Political cartoonist Glenn McCoy is just the latest person to compare those who blocked President Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, from entering a public school last week to those who aimed to stop 6-year-old Ruby Bridges from becoming the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

Trump’s defenders would be wise to stop this. While attempting to paint DeVos in a sympathetic light, as a brave pioneer, they’re also unintentionally highlighting the deep racism that fueled the protests against Bridges. And to anyone following conservative politics today, that racism feels frighteningly familiar, and the comparison is deeply unflattering.

Over the past few days, conservatives have had a heyday comparing the protesters who blocked DeVos from entering a Washington, DC, school to the mobs that antagonized and threatened Bridges in 1960. McCoy’s cartoon of DeVos is meant to evoke the famous Norman Rockwell painting that depicts US Marshals escorting Bridges into the school.

Six years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordered the nation’s schools to integrate, New Orleans’s school board finally put in place a plan to do so. Thousands of white segregationists rioted in protest of the racial integration of New Orleans schools and pulled their children out of class rather than have them learn side by side with black kids.

As the Civil Rights Digital Library explains, “The integration of New Orleans’ public schools drew national criticism from those who condemned segregationists for their hostile reactions and prompted acclaimed American painter, Norman Rockwell, to paint ‘The Problem We All Live With,’ which depicted four federal marshals escorting six-year-old Ruby Bridges to school on her first day at William Frantz.”

The story of DeVos being heckled by a handful of protesters as she tried to enter a middle school can’t quite compare. As German Lopez has explained, that was a peaceful, politically motivated demonstration against a single government official — the kind of person whom the public is supposed to hold accountable — who couldn’t answer basic education policy questions at Senate hearings.

Lopez and many others, like historian Kevin M. Kruse, have contrasted the two events to make the case that equating them is absurd on a number of levels. Still, the “standing in the schoolhouse door” comparison remained a popular talking point among conservatives.

But Trump supporters would be wise to leave Bridges in the past, and not just because the comparisons to DeVos are inaccurate and offensive.

It’s because the irrational and hateful attitudes that fueled the backlash against the 6-year-old girl have some undeniable parallels to the ones that shaped the recent election and are animating national policy today. The racial anxiety and belief in white supremacy that led white Americans to riot over school integration should feel familiar: These same forces fueled Trump’s win and thus, indirectly, DeVos’s appointment.

Beyond being inaccurate, the Bridges comparison highlights the horrors of white Americans’ panic over diversity

Donald Trump’s campaign tapped into racism, racial anxiety, and outright hate — the same kind that made white parents in the 1960s horrified at the idea of school integration — to fuel his success.

As Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox in October, it was popular to argue that Trump voters’ main concerns were about the economy. But that didn’t reflect what Trump voters were saying about themselves, and the data didn’t back it up. In a feature on the racist and anti-immigrant sentiments that fueled support for Trump in the same way they fueled the Brexit decision, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote in November:

Michael Tesler, a professor at the University of California Irvine, took a look at racial resentment scores among Republican primary voters in the past three GOP primaries. In 2008 and 2012, Tesler found, Republican voters who scored higher were less likely to vote for the eventual winner. The more racial bias you harbored, the less likely you were to vote for Mitt Romney or John McCain.

With Trump, the opposite was the case. The more a person saw black people as lazy and undeserving, the more likely they were to vote for the self-proclaimed billionaire.

Tesler found similar effects on measures of anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim prejudice. This shows that Trump isn’t drawing support from the same type of Republicans who were previously picking the party’s winners. He’s mobilizing a new Republican coalition, one dominated by the voters whose political attitudes are driven by prejudice.

“The party’s growing conservatism on matters of race and ethnicity provided fertile ground for Trump’s racial and ethnic appeals to resonate in the primaries,” Tesler wrote in the Washington Post in August. “So much so, in fact, that Donald Trump is the first Republican in modern times to win the party’s presidential nomination on anti-minority sentiments.”

Multiple other studies have supported Tesler’s findings. An April Pew survey looked at whether Republicans had “warm” or “cold” feelings toward Trump and how they felt about the census projection that the US would be majority nonwhite in 30 years.

It found that 33 percent of Republicans thought this shift would be “bad for the country.” These people were also overwhelmingly likely to feel warmly rather than coolly about Trump, by a 63-to-26 margin.

Meanwhile, as Matthews reported, there was no evidence to support the idea that Trump voters were disproportionately poor, and in fact, a major study from Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell showed the opposite: Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people.

If anything, Trump’s win was powered by a not-so-subtle message that these people’s racial resentment was that of the potential president’s too. And all voters had to do to know this was take a look at his track record.

Decades have passed since Bridge’s first day at William Frantz Elementary School. Still, it’s hard to separate the 1960 idea that black children didn’t belong in schools with white children from the 2016 belief of Trump voters that increasing diversity would be “bad for the country.”

It’s hard to say the mobs that protested Bridges had a different worldview from the one Trump expressed when federal officials found evidence that he had refused to rent to black tenants and lied to black applicants about whether apartments were available.

It’s hard to separate the white mob’s core belief that white children and black children belonged in different places from the stance attributed to Trump in a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. In it, he quoted Trump’s criticism of a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

Those who bring up Bridges to try to put the peaceful protest against DeVos in a bad light inadvertently bring to mind these unavoidable comparisons, which don’t reflect very well on the administration they aim to defend.

The “racial antagonism” Obama triggered was a lot like the kind 6-year-old Bridges inspired

A December 8 CNN special included rare, candid moments in which Barack Obama and his former adviser David Axelrod each acknowledged that racism contributed to negative attitudes toward the first black president.

“I think there’s a reason why attitudes about my presidency among whites in Northern states are very different from whites in Southern states,” Obama told Fareed Zakaria in an interview for “The Legacy of Barack Obama.” “Are there folks whose primary concern about me has been that I seem foreign, the other? Are those who champion the ‘birther’ movement feeding off of bias? Absolutely.”

This public admission was a first from the president. Axelrod was even more direct, saying, “It’s indisputable that there was a ferocity to the opposition and a lack of respect to him that was a function of race.”

They’re not the only ones who believe that.

What Obama and Axelrod said relates directly to an idea that Cornell Belcher, who served on the polling team for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, lays out in detail in his book A Black Man in the White House. In it, he makes the case that Obama’s election triggered what he’s dubbed “America’s racial aversion crisis”: a panicked emotional response on the part of white Americans to an African-American president, which transformed into a powerful force in politics.

Belcher uses numbers to support that claim. The book was inspired by a survey of voters between the 2008 general election and Obama’s reelection in 2012, tracking levels of “racial antagonism” — a term that basically means racism — along with political opinions.

His conclusion, as he wrote in his book: “The changing cultural and racial demographics of the country had, indeed, finally allowed the nation to overcome a monumental electoral political barrier, but they did not ‘exorcize the racial ghost.’” That “racial ghost,” he writes, worked to “delegitimize the black man in the White House and stop him from effectively governing.”

Belcher explained to Vox in a December interview:

During the course of his presidency, not only did racial aversion not lessen but it increased greatly. In particular, it found a fertile and comfortable place to land on the Republican side, and it spiked tremendously. And going into the midterm election and particularly during the primary season, it created almost a perfect storm for a racial antagonist to reboot the “Southern strategy” — and for Donald Trump to really ride and expand that niche and take the Republican nomination.

Tesler, of UC Irvine, has made a similar case: that the mere existence of a black president prompted white voters to lash back by voting for Trump, party affiliation notwithstanding:

My book, Post-Racial or Most-Racial: [Race and politics in the Age of Obama], shows that Obama’s presidency rapidly accelerated the pre-existing relationship between party identification and racial attitudes. Moreover, he activated a previously non-existent partisan divide according to attitudes about Muslims — one that contributes to partisan sorting even after controlling for racial attitudes. The book further shows that most of this growing polarization of party identification was driven by non-college educated whites. Prior to Obama’s presidency, racial attitudes were only weakly related to party identification among non-college whites, but that correlation shot through the roof during Obama’s presidency.

Again, conservatives should be careful about using the irrational, racist backlash to the presence of a little black girl to make a point, when the pathology that inspired that backlash is arguably exactly what got Trump elected just last year.

The idea that America is for white people — the very view that drove the protests against Bridges — is shaping policy from the White House

The beliefs of those rabid Ruby Bridges protesters — that white people are most important in America and that racial diversity threatens them — did not disappear after the civil rights movement. Quite the opposite: They were an animating force in Trump’s election in a way that turned out to be more than campaign trail talk. Those ideas have informed his administration’s early policies and Cabinet appointments of men who have promoted or espoused contempt for immigrants and members of racial and religious minority groups.

