes to race? We never hear anti-Semitic rhetoric described as “religiously tinged,” and although the Boston Globe once referred to Trump’s “gender-tinged attack on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton” during the spring of 2016, it was nearly alone in doing so. Imagine if, after Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape became public, the press had referred to Trump’s “gender-tinged” comments or claimed that he had “escalated” gender or that he was a “gender provocateur”? Such phrases turn oppression into a neutral condition. “Gender-tinged,” for example, suggests the infusion of gender into an issue but ignores the question of power—in Trumpian terms, of who grabs whom.
[For more on this story by LAWRENCE B. GLICKMAN, go to http://bostonreview.net/race/l...kman-racially-tinged]
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