The race card is being played so often that it’s losing its effectiveness. That’s both good and bad. There are still some race issues in our nation but playing the race card every time, someone disagrees with a person, is immoral.
The latest comments by Pres. Trump have been declared to be racist. They are not. He was very clear in what he was saying. You don’t fix the USA by making it look like nations that are failing governmentally and economically.
Conservatives have been equally critical of white people like Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Bernie Sanders.
While I don’t debate for a living, I’ve been involved in lots of debates over the past 35 years. Some of them have been before live audiences in a formal debate structure, on the radio with callers, books, or (mostly) with emails and comment posters. A few years ago I did three radio shows over the same number of days where the callers got to ask me questions about a particular topic. It was the most fun I had in a long time.
In the many years of doing this type of work, there are a few things you learn. One of them is “be prepared.”
I debated an ACLU lawyer from Beverly Hills on the role religion played in America’s founding. I prepared a notebook of possible questions and references to original source documents . . . just in case. At one point in the debate, my opponent quoted a paragraph of a source document that I had included in my binder. When he finished citing it, I immediately responded by reading the rest of the quotation that changed the meaning of the point he was trying to make. Context is everything.
A lot of people will make a claim with nothing to back it up. “They’ve heard it through the grapevine,” so to speak. A simple “what is the source for your claim or statistic” usually shuts them up. Of course, you must be ready if your opponent offers a source. But not all sources are created equal. An “independent source” can be cover for a prejudiced source. I always ask for a book, article, web address, page number, author, etc.
Most people are not prepared to deal with facts, so they resort to debate tricks. The first trick is to question your sources. Here you have to be ready. If you reference a source, you must be ready to back it up.
In the end, however, I’ve found that most debate opponents resort to trying to destroy the character of the person they’re debating by making unsubstantial charges. This works because most audiences are ignorant. They fall for every logical fallacy in the book.
For example, an ad hominem argument is no argument at all. Attacking the “man” is to attack the argument, and they are not the same thing. When a person has nothing, he goes after the person he can’t answer with logic or facts by leading with innuendo. For example:
Billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump blasted President Barack Obama’s senior adviser Robert Gibbs Sunday as “vicious and hateful” after the former press secretary called Trump a “right-wing nut job” on Fox News.
“I was a great student at a great school, Wharton School of Finance,” Trump told Newsmax late Sunday night. “I built a net worth in excess of $8 billion, built a tremendous company, and have employed tens of thousands of people. I hardly see where I qualify under his definition.”
“The Obama representatives like Robert Gibbs attack people viciously, but people like me will not be silent and will answer them back,” Trump said. “It is a shame that they are so vicious and hateful and that is why the country is so terribly divided”"
The favorite and most overused ad hominem attack is to call someone a “racist.” Over and over again leftists pull the race card. By definition, to attack a liberal policy is to be a racist by definition since many programs have been designed to help the poor, of which blacks make up a disproportionate percentage. A majority of people are seeing through the charade.
If you’re white and you say that a black woman is angry, this is translated as “angry black woman,” thus, racist.
Concerning voter ID laws, former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech to the NAACP “referring specifically to a law being implemented in Texas. ‘We call those poll taxes.’” Poll taxes were designed to keep blacks from voting. What? Everyone who is voting should show an ID. How does “everyone” become racist?
I found this helpful in a review of Richard Thompson Ford’s book The Race Card:
Mr. Ford, a clear and lively writer, probes and prods and provokes as he steers his way through this contested terrain. He takes dead aim at racial opportunists, opponents of affirmative action, multiculturalists and the myriad rights organizations trying to hitch a ride on the successes of the black civil rights movement. All, in different ways, he argues, are playing the race card. All are harming the cause of civil rights.
In a chapter titled “The Wild Card: Racism by Analogy” Mr. Ford energetically rejects claims that the overweight, the unattractive or people with tongue studs and blue hair should enjoy the same protections as racial minorities. “Fat is not the new black,” reads one of the book’s blunt subheads. Smokers forced to puff outdoors are not victims of Jim Crow.
The real racists are those who make these charges. It assumes that blacks are children who are in constant need of supervision and dominance by their political masters since they are unable to care for themselves. Elections happen every two years. The assumption of the race-baiters is that two years is not enough time to get a free ID for voting identification.
Black racist Touré said that the Republicans were seeking the “niggerization” of President Obama when they describe him as a liberal extremist. What do you call it when a liberal describes a white candidate as a right-wing nut job? Can the accuser be a “racist”? Of course not. And what can be said about the charge that a white president is also a liberal extremist? My guess is that because the policies affect blacks, that charge also must be racist.
Overplaying the race card is having an impact on the political narrative. Whites and Blacks are tired of it. It’s worn out its effectiveness. The charge trivializes real racist beliefs, attitudes, and actions. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. After a while, no one will listen.
The race card is most often pulled when an argument is weak. Instead of arguing acts, ideology, and results, the race card is pulled to end the debate. Consider the following from actor Kevin Costner:
[Race] gets talked about, but what I think happens is a lot of times a conversation gets stopped dead in its tracks because if somebody thinks they are losing, race comes up even if the word has no place in the discussion. It trumps the point someone is trying to make, or what they are trying to talk about, and it has no place there.
Race has a place in our country and a terrible one, and it is one we are still grappling with, but oftentimes we just feel we know how to talk about it, and if someone feels they are losing the argument the conversation breaks up, it stops, it just comes to a shrieking halt.
Amen!