Reflecting on this, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has made the case that “government by white nationalism is upon us”:

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, his former aide Stephen Miller, and right-wing media mogul Stephen Bannon occupy prominent positions in the present administration. Like Anton, they hold deep antagonism to immigrants and immigration, opposition to their equality within American society, and nostalgia for a time when prosperity was the province of the native-born and a select few “assimilated” immigrants. But these aren’t just ideologues with jobs in a friendly administration. They are the architects of Trump’s policy, the executors of a frighteningly coherent political ideology. …

These weren’t the only executive orders from the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, but they were the most visible — the most controversial. They fulfill key promises of the Trump campaign: a wall, a Muslim ban, and a general crackdown on immigrants and immigration. In keeping with the white-nationalist ideas of that campaign and of the president’s brain trust, they target the stated threats to white hegemony. And they advance the white-nationalist narrative: that America will be made “great again” by preserving the integrity of white America.

It’s not just critics who’ve said this: White nationalists and white supremacists themselves, who reported they were energized by Trump’s campaign, and whose hate groups have been reinvigorated since the election, got the message loud and clear that Trump was on their side.

As the debate around the cartoon settles, it’s hard to make the case that DeVos actually has anything at all in common with Bridges. And few can argue with a straight face that people who protested the new education secretary actually have anything in common with those who rioted over the 6-year-old girl’s presence in an elementary school. But by comparing the two events, conservatives have done worse than make a major, indefensible stretch. They’ve drawn Americans’ attention to the racist attitudes that fueled the attacks against Bridges — attitudes that have uncanny and disturbing similarities to the ones shaping our country today.

One early February day at a New York City middle school, a sixth-grade boy sobbed uncontrollably in the hallway during a break between classes. When teachers asked him what was wrong, he’d said received detention. But that punishment wasn’t a first for him. So why the dramatic reaction to everyday school discipline?

When the tears stopped, the preteen explained that he and his family were from Senegal. With President Donald Trump’s executive order banning residents of seven majority-Muslim countries putting immigrants at the center of national news, he was terrified that getting into trouble at school could mean he would be deported.  

Jane Brown*, a New York City school administrator, relayed this story to Vox. At her school, where the majority of students are immigrants, primarily from Yemen, she said this type of emotional outburst in reaction to political discourse has become increasingly common since Trump began condemning Muslims and Mexican-Americans from the campaign trail. In the wake of the order, or so-called “Muslim ban,” things have only become more tense.

Stories of children stuck in war-torn countries, separated from their parents, or denied medical treatment, and the report of a 5-year-old US citizen who was detained at Dulles International Airport for hours were among the highest-profile narratives of the human toll the order took in the chaotic days between when Trump signed the executive order on January 27 and a judge issued a stay on February 4.

But it’s affected other children, too, in ways that have nothing to do with travel plans and are not limited to kids with direct ties to the seven listed countries. Whether or not the ban ultimately passes legal muster, its unsubtle message about the place of immigrants and Muslims in this country has shaken many children in a way no court’s ruling will be likely to undo.  

Tears and confusion are regular parts of the school day

Once Trump signed the order, chaos and confusion ensued, creating logistical nightmares at airports accompanied by nationwide protests and legal challenges.

With adults taken aback by the order’s constitutional and moral status, it’s no surprise that kids and teens are experiencing confusion and uncertainty.  

Brown said her students’ politically inspired anxiety began to rise through campaign season, and peaked with the first mention of the “Muslim ban,” the election itself, and inauguration.

Lately, conversation at the school’s morning circle, during which kids in each classroom pass around a toy ball and take a chance to speak to the group, has focused on the latest from the administration on immigration. Typical prompts include “What have you heard?” “What do you know?” and “What are you concerned about?”

Since the travel ban was announced, “crying is a regular thing,” Brown said. “Kids were sobbing, especially immigrant children, saying they were going to get sent back to Guinea, Senegal, Yemen. They were totally distraught. And then one kid would try to explain to another kid about deportation and it would turn into an argument about, ‘You’re going to get deported.’ ‘No, you are.”

She noticed the eighth-grade students have a better understanding of the ban than her sixth-graders. Along with age, home life can shape kids’ grasp of its meaning and their level of concern. “Students whose families are more engaged with religion or go to a mosque tend to have more information, whereas kids who have less of a community organization supporting them are mostly only hearing things from other kids at school, so there’s more fear there,” she said.

That the order does not actually provide for deportation, and that it’s limited to Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, are details that don’t provide great comfort to children. The reaction of the student from Senegal — not one of the listed countries — who feared he’d have to leave the country is a perfect example of this.

Educator and activist Debbie Almontaser, the board president of the Muslim Community Network, says the angst from the order casts a wider net than a literal reading of it might suggest. “Though there are seven countries that have been identified, it has rippling and chilling effects through the entire Muslim community, locally, nationally, and internationally. This is a fear that everyone is feeling,” she explained.

She said children who may not understand the legal details can pick up the underlying debate about to what extent immigrants and Muslims are welcome in the United States — and, more importantly, the uncertainty and the fear of what could come next. “In such a contentious time and one that has so much uncertainty and for American Muslim adults, I can’t even imagine how children are feeling,” Almontaser said.

The consequences of fear and anxiety can be serious, and lasting

Sirry Alang, an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Lehigh University, studies how social and geopolitical factors shape health over the lifetimes.

“The travel ban exposes children to discrimination based on national origin, religion, and race,” she said. In her view, this experience, especially as it’s paired with societal discrimination by those emboldened or encouraged by the administration’s policies to fear Muslims or immigrants, can have consequences. “Discrimination is not only bad for children and families who experience it morally,” she said. “People who are discriminated against are less productive and less healthy.”

Children like the 5-year-old who was detained at Dulles Airport or those who were temporarily separated from their parents as the result of the ban face the most obvious stress. But those who just hear rumors from their friends or sense their parents’ fear about the administration’s next move are at risk, too.

“Experiencing stressful events earlier on in the life course — school age — has significant and lasting effects on health and well-being over a child’s life span,” Alang said. “Things like psychological distress, emotional and behavioral problems, poor academic performances. It also increases risks of physiological and chronic conditions that are linked to stress, like gastrointestinal issues, cardiovascular diseases, that not only affect the child but tax other systems such as health care, education, and social services.”

Last Spring, Teaching Tolerance, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm, took an informal poll of educators to gauge how the presidential campaign had affected the climate of K-12 schools across the country. More than two-thirds of teachers reported that students — mainly immigrants, children of immigrants, and Muslims — had expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election.

Erlanger A. Turner, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Houston-Downtown, told Vox in an October interview about those findings that there is significant research on the negative impacts of both subtle and overt racism on individuals’ psychological and physical health. “When children are the recipients of racist rhetoric, it can lead to anxiety, depression, and concentration difficulties that might hurt their academic performance,” he said. There can be long-term consequences, too: psychological symptoms or even health risk such as high blood pressure later in life.

Turner said these concerns apply to the anxiety children are experiencing over the travel ban in the same way they did to those who were stressed by being taunted by classmates during the campaign season. “Children often emulate their parents’ responses to events; therefore, if adults in their lives are distressed and struggling to cope with thoughts of being deported from the US, similar emotions will be experienced by children,” he said.

Key to his research is that this harm can occur even for children in families who do not face any concrete consequences from the ban. In Turner’s view, the belief that a person is being discriminated against can be enough to cause her harm.

“I know there has been a lot of discussion regarding the specifics of the ban or whether it affects American citizens,” he said. “However, research shows that perceived discrimination or unfair treatment of disenfranchised groups may result in negative psychological outcomes such as stress. In addition to children experiencing increased anxiety, stress, and academic difficulties due to poor concentration at school, these fears may also lead them to have identity confusion. Many of these children may be US citizens and may struggle with understanding how their ancestral culture of origin (or religious affiliation) leads to questioning their sense of belonging. They may have questions or be conflicted about their identity as an American, which will cause more anxiety or negative emotions.”

For non-Muslim, non-immigrant kids: a confusing message and a crash course in compassion

Even non-Muslim children who are generations removed from their family’s arrival in the United States face their own set of consequences from the ban and the public debate that has surrounded it.

“Children will have varying understanding of these policies, and this confusion could certainly lead to misunderstandings about groups of people,” said Rachel Annunziato, an associate professor of psychology at Fordham University. “I worry that children may well be influenced by interpretations of the ban on TV or at home that could translate into a sense that bullying behavior is okay.”

She says the experience of her 5-year-old twin boys offers an example of how this applies to kids who’ve just begun to absorb basic lessons about diversity and fairness. “We just had a beautiful segment about MLK at school only to now hear of things like a ‘ban’ and a ‘wall.’ It is very confusing and scary for them, when we just learned that all people are the same,” she said.

But parents are also seeking ways to teach their children how to express solidarity with others, while ensuring their kids don’t absorb negative views about Muslims — or come to believe that discrimination is acceptable. Francie Latour is the co-founder of Wee the People, a Boston arts-based social justice advocacy group for parents and children. Recently, members held an event titled “To Islam, With Love,” during which kids made Valentine’s Day cards for the Muslim community, to be delivered to the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. It was one of several arts and social justice events for children since the election, but the surge of interest in this particular event far exceeded Latour’s expectations.

