"Those Trump voters are not racist! They voted for Obama BOTH times!" [View all]

Been hearing this one a lot recently, regarding those white Obama/Trump voters in the Rust Belt.

Sounds suspiciously like "Some of my best friends are black." As if voting for Obama is proof that a white person does not harbor any racist sentiment. As if Black Lives Matter - and the white backlash to it - didn't emerge between November 2012 and November 2016. As if Donald Trump didn't give unprecedented (in modern times, at least) legitimacy to white bigots of ALL kinds (racists, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Islamophobes...). As if it wasn't a black man who won the Democratic nomination this year, but a woman - and not just any woman, but a controversial yet undeniable modern feminist icon. And as if Democrats hadn't been bleeding white voters (especially the once-solidly Democratic working class white voters) for the past half-century - a phenomenon that began in the South, but has been spreading to other parts of the country in the post-civil rights, post-women's rights, and post-LGBT rights (i.e. since the 1960s).

I guess people will believe what they want to believe.