Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and America's long history of racist disinformation

Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and America's long history of racist disinformation
Donald Trump's racial insults belong to a lengthy history of false, fantastical and contradictory claims

By Joe Hayden
Professor of journalism, University of Memphis
Published October 6, 2024 6:00AM (EDT)


In the spring of 1892, Ida B. Wells had had enough. The 29-year-old Memphis editor was sick of reading about the lynchings of Black Americans and angry about the bogus excuse often used to justify them: fraudulent claims of sexual assault — “the same old racket,” as she called it. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women.”

And so she set out to convince other Americans. Wells collected data for hundreds of cases, investigated dozens herself and even hired private investigators, and carefully tracked and catalogued how those cases were reported. What she found was a concerted newspaper campaign of false propaganda that encouraged lynching and then excused or covered it up.

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Disinformation about Black people is one of the oldest traditions in America. It turns out that, for centuries, what white people have said and written about communities of color was false, fantastical, unfair and often self-contradictory.

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His attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris often descend to insults about her identity — that she’s not Black or too Black or in some way not sufficiently American — but mostly they lump her in with the myths so often told about African Americans, essentially that they’re deficient in some way and thus not equal to white citizens. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/06/kamala-harris-donald-and-americas-long-history-of-disinformation/