The card-making followed a mini teach-in by Elizabeth Dann, an attorney and treasurer of the Muslim Justice League, as well as a parent, who talked about Islamophobia. The Boston Globe reported that 12 students at Boston Latin Academy who study Arabic volunteered to help those who wanted to to write their messages in Arabic script. Once the creative portion of the day began, “it was clear that parents took that ball and ran with it,” Latour said. “They were talking to their kids about why they were there, the fear and the hate that is driving these hurtful policies, and how hurtful these policies are to our ‘friends and neighbors’ who are Muslim.”

“The messages on the cards were kid messages, but they spoke directly to the reason we were all gathered there,” she said. “‘Don’t be afraid,’ ‘You are a rock star,’ ‘You are perfect just the way you are,’ and, ‘Be strong!’ They were all like that.”

Teachers have become counselors, and schools have become resources for information and reassurance

“We are in a time when a lot of behavior is being modeled at a high level that could very well impact our children,” Annunziato said. In her view, the nature of that impact will depend on how trusted adults react.

Brown told Vox that after the election, it’s possible to balance the mandate to avoid political proselytizing with addressing students’ fears. “We talk a lot about tolerance and unity and valuing everybody,” she said. When students are distraught or confused, first there’s “emotional first aid,” followed by attempts to clarify and explain what is actually happening. That’s difficult, she said, because “what do you say to kids when you don’t know what’s happening on some level?”

She said teachers are advised to assure students, “We will keep you safe here. You’re in a safe place where people will protect you,” and that her school also reaches beyond students to their families. Their latest project: working on communicating to parents what to consider when making travel plans — or not — for the school’s February break.

And it makes sense, considering the makeup of New York City’s schools. While there’s little data on the precise number of city’s students who are immigrants, according to the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, in 2011 more than half of all children born in New York City were born to immigrant families. Carmen Fariña, the chancellor of New York City’s Education Department, and Nisha Agarwal, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, sent a letter home to parents reassuring them — to the extent possible — of the city’s public schools’ commitment to protect the rights of students.

Meanwhile, Almontaser has received numerous calls from parents as well as social service organizations asking for advice on how to have conversations about the ban with families, in after-school programs, and in classrooms.

“Right now I hope most parents are able to speak to their children and say, ‘This ban has been suspended; you don’t have anything to worry about,’” she said. But with the future of the ban unclear, she also encourages adults talking to Muslim children to remind them that advocates and public officials are working to reverse the ban, and that thousands of non-Muslims “have gone out into the streets to make sure everyone feels safe and welcomed.”

At least in some places, that messaging seems to be providing a measure of comfort to children. Brown says she’s gradually observed a “coming together” among her diverse group of mostly immigrant middle schoolers — a departure from the teasing about countries of origin and ethnic stereotypes that she used to hear. “Now there’s kind of a team mentality at this point, like we’re in this together,” she said.

Through her work with Wee the People, Latour says she’s observed that “well-meaning white parents who have defaulted to very general messages in their parenting — ‘We’re all the same,’ ‘Be nice,’ etc. — are feeling a sense of urgency to get really clear with their kids about what they value, what injustice looks like, and what kind of country they want their kids to imagine and fight for.” Now, she says, parents are working to find the language and the tools to have hard and uncomfortable conversations that they’ve actively avoided having with their kids up until this point.

As far as the children who participated in the To Islam With Love event, she says there was a range of emotional reactions. “There was confusion: ‘Why would our president do this? Why would people hurt someone just for wearing a scarf on their head?’ And there was some fear: ‘Is the president going to try to hurt my family?’ But the strongest response was, ‘I am going to make the most sparkly, most loving Valentine so that whoever gets this will feel better.’ That’s where pretty much all the kids landed emotionally.”

*Name has been changed to protect privacy.

During February, it’s not uncommon to hear the refrain, “If there’s an African-American History Month, why isn’t there a white one?”

This question, and its close relative “What’s wrong with being proud of being white?” sometimes comes from people who sincerely, if oversimplistically, think racial equality should mean identical treatment for all racial identity groups.

But it’s also the kind of idea you might hear from members of the self-described “alt-right” and groups with closely related beliefs: white nationalists and white supremacists. They have in common agendas that would do serious harm to — or eliminate — members of racial and ethnic minority groups. “White pride” is what fueled racist alt-right leader Richard Spencer to tweet during the 2017 Super Bowl that he was cheering for the Patriots to win because of their “Three White wide receivers,” and because they’re “[c]onsistently NFL’s whitest team.” He celebrated afterward with, “For the white race, it’s never over.” These views don’t just live on Twitter. Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has made the case that white nationalism is the best description of the Trump administration’s ideology.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to give a thorough response to their rhetoric — even things like calls for celebrations of “white pride,” white identity, and white history that many would easily laugh off as absurd.

To help explain this, I spoke to Daniel Hirschman, an assistant professor of sociology at Brown University, whose current research focuses on the politics of race and decision-making in higher education, consumer credit, and insurance.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of our exchange.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Can you explain, as simply as possible, why we don’t have White History Month? And why this makes sense, even though black Americans and other ethnic groups have celebrations dedicated to their heritage?

Daniel Hirschman

We celebrate the accomplishments of white people every day. Calls to celebrate whiteness ignore the institutionalized celebration of whiteness that’s built into the very fabric of our day-to-day lives, along with the more overt celebrations in every history textbook.

Yesterday, I went to an event at the Rhode Island State House. The hallways in the State House are decorated with portraits of past political leaders, including all of Rhode Island’s governors. And they’re all white. (Until 2015, the governors were all men too.) This pattern is common. If you walk through Sayles Hall here at Brown University, you’ll see portraits of past board members and university presidents — again, almost all white. We institutionalize that celebration in the names of our businesses, our towns and streets, our schools and universities, our prestigious awards, and more.

Such calls imply that, absent such a specified month, we would somehow have a state of equality. In so many words, they are saying, “It’s unfair that we recognize the accomplishments of African Americans but never white people.” One of the most pernicious forms of contemporary racism is the attempt to downplay how much inequality remains — economic inequality, political inequality, but also symbolic inequality, an inequality of respect and recognition.  

Jenée Desmond-Harris

What do white nationalist and white supremacists really want when they call for celebrations of whiteness? How should people understand this? What’s the historical and sociological context that we need to make sense of these ideas?

Daniel Hirschman

When white nationalist and white supremacist movements call to celebrate whiteness, they claim or imply that white people are under threat from nonwhite people. That is a cover to justify white people’s monopoly on wealth, income, property values, prestige power, and other desirable things. So they are deeply invested in inventing a particular understanding of race and a particular understanding of history that supports their narrative of white people under siege.

This is nothing new. Centuries ago, white supremacists spread the lie that slaves were both inferior and dangerous to justify slavery. And now they need to argue that Islam is an essentially and historically hateful religion of dangerous, nonwhite fanatics and that the contemporary Muslim ban is the only way to protect white people. (Many American Muslims identify as white, but white nationalists consider them nonwhite.)

All of these claims are, quite literally, “white lies.” They are lies told by (some) white people to justify a political project of protecting and empowering white people against nonwhite others. You can see telltale signs of these politics today, for example, in the move to turn the “Countering Violent Extremism” program into the “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism” program — despite the fact that law enforcement believes white supremacists to be a greater terrorist threat. Anyone interested in better understanding contemporary white nationalists and white supremacists and their place in the history of such movements can start by reading Kelly Baker’s fantastic work.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

It’s been suggested that there should be some focus on whiteness that addresses the social construction of whiteness and its consequences: For example, Portland Community College has held “Whiteness History Month” event, which its website described as “a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins and heritage” that “seeks to inspire innovative and practical solutions to community issues and social problems that stem from racism.” What’s your take on something like this?

Daniel Hirschman

I think it’s great! We should be talking more about whiteness. There was a recent controversy over a course being offered at the University of Wisconsin Madison on “The Problem of Whiteness.” I looked over the syllabus — it’s a great example of how to think and teach about race by foregrounding whiteness rather than nonwhiteness. That is, when we talk and write about race, we almost automatically assume that race is something that African Americans and Latinxs and Asians and Native Americans have; white people are just people. By foregrounding whiteness, we remind ourselves that race is a social construct that, for the most part, white people have used to assert or imply that white people are superior. 

That last bit is hard to swallow, and probably causes the most confusion of any concept I’ve ever learned or tried to teach in sociology. The first thing people learn in sociology about race is that race is “socially constructed.” By this, we mean that race isn’t essential, unchanging, fixed, or biological. Race meant something different 100 years ago, and something very different 400 years ago. The map from human biology to social races is basically nonexistent — despite repeated attempts to prove otherwise. (For excellent analysis, see books by Ann Morning and Alondra Nelson). But even though race is socially constructed, it’s a very firm construct.

Race and racism are real, even though they’re not biological. You can’t get rid of them by simply pretending they don’t exist. And this is the tricky part. Race has real consequences. White people built a very strong, very racist social foundation for race. And that foundation is built on and continually reinforces the distinction between those who are white and those who are not. So understanding the reality of race requires understanding the history of whiteness — how white people have organized collectively at different moments in time to declare their superiority and to ensure their dominance.   

