Michaela Angela Davis: All Trump Voters Are Racist

Wednesday on CNN’s “New Day,” culture critic Michaela Angela Davis said “yes” all the people who voted for Donald Trump are racist.

Partial transcript as follows:

DAVIS: They made a connection together right when Trump touted her ratings, almost took credit for them, said it was about us. They made their relationship clear. And he’s made it more popular, I think, to be openly racist. And I think it’s important we don’t make Trump seem this untouchable thing, that no one gets to be Trump but Trump. Tens of millions of people voted for him after he showed his cards for years.

BERMAN: Are you suggesting that they’re racist —

DAVIS: Absolutely yes. Yes.

BERMAN: All the people that voted for Donald Trump are racist?

DAVIS:  Yes. They may not be violently racist, they may not be — he’s targeted. He’s very clear and strategic. Look anti-blackness is a strategy that has been the foundation of part of the American project. So if you — we have to grapple with the idea if that if you heard someone at their rally say ‘build a wall, kill them all.’ If you heard someone say—

CAMEROTA: You know that people interpret this differently and to paint as broad a brush saying you are that saying everybody who voted for him is racist. They’ll say that people compartmentalize during Bill Clinton and you overlook the things that you’re uncomfortable with because you like the policy. You can’t paint that broad of a brush stroke.

DAVIS: Racism isn’t broad. What you are not hearing is there’s so many different levels of racism and how it works itself out.

CAMEROTA: I hear you.

DAVIS: There’s levels to how it is interpreted and there’s levels to how it is acted out and most of the time we are operating in racist structures, so you as an individual may not —may not understand that you are racist but you are working in a racist structure. So that’s how policemen of color can be participatory. So it’s not — it is so complicated and that’s why we have to have sustained complicated, nuanced conversations that ground themselves in history.

(h/t NTK)