No Joe, Trump is Not the First Racist President

Joe Biden said recently that Trump was our first racist president.

Joe is wrong, completely.

Yes, I agree Trump is racist. He doesn’t even try to hide it much and when people attempt to pretend he isn’t, they have to do lots of creative mental gymnastics.

No, it’s the “first” part that I object to.

Forty-four men have been US presidents. It would be very difficult to find one in the first thirty who wasn’t racist, most were very openly so.

At least a dozen held slaves.

Andrew Jackson was viciously racist, owing his election to his reputation for killing Indians. Woodrow Wilson was also openly racist. (Both were Democrats, as Biden surely knows).

Lincoln, a Republican, freed the slaves, but he was a man of his time, known for telling racist jokes. He fought the civil war more to preserve the Union than to free the slaves, much less for equality. One of the best things that can be said about him is that he was open to new ideas and his views changed over time. When the opportunity came, he helped push for the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. But it would be a big stretch to say that even he wasn’t a racist.

Things have gotten somewhat better. Presidents of both parties have nudged us toward progress, particularly Eisenhower and Johnson. (Though both had their shortcomings on the issue).

It’s true that most recent presidents have been more tactful on race than Trump, but they’ve been more tactful on just about every other issue as well. Trump is both racist and crude. Even Nixon’s Southern Strategy was more subtle.

Most of our presidents have been openly racist, probably not because they were bad people (though some were), but because they were politicians and we were a racist country that would not have elected a non-racist, much less an anti-racist.

But Biden is just wrong here on the history. And it matters. We’d like to think we’re better than this now. Maybe, but there’s still a long way to go. And we can’t make that improvement unless we’re honest about where we have been and how we got here. History matters because it shaped the present.

Racism is built into the foundation of the country. That doesn’t mean we are evil people. It means that the idea of America as a land of equality and opportunity is aspirational. We aren’t going to get where we want to get on these issues until we’re willing to kick at that foundation a bit.

At the risk of mixing metaphors, that means we’ll have to kill some sacred cows. But that’s OK. As Mark Twain (another man of his time, especially on these issues) noted, sacred cows make the best hamburger.

—

***