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Related, what are some other topics that a curriculum or program on the history of the category of whiteness and its consequences would cover?

Daniel Hirschman

A sociological class on whiteness should explain the institutional dynamics of racism and white racial identity, put in historical context. You can’t leave that history out. If I were teaching a class on whiteness, I’d probably focus on a few different institutions that are central to American life today and racially unequal — like property ownership and higher education — and trace their history to a few key moments in American history. I’d start with settler colonialism.

So you’d want to talk about how colonists defined their whiteness against Native Americans and how that paid off. Colonists’ land grab was only made possible by the mass exploitation and extermination of Native Americans. And that placement helped to justify massive dispossession.

Then slavery. That’s also foundational. We think about the history of slavery as part of African-American history, but slavery is just as much white history. Slavery helped to define whiteness and enrich white people through the brutal treatment of mostly black Africans. And not just in the South — as recent discussions of slavery at elite Northern institutions like Brown and Columbia have shown, slave labor in the North and profits from investments in Southern slavery labor were essential in the formation of those institutions, with ripple effects to today. 

From there, I’d probably jump ahead to Reconstruction. We all talk about the Civil War (although what narrative we learn about it depends on where you grew up). But no one wants to talk about Reconstruction. If you read W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic work, Black Reconstruction in America, you get one of the clearest understandings of why we don’t. Reconstruction was when America decided that it didn’t have the will to actually undo race-based oppression. In the absence of slavery, white people created new tools to maintain the color line, like sharecropping, and voter disenfranchisement. Perhaps the portraits in the Rhode Island State House would look different today if the American leadership had instead instituted reparations at that time.

Violent white terrorism is part of this history, particularly race riots and lynchings.  When we talk about “race riots,” I think we almost always assume we’re talking about Detroit in 1967 or LA in 1992 — poor, urban, black, or Latinx people lashing out against economic and political oppression. But the first race riots in the US were all about “whiteness defending itself” (to borrow a phrase from Tressie McMillan Cottom). 

I grew up just outside of Detroit, and I learned a lot about the 1967 riots. But no one ever mentioned the 1943 riot, when white Detroiters formed a violent mob to prevent black Detroiters from moving into their neighborhood. Lynchings were perhaps the most effective form of white terrorism, as the recent discussions of Emmett Till’s murder should remind us.

To get to consequences, I’d assign Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fantastic “The Case for Reparations.” I actually do assign this piece in two classes already. Coates links white violence to black poverty, and specifically the black-white wealth gap. He focuses on the crucial issue of homeownership, which is the primarily basis of wealth for middle-class Americans, and that wealth gets transferred generation to generation. Most black people were denied the opportunity to buy houses up until the 1960s and 1970s, barred from buying houses in white neighborhoods, and only offered contracts with exploitive terms in black neighborhoods. The consequences couldn’t be clearer. 

Last month, Donald Trump canceled his planned Martin Luther King Jr. Day visit to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The unspecified “scheduling issues” that his transition team said were responsible for the scrapped plans were unfortunate. The president-elect really could have benefited from an educational experience about the lives of black people in America — namely, that they exist outside of the “inner city” and often have lives that aren’t defined by criminal activity.

It’s a concept Trump has appeared to struggle with since the early days of his campaign — and he hasn’t improved since he’s moved into the White House.

That was reaffirmed this week. Speaking at an event to commemorate African-American History Month on Wednesday, he touted the 8 percent of black voters who supported him, according to exit polls. “If you remember,” he said, “I wasn’t going to do well with the African-American community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting — and I won’t go into details — but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who had run in the past years.” (By the way, Republican nominee Mitt Romney earned 6 percent of the black vote in 2012, and 4 percent went for Sen. John McCain in 2008, each versus Barack Obama, the first black president.)

The now-predictable “inner city” reference didn’t get as much attention as the more shocking observation that Trump and White House press secretary Sean Spicer made comments suggesting they might believe that 19th-century abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass was still alive. But it was one more data point in a troubling pattern.

Recall that before Trump’s visit to the museum was canceled, he lashed out on Twitter in response to civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis referring to him as an “illegitimate” president. In that three-tweet attack, Trump characterized Lewis’s district as being “in horrible shape,” “falling apart,” and “crime infested.” He added that Lewis (who, prior to his career in Congress, had his skull fractured by law enforcement officers as he marched to demand voting rights for black people in 1965) “should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S.”

Trump’s argument “bears little relation to the facts,” Vox’s Dara Lind pointed out, explaining, “Atlanta is the heart of the black middle class in America. And while the city has a relatively high violent crime rate, it is almost certainly not as dangerous as Donald Trump (who routinely claims that America’s murder rate is at a 50-year high, and claims that black Americans ‘can’t walk out the door without getting shot’) thinks it is.” And why does he insist should Lewis focus specifically on the “burning” inner cities versus any other social issue in America? Unclear. Well, it’s a little clearer if you understand the way Trump thinks.

The president’s disregarded of demographic realities to force a link between black people and inner cities isn’t new, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping. Whether this habit is a racist dog whistle to his white supporters or a reflection of true ignorance is up for debate, but it’s definitely a pattern.

Trump cannot or will not discuss black people except in connection with “inner cities” and crime

Trump’s frequent use of “inner city” in his Twitter rant against Lewis was odd in part because the term, in the way he uses it, is really outdated. As Lind wrote:

Time and again, he conflates black residents with the “inner city,” and characterizes inner cities as a lawless, crumbling dump — not to mention a place where all votes are fraudulently cast. It’s a characterization that resembles actual black America (or increasingly nonblack urban America) less than it resembles 1980s dystopias like Escape From New York and Demolition Man. 

But he’s decided to pick this theme and run with it — and it started long before his comments this weekend. Just a few examples:

At the third presidential debate: “Our inner cities are a disaster,” Trump said. “You get shot walking to the store. They have no education, they have no jobs. I will do more for African Americans and Latinos than [Hillary Clinton] can ever do in 10 lifetimes. All she has done is talk to the African Americans and to the Latinos.”

At the second presidential debate: In response to an audience question about whether the candidates could be “a devoted president to all the people in the United States,” his answer included, “I would be a president for all of the people. African Americans, the inner cities. Devastating what’s happening to our inner cities.”

At the first presidential debate: All the candidates were asked how they would “heal [America’s racial] divide.” Trump implied that black people are universally trapped in — you guessed it — “the inner city,” with all of its associated criminal activity:

We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.

[…]

We have to know what we’re doing. Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything. We have to protect our inner cities because African-American communities are being decimated by crime.

Reacting to these statements in October 2016, Vox’s Victoria Massie identified what was already a pattern in Trump’s thinking, explained that “inner city” has very little to do with where black people actually live in the United States today. It’s become code for “cultural failings” versus actual geographic locations, and ignores the gentrification that is actually making urban areas less black. Relatedly, German Lopez has reported on the data proving that America is nothing close to the crime-ridden hellscape Trump repeatedly insists it is.

More recently, Trump has revealed that he doesn’t just link black people to inner cities as an insult when he’s angrily tweeting, or as a dramatic flourish when he’s making policy promises or trying to impress others. (Now, whom, exactly, he’s trying to impress is up for debate — Lind has observed that Trump is really speaking to white Americans when makes promises draped in insulting inaccuracies to black people.) He’s also seemingly used this thinking to decide on a political appointee.

“Ben Carson has a brilliant mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities,” Trump said in December to explain his choice to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “We have talked at length about my urban renewal agenda and our message of economic revival, very much including our inner cities.”

Though HUD’s work is not focused specifically on inner cities, Trump seems to think it is. So, given his history, it’s not surprising that he decided a neurosurgeon with no expertise in housing policy — but who happens to be black — was the perfect person to lead it.

The pattern reached an almost comical level when Trump announced that another black man with no relevant experience, talk show and game show host Steve Harvey (whose primary area of “expertise,” to use the term generously, is regressive relationship advice) would be working with his administration to bring “positive change to” — once again — “the inner cities.”

His recent Twitter threats to call “the feds” to Chicago to address gun violence there touch on all the same themes, according to Khadijah Costley White, an assistant professor in the department of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who researches race, gender, and politics in media.

“Media representations of black people often rely on stereotypes that paint black people as pathologically flawed: criminal, violent, neglectful, and subhuman. That is, the media often depicts the black community as the cause of their own problems, which are the persistent and substantive disparities in housing, education, employment, incarceration, health, and more,” she said. “By focusing on individual behavior and choices in describing problems in black neighborhoods, media messages both justify the condition of black people and distract from the larger systemic issues affecting their communities.”

In her view, Trump’s comments actually serve to justify police violence against black people by painting them as a constant threat and insist that black residents are the problem of Chicago, rather than understanding the structural inequality in Chicago as the key problem for black residents.

Maybe, during Black History Month, Trump will reschedule that visit to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. January’s cancellation means a missed opportunity for a crash course in the black experience in the United States — from current demographic realities to the fact that Frederick Douglass is no longer with us. It’s clearer every day that that was an education he really couldn’t afford to miss.

