Throughout his campaign, there has been much discussion about whether Donald Trump is racist or not. Like so many conversations about race in America, this particular dialogue has been oversimplified.
Some may point out Trump’s past controversial comments about Muslims, Latinos and black people, while others may counter that by arguing that he’s hired black and brown people in his businesses. But it may be hard to ignore that former KKK leader David Duke has endorsed Trump, or that his daughter described him as “colorblind and gender neutral.”
The question of whether Trump is racist (if we’re really choose to debate that) obscures another important question: What about his supporters?
To be clear: being a Trump supporter doesn’t automatically make someone racist. But Trump’s rhetoric and his platform have emboldened a disturbing amount of Americans with racist ideology to proudly and publicly voice their prejudice.
On Monday, a clip of an angry Trump supporter in New York telling a black woman to get “back in the f**king fields” went viral. The video is shocking, but it’s not the first time a proclaimed Trump supporter has been caught on camera using blatantly racist language.
Below are just a few instances of Trump supporters being unapologetically racist, which leaves little to the imagination about what this says about Trump if these are the type of people who intend to vote for him.
A black protester at Trump's rally today in Alabama was shoved, tackled, punched & kicked: https://t.co/Aq0wuaAtax pic.twitter.com/cTRDMtjuBl
— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) November 21, 2015
Immigration activists disrupt Trump rally. He gamely continues, but crowd raged. One spit on protestors @wusa9 pic.twitter.com/82T2s845Eu
— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) October 14, 2015
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.