ThinkProgress
By Esther Lee
October 15, 2015
Donald
Trump supporters are not just passionate about his anti-immigrant
rhetoric; they’re also living out his outrage in real-time.
A
man spat in an immigrant activist’s face during a campaign rally for
the Republican presidential candidate in Richmond, Virginia on Wednesday
night. The incident occurred
soon after immigrant activists briefly interrupted the Republican
presidential candidate as Trump launched into an anti-immigrant tirade
about giving “free stuff” to “illegal immigrants.”
During
his speech, Trump referenced this week’s Democratic presidential
debate, when candidates like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
discussed their positions on providing
services to undocumented immigrants. “They just couldn’t give away
things fast enough,” Trump said. “They want heath care for illegal
immigrants. They want drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. They
want, listen to this, Social Security for illegal immigrants.”
At
that point, progressive activists began loudly protesting, but a small
group of Trump supporters drowned them out. Local CBS reporter Garrett
Haake recorded an encounter
in which a blue-shirted Trump supporter repeatedly shouted “Fuck you”
to the activists and spat in the face of one man before walking away.
Since
June, when Trump first launched his campaign by suggesting that Mexican
immigrants are rapists, criminals, or drug dealers, he has consistently
generated the most
applause from broadly condemning the immigrant community. But his
charged political rhetoric is having real-life consequences.
By
now, incidents like this at Trump rallies are becoming routine. In
fact, his supporters have spit on immigrant activists in the past.
Trump
supporters have told immigrant activists to “clean my hotel room,
bitch;” shouted “if it ain’t white, it ain’t right” while ripping up
posters; told Latino U.S.
citizens to “go home” while grabbing their hair and spitting on them;
told prominent journalist and U.S. citizen Jorge Ramos to “get out of my
country;” joked “you can shoot all the people you want that cross
illegally;” and beat up and urinated on the homeless.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of incidents against Latinos.
There’s
some evidence to back up this phenomenon. A slew of behavioral
psychology studies have found that xenophobic rhetoric can and will
embolden supporters to normalize
racism.
A
1980 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study found that when
participants were given favorable and unfavorable information about
in-group and out-group members,
they were more likely to remember the unfavorable information about the
out-group members. A 2001 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
study found that when people consider others as part of a general group,
rather than as individuals, they may have
greater feelings of fear and lower levels of trust in their
interactions with them. And a 2004 Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology study found that exposure to “disparagement humor” that
denigrates, belittles, or maligns an individual or social group
“increases tolerance of discriminatory events for people high in
prejudice toward the disparaged group.” The study also found that it
“expands the bounds of appropriate conduct, creating a norm of tolerance
of discrimination.”
And
even if science hasn’t done enough to prove that xenophobic rhetoric
can change attitudes about immigrants, there’s always historical
evidence. It happened when right-wing
extremism emerged in eastern Germany. It happened when Japan failed to
acknowledge its role in the genocide and forced prostitution that took
place during World War II. And now it appears that Trump’s rhetoric is
making it acceptable for supporters to feel
justified in treating immigrant advocates with vehemence.
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