Fraternal twins can look as similar or dissimilar as any other siblings — from features to size and height to hair color. So when they’re born with different skin tones, it’s not really a big deal.

Or at least it shouldn’t be.

But somehow, thanks to the often confusing topic of racial identity, stories like People magazine’s “Biracial Twins Born in Illinois: ‘It’s So Rare’” still make headlines.

“Twins in Quincy, Illinois, are garnering attention and not just because they are super adorable,” People reported Tuesday. “Nine-month-old Kalani inherited her mother Whitney Meyer’s lighter complexion, while twin sister Jarani got her darker complexion from her father, Tomas Dean. Meyer is Caucasian, while Dean is African-American.”

The article goes on to suggest that one twin is black and the other is white. It doesn’t exactly spell that out, but very fact that it’s featured in a magazine along with their mother’s exclamation, “Sure enough they’re biracial twins!” suggests that these twins are “so rare” because their complexions are different enough that they belong to different racial groups.

It’s just the most recent in a series of stories of fraternal twins (almost always with one black parent and one white parent) born with such dramatic variations in complexion they’re perceived this way. The fascination with each these situations and their accompanying images is a reminder of how fluid and subjective the racial categories we’re all familiar with are.

What "black and white twins" can teach us about race: It's not (scientifically) real

Kalani and Jarani, are not the only twins whose tales are sensationalized in the “Black and White Twins: born a minute apart” vein. In reality, these stories are simply overblown reports on siblings who, because of normal genetic variations that show up in more striking ways in their cases, have different complexions. Their difference in skin tone is really quite similar to a set of twins with a pair of blue eyes and a pair of brown eyes, or one with freckles and one without.

But the fascination and excitement about them highlights just how flimsy and open to interpretation the racial categories we use around the world are.

It’s a reminder that the racial categories we use are fickle, flexible, open to interpretation, and have just as many exceptions as they do rules when it comes to their criteria for membership.

Racial classifications didn’t always exist. Of course, there were always people in different parts of the world who had some physical traits in common, but they weren’t forced into rigid categories. Discrimination and stereotypes existed, but they were based on country of origin, religion, or culture, not so-called scientific distinctions.

With the 1776 edition of his book On the Natural Variety of Mankind, German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is credited with creating one of the first race-based classifications. He decided on five categories: “Caucasian, the white race; Mongolian, the yellow race; Malayan, the brown race, Ethiopian, the black race, and American, the red race.”

Those are pretty rough categories, and they’ve changed over time, often for political reasons. And they still vary from place to place, depending on cultural perspectives. That helps explain why many people’s racial identity matches their siblings’ and also lines up perfectly with how the world sees them. But those whose racial identity is more complicated provide dramatic reminders that racial categories were created by humans, not biology, and not all humans agree with the exact criteria for membership. Racial classification is not at all an exact science.

Another recent example was the 2015 profile of Lucy and Maria Aylmer, whom the New York Post called a “set of biracial twins in the UK who are turning heads because one is black and the other is white.” The then-18-year-olds’ father identifies as white, and their mother is “half-Jamaican” (and, we’re to assume, identifies as black). The Post described the Aylmer twins as “biracial,” and also said in the very same sentence that one is white and the other is black. The fact that the two, despite having the same parents, did indeed think of themselves as belonging to two different racial groups (“I am white and Maria is black,” Lucy told the Post) proves there’s a lot more than biology or heritage informing racial identity.

So do the races of your parents decide if you’re black or white, or is it your looks? The way Kalani, Jarani, Maria, and Lucy are seen and categorized will depend on who’s doing the categorizing. And, hard as it may be to believe, there are no objective tests (even ancestry tests don’t come with a rule for exactly how much African ancestry makes a person “black”) to decide who’s right.

Race might not be “real,” but that doesn't mean it’s not important

Of course, none of this changes the fact that the concept of race is hugely important in our lives, in the United States, in the UK where the older set of twins live, and around the world.

There’s no question that the way people categorize Kalani and Jarani, and the way they think of themselves, will affect their lives.

That’s because even though race is highly subjective, racism and discrimination based on what people believe about race are very real. The racial categories to which we’re assigned, based on how we look to others or how we identify, can determine real-life experiences, inspire hate, drive political outcomes, and make the difference between life and death.

But it’s still important to remember that these consequences are the result of human-created racial categories that are based on shaky reasoning and shady motivations — like attempting to justify slavery. This makes the borders of the various groups impossible to pin down and renders modern debates about how particular people should identify futile.

Whether People readers think these two babies actually belong in different racial categories or not is a pretty low-stakes debate. But in a world where lazy, uncritical thinking about race — from the confusion about how to characterize President Obama that followed him throughout his term to Donald Trump’s regular conflation of black people with “inner city” residents to his assaults on Mexican immigrants as rapists — is an epidemic, it’s worth taking the time to think about the labels we apply and why.

President Trump took to Twitter Tuesday night to threaten, “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds.”

Putting aside the serious issues surrounding what would amount to a threat to impose martial law in the city, his attention to Chicago is part of a pattern. He’s previously publicly urged Mayor Rahm Emanuel to request federal assistance to deal with the city’s problem with violence — which, by the way, is real: CNN reported this week that, according to the Chicago Police Department, there have been 38 homicides and 182 shooting incidents in the city so far in 2017. (But it’s not the worst: In fact, as USA Today’s Brad Heath has reported, Chicago’s murder rate wasn’t even in the top 10 among large cities for the first half of 2016, according to the FBI’s recently released data for that period.)

And some will recall that on the campaign trail back in September, he advocated reviving and expanding the practice of stop and frisk. This now-defunct, ineffective, and unconstitutional New York City policing tactic — which allowed officers to search any person they suspected of a minor crime — was used disproportionately against black and Latino men. Trump later clarified that he didn’t want to see it applied nationwide — just in Chicago.

His fixation on the city seems to go hand in hand with both his repeated inaccurate statements about rising crime and his regular conflating of black people with “inner city” residents — using a term that has more symbolic than descriptive value.

His suggestion to “send in the feds” does not address the volume of firearms in Chicago (which make it there despite the strict gun control laws in the city), or the structural factors, like the city’s public housing policies, that experts have suggested create the conditions for violence. Instead, he’s simply announcing (or threatening) to solve the problem with force. And he’s using language that, taken in the context of his previous statement about “the blacks,” “the inner city,” and skyrocketing violence, has all the trappings of a racist dog political dog whistle.

So what purpose does it serve? While it’s impossible to know what the president’s actual motivations are, Chicago’s history and its longstanding role as the subject of racial dog whistles may shed light on the message he is sending — and the message many Americans are receiving — when he expresses alarm and despair over the violence in this particular city.

To help illuminate this, I spoke to Ramsin Canon, a Chicago-based attorney and activist and longtime political columnist and commentator, and Khadijah Costley White, an assistant professor in the department of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who researches race, gender, and politics in media.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

What do you know about the history of Chicago that could help people make sense of Trump’s tweets about sending the feds into the city, and his ongoing interest in the violence there?

Ramsin Canon

Trump is calling on some Reagan/Bush-era stuff for this, I think. I think some of this national vocabulary about Chicago goes back to Reagan’s “welfare queen” who was typically characterized as “in/from Chicago.”

Also in the ’70s to ’90s, Chicago started to get very closely associated in the national press with black and Latinx street gangs who were supposedly benefiting from anti-poverty programs. The Latin Kings, Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples started here, and the national press was particularly obsessed with the Black P. Stone Nation, which morphed into the El Rukns. The national press was obsessed with the El Rukns in the ’80s and ’90s (the leaders of the El Rukns famously met with Muammar Qaddafi and were indicted for conspiring to commit terrorist acts).

[The election of Harold Washington,] Chicago’s high-profile first black mayor in 1983 — which was considered unthinkable at the time — was used to fuel white migration to suburbs and fears about black “takeovers” of American cities, and contributed to the termination of direct federal funding to cities, moving it to block grants to states.

I think the Washington victory was a big watershed in white American psychology. Gary Rivlin’s Fire on the Prairie discusses this, as does Zoltan Hajnal’s “Changing White Attitudes to Black Political Leadership.” The Economist referred to the situation as “Beirut on the Lake.”

In the national consciousness, Harold’s win associated Chicago with black political power in cities, and tied it to stories about welfare queens and powerful street gangs.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

How do Trump’s recent comments about Chicago relate to his frequent mentions of “the inner city” (always in connection to black people) and crime?

Khadijah Costley White

For Trump, Chicago has become symbolic for unchecked and seemingly irrational black violence, which of course is implicitly perceived as an ongoing threat to the safety of white people. More than that, Chicago is also seen as producing President Obama, and he worked there as a community organizer and a legislator. And now it’s a city led by a Democrat, Obama’s own chief of staff. So drawing on Chicago as a disaster is actually a brilliant rhetorical move that frames black folks there as permanently deviant and threatening and a failure of Democratic leadership, subtly linking both to President Obama

Ramsin Canon

Besides Harold, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan are based here; Barack Obama cut his political teeth here. My guess is for Americans of a certain generation for whom Jackson and Farrakhan are stand-ins for black political activism in particular, Chicago and urban black power are entwined.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

What should people know about the discourse around race in the media to understand what these comments mean and how they’ll be interpreted?  

