UCSD Trump chalkings are latest case of racism

Congratulations again to Donald Trump, who has once more successfully received the negative national attention his campaign so clearly craves. Earlier this week, UC San Diego became the latest scene in a string of pro-Trump chalkings, in which racially motivated and hateful messages could be found on university grounds — most recently (and unsurprisingly) in front of the Raza Resource Centro, a resource center for Latinx and Chicanx  students.

The perpetrators were probably, like many of the chalkings themselves, white, and also like the chalkings, unintelligent and painfully unoriginal. UCSD is the second campus in the past month to see this type of vandalism.

But the underlying cause goes back much further than that. Back all the way to early American history: The year was 1676, and the event was Bacon’s Rebellion. Poor, white frontiersmen were threatened by constant Native American attacks. Dissatisfied with the landed gentry’s dismissal of their safety concerns, poor whites allied with the gentry’s black slaves to rise up against the wealthy elite. After the insurrection was put down, the Southern upper class disseminated messages of racist hatred to the white lower classes — they might be poor, but at least they weren’t black. It was intended to prevent the alliance of poor whites with poor blacks in fear that they would overpower rich whites. The lower class ate up the message of God-given, inherent superiority, and a critical piece of American racism was born.  Trump has mobilized the white working class in exactly the same manner — except his target is not the black community. It is the Hispanic one.

Dissatisfied by unemployment, poverty and a lack of educational opportunity — all self-fulfilling prophecies, really, when any community of the working class votes red — Trump used that betrayal of the political elite to cultivate a vitriol the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades, creating a loaded gun aimed prominently at the ballooning Hispanic-American population. They are taking all your jobs, they are filling your classes — even when they are just as American as you. But, as Trump tacitly teaches his supporters, you’re white and they’re not. And it’s time you were first in line again.

So, from a sociopolitical standpoint, it’s very easy to see why these chalkings occur. This is the brilliant manifestation of the attempt by the not-so-brilliant white community to redirect their anger away from themselves and their (again) not-so-brilliant political decisions and blanket it onto a group to call the evil “other.” Because let’s face it — even if President Trump did build a wall, poor whites would never take the menial labor jobs its construction would offer.

Some argue that condemning such chalkings are somehow a freedom of speech issue, even though their clearly racist messages (“f-ck Mexicans”; “deport them all”) are in direct violation of campus codes of conduct. Others would say that college students are simply “oversensitive,” that our desire to keep our living and learning space — which we pay for — free of racially motivated violence and ignorant hatred is somehow a testament to “this generation” and its incorrigible immaturity. To the angry, divorced white grandfather who rants about the sensitivity of the iPhone generation: It is not a mark of immaturity to take the deplorable actions that were once acceptable in your time and decide quite largely, as a society, that they are no longer acceptable. I’m sure these chalkings pale in comparison to the homophobic and racist slurs you used to be allowed to throw around at football practice. But the rest of us realize that backlash against these vandalisms demarcates something important: progress, in what is perhaps the most diverse and divided society of the Western world.

So take it this way: If you’re bothered by the fact that UCSD students came out in droves on all platforms of social media and in person to stand against the racism proliferated by the Trump campaign, you are, whether you like it or not, being swept along feet-first by the tide of progress and hopefully it will eventually drown your tacit racism.

But to those who see these actions for what they are, and seek to stand against them — do. We must express great appreciation for students at Emory University and UCSD who chose to oppose racial divisiveness. I would urge all educated and worldly students to show those who sought to make Hispanic students feel alien that they are the ones who are unwelcome on our campuses. We will teach them that making America “great again” would only truly be possible had America already been great — and this greatness is undeniably due to the roles played by Latinx and Chicanx Americans throughout this nation’s history. So, to those who chalked UCSD, please, chalk again — and know that your desperate messages of misdirected anger are falling on deaf ears.

Lily Vaughan is a freshman majoring in history and political science. Her column, “Playing Politics,” runs  Fridays.