One of the most offensive slurs in modern American language is the n-word. It has a long and ugly history and is offensive to most people.
But as on most issues, many Trump voters have a different point of view.
The Washington Post‘s Michael Tesler on Tuesday took a long look at Trump voters and their perception of what is racist. (It’s important to note that only about 5% of Black voters are Trump voters.)
In a post titled, “Republicans don’t think Trump’s tweets are racist. That fits a long American history of denying racism,” the Post notes, “Even under Jim Crow, most whites thought that blacks were treated fairly.”
That likely helps explain the disturbing revelation that “in the past several years, Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart on questions of race.”
Take one other seemingly clear-cut example of racism: the use of the n-word to describe African Americans. Polls show that Democrats and Republicans increasingly disagree on whether the n-word is offensive. Indeed, the percentage of Republicans who consider the word offensive or unacceptable has actually declined in recent years.
The Post reports that just one-third (33%) of Trump voters now consider it racist to use the n-word. By comparison, 86% of Hillary Clinton voters believe it is racist to use the n-word.
Tesler provides graphs that show just over the past three years Republicans find the use of the n-word decreasingly offensive. Democrats, and at a faster rate, increasingly find it offensive.
Further illustrating the difference in how Trump voters view race, less than one in four Trump voters disagreed with this statement:
“I prefer my close relatives marry spouses of their same race.”
63% of Clinton voters disagreed with the statement.
“These gaps help explain why, overall, Trump voters think that discrimination against whites is more pervasive in the U.S. than discrimination against blacks,” the Post adds.