Khadijah Costley White

Media representations of black people often rely on stereotypes that paint black people as pathologically flawed: criminal, violent, neglectful, and subhuman. That is, the media often depicts the black community as the cause of their own problems, which are the persistent and substantive disparities in housing, education, employment, incarceration, health, and more. By focusing on individual behavior and choices in describing problems in black neighborhoods, media messages both justify the condition of black people and distract from the larger systemic issues affecting their communities.

Trump’s comments serve to justify police violence against black people by painting them as a constant threat and insist that black residents are the problem of Chicago, rather than understand structural inequality in Chicago as the key problem for black residents

Ramsin Canon

I’d add that locally, for as long as I can remember, in the suburbs and exurbs of Illinois, disputes over construction of low-income or even just rental housing often uses the coded language of attracting “Chicago people.”

Jenée Desmond-Harris

How do the tweets about Chicago fit in with Trump’s overall messaging strategy about race?

Khadijah Costley White

Well, Trump has consistently described black people as in need of his intervention and “law and order.” What’s particularly ironic about his fixation on Chicago is that it’s a city that has been shown to have one of the most corrupt police forces in the country, from torture and unlawful detention in Homan Square to the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. It’s a city where the so-called wielders of law and order don’t seem to subscribe to either. But Trump is saying more policing is necessary, which fits the pattern of his consistent exaggeration and lies about black violence.  

Jenée Desmond-Harris

What does you think someone who takes Trump’s comments at face value understands when they hear his references to Chicago?

Khadijah Costley White

I think they hear proof that black people are their own worst threats, which paints them as in need of white (i.e., “rational”) intervention and discipline. It sets the stage for the white savior trope that has existed since slavery, except here Trump frames himself as  savior. It’s a really effective rhetorical tool

Serena Williams, who’s widely considered the greatest woman tennis player ever, has made history again.

When she beat her sister Venus to win Saturday’s Australian Open final, she won her seventh Australian title and her 23rd Grand Slam singles title, moving ahead of Steffi Graf for the most major titles in the Open era, the Associated Press reported.

Breaking records is nothing new for Williams. As recently as September of last year, she defeated Kazakhstan’s  Yaroslava Shvedova in the fourth round of the US Open, giving her more Grand Slam victories (308) than any other tennis player.

But longtime fans know that along with celebrating, they should brace for more of the expressions of bigotry that have threatened to tarnish nearly every victory, magazine cover, and interview of Williams’s entire incredible career. All too often, at the same time she’s being celebrated, she’s targeted with outrageous racist and sexist comments.

For example, in the moments surrounding her win at the French Open in June 2015, Williams was compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive. One Twitter user wrote that Williams “looks like a gorilla, and sounds like a gorilla when she grunts while hitting the ball. In conclusion, she is a gorilla.” And another described her as “so unbelievably dominant … and manly.” ESPN sports commentator Bomani Jones responded to those reactions — as well as to the ones that dismissed them as subjective commentary — with a series of tweets.

This time, while hordes of fans celebrated her Australian Open win with tweets complimenting her for her athleticism, the predictable reactions were still there. One user joked that the Sydney suburb, Manly, was “named after her.”

What people who try to insist that comments like this one are merely innocent individual assessments of Williams’s looks don’t understand was that none of this was new, and none of it was random.

Indian Wells and beyond

At the 2001 BNP Paribas Open tournament in Indian Wells, California, Serena and Venus Williams were booed by fans who accused them of match fixing when Venus withdrew from a scheduled semifinal match. And then, according to the Williams family, things got worse:

“When Venus and I were walking down the stairs to our seats, people kept calling me ‘nigger,” her father and coach Richard Williams told USA Today at the time. One man, he said, threatened, “‘I wish it was ’75; we’d skin you alive.'”

Serena boycotted the event for more than a decade, only returning in 2015.

But the more recent commentary is a reminder that that didn’t mark an end to the racialized, sexualized, dehumanizing comments about her. It’s nearly impossible to imagine these comments being made about any of her peers; they’re a genre unto themselves, offering a case study in how biases make their way into media coverage. As James McKay and Helen Johnson write in a 2008 article published in Social Identities, about what they called the “pornographic eroticism and sexual grotesquerie in representations of African American sportswomen,” even so-called complimentary commentary about Williams’s athleticism is often grounded in stereotypes about black people (animalistic and aggressive) and black women specifically (masculine, unattractive, and overly sexual at once).

These remarks don’t always take the form of explicit racial slurs or threats of bodily harm, like the ones reported at Indian Wells did. But if Williams were to boycott every tennis event at which someone made an offensive, dehumanizing reference to her body’s size and shape, she’d have to quit the sport altogether.

Shameless, explicit racial stereotypes

It’s true: Williams is black, she’s very muscular, and she’s a skilled player. But breathless commentators sometimes talk about these qualities in a way that buys into what sociologist Delia Douglas, in an article on the Williams sisters published in 2004 by the Sociology of Sport Online, called “the essentialist logic of racial difference, which has long sought to mark the black body as inherently different from other bodies.” The result is that Williams’s athleticism is attributed to her ethnicity.

Dr. Peter Larkins, in an apparent attempt to compliment Williams, contributed his medical opinion in an interview with Australia’s Herald Sun for a 2006 piece that compared her fitness to a competitor’s. “It is the African-American race,” he explained. “They just have this huge gluteal strength. … Jennifer Capriati was clearly out of shape and overweight. With Serena, that’s her physique and genetics.”

This thinking is part of a tradition Douglas dubbed the “ancient grammar of black physicality.”

Ironically, Williams’s mistakes have also been attributed to her race. At the 2007 Sony Ericsson Championship in Miami, a heckler was ejected from the stands after yelling at Williams, “That’s the way to do it! Hit the net like any Negro would!”

But most of the racialized comments about Williams have been more carefully coded, rarely mentioning her ethnicity outright.

Inappropriate scrutiny and sexualization of her body's size and shape

There’s no way around it: The fascination with the size and shape of parts of Williams’s body that have nothing to do with her tennis skills is creepy. It’s also unsurprising. Ms. Magazine‘s Anita Little, writing in 2012, linked the sexualization of Williams’s physique to the legacy of the “Hottentot Venus,” an African woman whose real name was Saartjie Baartman, who was displayed before European audiences as a freak show attraction in the 1800s. “No matter how insanely successful black women like Serena become, the legacy of the Hottentot Venus will always be ready to rear its ugly head at an opportune moment,” she wrote.

Reading some of the remarks made about Williams’s curves, it would be easy to think you were privy to the observations of circus attendees gawking at an unfamiliar body, as opposed to journalists and sports commentators.

In 2002, after Williams competed at the US Open wearing a black spandex catsuit, Sunday Telegraph columnist Otis Gibson, seemingly struggling to find appropriate language in his critique of her outfit, wrote, “On some women [the catsuit] might look good. Unfortunately, some women aren’t wearing it. On Serena, it only serves to accentuate a superstructure that is already bordering on the digitally enhanced and a rear end that I will attempt to sum up as discreetly as possible by simply referring to it as ‘formidable.'”

In 2003, the satirical website Sportspickle published a piece that leveraged the preoccupation with this particular part of her body, in a piece starring Williams’s butt as the winner of the Australian Open:

Tennis star Serena Williams cruised to a victory in the finals of Australian Open women’s singles on Saturday and then dispatched her buttocks on Sunday to secure the doubles title. Serena beat her sister … to win her fourth-straight major. On Sunday, her butt muscled its way to a 6-2, 6-1 title victory over the doubles pair of Virginia Ruano Pascual and Paola Suarez. The feat is the first-known occurrence of a body part winning a professional athletic contest.

It’s not all white observers who make these types of comments. Jason Whitlock, a black sportswriter, slammed Williams in a 2009 Fox Sports column for having “chosen to smother” her beauty “in an unsightly layer of thick, muscled blubber.” His main gripe, unsurprisingly, was about what he called her “oversized back pack.” He explained, “I am not fundamentally opposed to junk in the trunk, although my preference is a stuffed onion over an oozing pumpkin.”

This type of disgusted scrutiny has targeted Williams’s breasts, too. In commentary that was demonstrably wrong, given her astronomical success in tennis, the Telegraph‘s Matthew Norman wrote in 2006 that they were likely to hinder her career.

Generally, I’m all for chunky sports stars … but tennis requires a mobility Serena cannot hope to achieve while lugging around breasts that are registered to vote in a different US state from the rest of her.

In 2012, Williams’s friend the Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki brought to life all the scrutiny of Williams’s body, mocking her curves by stuffing her own top and tennis skirt with towels at an exhibition match. Williams responded to those who thought the joke was in bad taste by saying, “I don’t think she meant anything racist by it,” but added, “If people feel [that it seems racist], she should take reason and do something different next time.”

