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Michael Vadon / flickr (CC by 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman

White people clarify that they don’t like Donald Trump either

As Trump rallies around his supporters, critics are calling his campaign racist.

 

Deron Dalton

Tech

Posted on Dec 16, 2015   Updated on May 27, 2021, 12:02 pm CDT

Donald Trump has mobilized his supporters around policies that many critics have blasted as Islamophobia, racist against black Americans, and xenophobic against Latino immigrants. 

But what do other white people have to say about all this?

As activist groups like Deport Racism have slammed Trump’s divisive rhetoric, musician Heather Bentley created the #WhitesAgainstTrump hashtag last week, calling for fellow white people to stand up against the 2016 Republican presidential frontrunner.

The hashtag lingered in relative obscurity until Tuesday afternoon, when comedian W. Kamau Bell tweeted the hashtag and an article he wrote for Salon, boosting #WhitesAgainstTrump to trend on Twitter during the GOP debate.

Bell asked white people to use the hashtag during the GOP debate.

Many used the hashtag to express their concerns with Trump and how he’s rallied supporters around race- and religion-based rhetoric.

https://twitter.com/YoyodyneInc/status/676933184492339200

https://twitter.com/JoshGwiazdowski/status/677161659077627905

https://twitter.com/AudraEqualityMc/status/676960020064509953

https://twitter.com/Payitforward87/status/677125319447453696

As the hashtag trended, critics blasted Bell and called the amplification of #WhitesAgainstTrump itself racist. According to Bell, these critics were missing the point.

https://twitter.com/deutschephysik_/status/676953825127899137

https://twitter.com/ButtChucks/status/677151710956138496

Trump has come under fire repeatedly during the 2016 campaign: after his calls to deport all 11.3 million illegal immigrants; after video captured his supporters beating and calling a Black Lives Matter protester in Alabama racial slurs as he was removed from the rally weeks ago; after he called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the U.S.; and again, most recently, after a video captured Trump’s supporters at a Las Vegas rally calling a Muslim protester racial slurs while violently removing him.

Michael Vadon / flickr (CC by 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman

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*First Published: Dec 16, 2015, 3:28 pm CST