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Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is built around inherently racist and xenophobic ideas. So one student spent a day at a Trump rally to see for himself what things were really like as a young black man on site.
His unsurprising discovery? Trump and his supporters are pretty frickin’ racist.
“The baseline of his campaign is to make America white again,” James Patterson, a high school student who was assigned to volunteer at Trump’s campaign as part of a student-based civics activity, told TYT Politics (watch the video above).
“It speaks to fundamentalist Christian, white middle class Americans who feel like their power has been taken. Even though that’s a false accusation, they feel like because minorities are making strides that they’re losing power,” he added.
Patterson, who says he was the only black volunteer that day, then described what he considers to be the most disturbing part of Trump’s campaign: the size and sentiments of Trump’s ardent supporters who believe in his twisted vision for America.
“That’s the scary part about the Trump campaign, they’re everyday people, people we work with, people at schools, people who hold these resentments,” he said in the video. “As an African American, that’s very scary… that I can talk to somebody and they can hate me because of my skin color.”
He said it’s what haunted him most about being the only minority among Trump fans: “They were very friendly, they were normal people but in the back of their mind, and openly, they were advocating for Trump’s policies which are inherently exclusive for people who look like me.”
Patterson said that while nobody outright used racial slurs against him, he did face some discrimination in the form of microaggressions from Trump supporters.
“If I had to describe the feeling it would be that of isolation.” – Patterson
“When I would bump into various members of the crowd, there were hostile looks when I would attempt to excuse myself,” Patterson said, according to TYT. “Many people in the crowd looked me up and down as I was walking. If I had to describe the feeling it would be that of isolation.”
Patterson says these are the sorts of things that happen to him all the time as a black man in America. He noted how people often refuse to make eye contact with him or will move out of the way when he says “hello”. “I think there’s definitely a sense of ‘otherism,'” he said of his experience that day.
But beyond Trump’s policies and the people who support him, Patterson said there’s something wrong with our society “when we can glorify someone openly that condemns whole groups of people,” including Mexicans and Muslims.
“Everyone has the right to say whatever they want… it’s America,” he said. “But there’s also something called respect and Trump is not respectful.”
Also on HuffPost:
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