Just a silly stunt without any intent to harm? Possibly, but it was still part of a troubling pattern. As Ms. Magazine‘s Little wrote, “If Caroline truly wanted to impersonate Serena, she could have padded her legs and arms to represent Serena’s muscled physique, but she targeted specific body parts — breasts and booty — for her little prank. The supposed hypersexuality of a black woman’s anatomy is a ceaseless trope that is always used to get a laugh. The racist undertones of Caroline’s stunt may not have been deliberate, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.”

Hyperbolic descriptions of her physical power

“The prominence of narratives that depict the Williams sisters as ‘overwhelming’ and ‘destroying’ their female opponents are significant for they call upon enduring stereotypes of the ‘dangerous’ black body and the ‘strong black woman,'” Douglas wrote, noting the way both Venus and Serena’s strong black female bodies were “described as ‘pummeling,’ ‘overwhelming’ and ‘overpowering’ (apparently frail and powerless) white female opponents.”

It’s true that sports metaphors include references to violence: “crushed,” “killed,” and “destroyed” aren’t unusual words to hear when describing wins. But descriptions of Serena’s power and the strength behind her victories have taken this type of hyperbole to another level — one that suggests she’s absolutely unparalleled in her strength and capacity for violence, especially as compared with her white opponents.

Writing for Rolling Stone in 2013, Stephen Roderick observed, “Sharapova is tall, white and blond, and, because of that, makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas.”

In 2014, Russian tennis official Shamil Tarpischev infamously called the Williams sisters “brothers,” saying, “It’s frightening when you look at them. But really you just need to play against the ball.” In response, Ms. Magazine‘s Corinne Gaston wrote, “The type of body-shaming in Tarpishchev’s comment, while subtle, comes gift-wrapped in a triad from hell: misogyny, racism and transphobia.”

An insistence on seeing her as unusually aggressive and (literally) animalistic

The Telegraph’s Sue Mott seemed to embrace Tarpischev’s (and others’) characterization of Williams as scary and take it another, dehumanizing level, when she wrote in 2002 that Williams and Venus had “evolved into players of Amazonian physique and piranha mentality.”

Even when Williams loses, she’s perceived as an untamed source of power. Describing Serena’s 2009 US Open loss, an ESPN column noted that Williams’s opponent “seemed destined to win the match anyways,” describing how she’d returned “Serena’s savage strokes.”

And if it’s not clear what words like “savage” imply, some writers have spelled it out. In 2001, sportscaster Sid Rosenberg literally called Venus an “animal” and said she and Serena would fit better posing for National Geographic magazine than for Playboy. He later told the Daily News that his comments weren’t racist, “just zoological.”

David Leonard, chair of the department of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University, compiled the following tweets, which he recorded after Williams won her fifth Wimbledon title in 2012,  in a post for his personal blog arguing that she faced racist treatment from the media and fans alike:

• Today a giant gorilla escaped the zoo and won the womens title at Wimbledon… oh that was Serena Williams? My mistake.
• Serena Williams is a gorilla
• Watching tennis and listening to dad talk about how Serena Williams looks like gorilla from the mist
• I don't see how in the hell men find Serena Williams attractive?! She looks like a male gorilla in a dress, just saying!
• You might as well just bang a gorilla if you're going to bang Serena Williams
• Earlier this week I said that all female tennis players were good looking. I was clearly mistaken: The Gorilla aka Serena Williams.
• serena williams looks like a gorilla
• Serena Williams is half man, half gorilla! I'm sure of it.
• Serena Williams look like a man with tits, its only when she wears weave she looks female tbh, what a HENCH BOLD GORILLA!
• Serena Williams is a gorilla in a skirt playing tennis #Wimbledon
• My god Serena Williams is ugly! She's built like a silver backed gorilla

“The racism raining down on Serena’s victory parade highlights the nature of white supremacy. … her career has been one marred by the politics of hate, the politics of racism and sexism,” Leonard wrote.

The racism that underlies the characterizations of her as hypersexual, aggressive, and animalistic also means that when she dares to express frustration, she’s stamped with the infamous “angry black woman” stereotype.

It’s as bogus as the rest of the labels she’s endured, but given the slights against her over the years, she has every right to be outraged.

“Woman is the ni**er of the world.”

Jasleen Kohli was at Saturday’s Women’s March in Los Angeles when she saw a white demonstrator holding a sign emblazoned with that phrase.

She was taken aback by this bold display of a racial slur. The saying turned song lyric was initially made famous by the seemingly well-intended artist Yoko Ono, and later adapted by her white husband, John Lennon, more than 40 years ago. Aside from the obvious painful associations, the slogan has long been criticized for its embedded assumption that “women” doesn’t already include women who are already called the n-word and its failure to contemplate the ways in which black women are doubly oppressed.

Kohli, who is South Asian and directs the critical race studies program at the University of California Los Angeles’s school of law, says she expressed her concerns to the sign holder, who promptly dismissed her with instructions to “think about it.”

This experience “reaffirmed the limits of non-intersectional feminist solidarity quite clearly,” said Kohli. “She must have marched for quite some time without being confronted by enough people to even consider how offensive it was for her to carry such a sign.”

To be clear, there’s no indication that signs bearing racial slurs or conflicts between white women and women of color participating in the hundreds of Women’s Marches around the world were at all common. Quite the opposite: By and large, attendees of all backgrounds said they reported feeling unity and solidarity.

Still, the exchange echoed a tension that has simmered alongside the sense of triumph that the Women’s March created for so many. During what University of South Carolina Beaufort sociology professor Deborah J. Cohan characterizes as “a moment of potential racial reckoning, for feminism and for the larger culture,” a question loomed over the march’s planning and lingered in its aftermath: Is the mainstream feminist movement finally ready to treat the perspectives and experiences of women of color with the same gravity as those of their white counterparts?

Among some black, Latina, Asian American, and Native American feminists, cautious optimism mixes with deep cynicism on this topic. For the women who harbor doubts, these reservations are based less on what happened at the recent marches and more on the many demoralizing lessons of history — some of them as recent as the last presidential election.

When it came to planning and programming, the Women’s March became a model of intersectionality

The public discussions about the relationship of women of color to the march have centered on the term “intersectionality.” As Lehigh University’s Monica Miller has explained it, “An intersectional feminist approach understands that categories of identity and difference cannot be separated and doesn’t abandon one category of analysis such as gender or sexuality in favor of (over)analyzing others such as race, and class.”

In this context, the concern that’s surrounded the march specifically has had to do with whether it — and the movement some hope it will ignite at the dawn of the Donald Trump administration — prioritizes the unique issues facing nonwhite women. That’s something that, historically, has not often happened in the United States.

When it came to the question of whether the march would live up to this ideal, there were some significant early hiccups. Bob Bland, who conceptualized the event, and all of the other original organizers were white women. This raised concerns about whether the march’s agenda would speak to women who weren’t. The diversity deficiency was largely addressed when three prominent women of color and experienced activists — Tamika D. Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour — signed on as national co-chairs.

Even still, small fault lines were revealed, as the New York Times reported in early January that some white women were put off by discussions of race and racism on the march’s Facebook page and decided not to attend.

But when the official policy platform — a four-page document titled “Guiding Vision and Defining Principles” — was released the week before the march, there was little to criticize. Progressive feminists of a range of backgrounds were pleased to see that it made painstaking and explicit efforts to be inclusive of all racial groups, economic classes, and gender identities. It repeatedly emphasized the arenas in which sexism can be especially harmful to women of color and named black, Latina, and Native leaders among the past leaders whom the event would honor.

The official program of the main march in Washington, DC, echoed this stance, with a diverse lineup of speakers, several of whom delivered hard-hitting commentary on race. Angela Davis told the crowd, “Inclusive and intersectional feminism … calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.” She listed “resistance to the attacks on Muslims and on immigrants, disabled people,” “state violence perpetrated by the police and through the prison industrial complex,” and “institutional and intimate gender violence, especially against trans women of color,” among her priorities for action.

Ashley Judd, reciting a poem by 19-year-old Nina Donovan, drilled down into the ways racism intersects with sexism, modeling for the massive crowd how an intersectional approach to feminism sounds from a white woman’s perspective. In particular, she emphasized the fact that pay is particularly unequal for women of color:

I am not nasty like the combo of Trump and Pence being served up to me in my voting booths. I’m nasty like the battles my grandmothers fought to get me into that voting booth. I’m nasty like the fight for wage equality. Scarlett Johansson, why were the female actors paid less than half of what the male actors earned last year? See, even when we do go into higher-paying jobs, our wages are still cut with blades sharpened by testosterone. Why is the work of a black woman and a Hispanic woman worth only 63 and 54 cents of a white man’s privileged daughter? This is not a feminist myth. This is inequality. So we are not here to be debunked. We are here to be respected. We are here to be nasty.

While there’s no reliable reporting on the racial breakdown of attendees, images shared from the event suggest a largely white group that nonetheless had significant numbers of racially and ethnically diverse participants, many of whom were outspoken about their particular perspective. Among the photos that circulated widely on social media: three Native American women with a sign that read, “Resisting pussy grabbers since 1492. Indigenous women rising”; an elderly Japanese-American woman holding one that said “Locked up by US Prez, 1942-1946, NEVER AGAIN,” referring to her time in an internment camp; several young black women displaying large posters proclaiming, “America is Black, it is Native, it wears a hijab, it is Spanish-speaking, it is migrant, it is a woman, it is here, it has been here, and it’s not going anywhere.”

Notably, women of color weren’t alone in highlighting the racial dynamics of inequality and of the feminist movement. In a nod to black women’s long and often underrecognized history of activism, a white man held a sign that said, “Screw it, I’ll do it — black women” (it also included the hashtag #ThankYou). A white woman’s placard called on her demographic to “do better.” In a Mother Jones video asking attendees for their post-march pledges, one promised, “I’m going to use my white privilege for good.” During the rally, attendees were led in chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name.”

“Of the thousands of women of color who joined the march, many held signs that specifically mentioned racial equality alongside the traditional feminist planks such as equal pay and reproductive rights. And there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of white women who also carried placards proclaiming their support for Muslim rights, Black Lives Matter and immigrant women,” McClatchy’s Hannah Allam reported on the DC march.

Sarah Jackson, an assistant professor of communications at Northeastern University who researches the ways in which race and gender are constructed in national debates around citizenship and inequality, says all of that is significant, and a reason for optimism. “We just saw the largest street protests in US history,” she said, “and that these protests were organized with women at the helm, and in the context of a clearly articulated platform that incorporates a wide range of intersectional concerns, is something to celebrate.”

But some women of color, even those who took part in the march, are skeptical about the future. The reason: history.

Jackson said the weeks and months after the march will provide the real test of whether the intersectional approach march organizers emphasized will take hold in real life.

“Now, once people return to their homes, communities, and workplaces, that will be the test as to if these intersectional issues truly can enjoy a central place in American feminism,” she said. “The responsibility falls on women with the most privilege to ensure that they center those with less in political conversations and efforts in the future. Unfortunately, this is where many have good reason feel skeptical.”

But that skepticism, she said, is based in history.

“Historically, and today, it has largely been women of color, queer and lesbian women, poor women, sex workers, and women with disabilities whose lived experiences have been excluded from the gains of mainstream feminism,” Jackson said.

She explained that the feminist movement of the 1960s “unabashedly borrowed from strategies and language developed by members of the civil rights movement before them,” but when it came to their demands, many middle-class white feminists were “more concerned with issues like the dismantling of the ‘happy housewife’ myth and access to elite professional opportunities than the issues faced by black women and other women of color.” These women had of course been in the workforce (out of necessity and against their will) and dealing with racism and sexism for quite some time.

One piece of history that some feminists said must be reckoned with is recent: voting patterns in election that put Donald Trump in the White House. Fifty-three percent of white women voters voted for Trump, while 94 percent of black women and 68 percent of Latinas voted for Hillary Clinton.

An image of activist Angela Peoples holding a sign that read, “Don’t forget, white women voted for Trump,” has become one of the iconic images of the event in some circles.

The point of drawing attention to these numbers wasn’t to accuse the white women in attendance at the march of supporting Trump. Rather, the exit polling on race and gender is a reminder that racism can’t be ignored in the fight against sexism, said Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, an assistant professor of women’s studies at Texas Women’s University.

“Since the 19th century, black women activists, later joined by other women of color in the 20th century, have insisted on the importance of problematizing race in the struggle for women’s rights. As such, the burden of making race central to women’s social justice movements has mostly fallen on the shoulders of women of color,” Phillips-Cunningham said. “Donald Trump winning the presidency makes clear that white feminists, who were not previously committed to challenging racism, must address it moving forward.”

Kohli, who saw the “woman is the ni**er of the world” sign, said her experience was part of what contributed to her mixed feelings about the potential for a truly inclusive reemergence of the feminist movement, despite other positive moments at the march.

“I went from being a bit cynical and wary at the outset to being surprisingly teary-eyed at the metro station upon seeing the huge lines of people, back to being cynical again after the incident with this woman [with the sign], and then moved and inspired by the post-march protest outside of the LA Metropolitan Detention Center organized primarily by immigrants and women of color and filled with so many young activists as well as longtimers,” she said.

Feminist and cultural commentator Jamilah Lemieux wrote in a piece for Colorlines that she had mixed feelings about the march, and ultimately decided not to attend. Why? “That sense of loyalty, interconnectedness, accountability and shared struggle simply isn’t there” with the white women who she knew would be at the march in the biggest numbers.

The experience she anticipated was confirmed by some attendees, who reported seeing women hugging police officers, as if to distance themselves from the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticisms of racialized police violence.

Others used social media to express disappointment about the dismissiveness they observed toward black speakers from attendees who didn’t seem to know who Angela Davis was and didn’t seem interested in her remarks.

Among some attendees, there was even the critique that pink knitted “pussy hats” that became part of the march’s unofficial uniform represented a color palette associated primarily with white women’s anatomy. “For me it has to also do with these false notions of sisterhood,” said Yaba Blay, the Dan T. Blue endowed chair in political science at North Carolina Central University, who has studied the way colorism combines with racism and affects institutions. In a response that was echoed by some transgender women, she pointed out, “It is not our anatomy that would make us sisters.”

But most of the skepticism — and cynicism — wasn’t about observations from the actual march, but rather about what would happen next.

“White women who are marching, I swear to what ever Gods there are … this better not be a one day thing. I hope you’re ready,” Lemieux tweeted. Others publicly wondered what would happen in response to the high-profile death of a black woman, like Renisha McBride, who was shot in 2013 when she sought help by knocking on a door after her car broke down.

Would white women show the same level of despair and solidarity they did at Trump’s misogynistic comments? Not everyone was convinced. As one sign from the weekend’s events read, “I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next Black Lives Matter march, right?”

What has to happen next: conversations and actions that leave “we’re all the same” feminism in the past

Phillips-Cunningham said the results of the election give white feminists an opportunity to “interrogate whiteness and patriarchy within white communities. This means, for example, that they must initiate difficult dialogues with their family members who voted for Trump. When those sorts of intimate and uncomfortable discussions take place, then feminists across race and ethnicity will be able to struggle against the presidential regime in the most transformational way possible.”

A common pushback against this kind of intersectional approach to feminism — which is easy to stumble upon if you follow social media debates about the role of race in the march — is that it emphasizes differences instead of similarities.

“Since feminism relies on solidarity, some people fall victim to the temptation to push all other issues and identities aside so that gender is primary,” explained Aviva Dove-Viebahn, an honors faculty fellow at Arizona State University specializing in women and gender studies. “But intersectional feminism — and that’s how we must move forward if there’s any hope of coalition building, any hope of real change — cannot allow for that to happen.”

“We’re going to have to fight the temptation to say, ‘We’re all the same,’ as a kind of rallying cry,” she said.

That mandate is not just about words and language. It’s the basis of a mindset that will be required if feminists are to even contemplate some of the issues the march’s statement of principles calls for, like “accountability and justice for police brutality,” “[dismantling] the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system,” and affirming that all domestic and caretaking work is work and that women — especially women of color — bear the brunt of that burden.

Were the weekend’s marches, with their diverse leadership, progressive speakers, and intersectional platforms, an indication of a long-awaited turning point and the beginning of a feminist movement that will truly speak to all women? “It’s hard to say,” said Dove-Viebahn. “That’s a question for historians 20, 30 years from now. I hope so.”

The organizers of Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington, which has brought hundreds of thousands of participants to the nation’s capital and inspired satellite events around the country and world, say the event’s ultimate goal is “to affirm our shared humanity and pronounce our bold message of resistance and self-determination.”

But a promotional video posted to YouTube by the organizers of the event provides a more personal perspective, in which participants explain why they’re attending.

The statements, made by a diverse group of women, men, and children, include: “Because women’s rights are human rights,” “Because diversity is beautiful,” “Because my grandmother fought for the right to vote,” “Because no means no,” “Because I want my sister to be president one day,” “Because there’s nothing funny about inequality,” “Because we can’t do nothing,” “Because I can’t breathe,” and “Because together we’re stronger.”

These are, of course, only a small sample of the reasons. Additionally, the organizers issued a detailed statement of principles explaining what they’re calling for, including: “dismantling the gender and racial inequalities within the criminal justice system,” calling for freedom from sexual violence, affirming that all domestic and caretaking work is work, and that women — especially women of color — bear the brunt of that burden, and demanding comprehensive reproductive rights.

The question of whether the march’s goals speak to women of all backgrounds has been a theme leading up to the event, and the organizers have taken pains to communicate that the version of feminism it reflects is intersectional. This video, with its racially diverse cast of characters, seems to reflect an ongoing commitment to that effort.

Although 220,000 people committed to going to the DC march on Facebook, event organizers are expecting half a million people to participate, DC’s deputy mayor tweeted Saturday.