This has been an extraordinary election season. The amount of vitriol on both sides has been higher than any in recent memory. Without directly defending our president elect, Donald Trump, I want to talk about the persuasion on the left.

The thing that I noticed the most, though was that Donald Trump was called a racist, and his followers referred to as racists. I disagree with many of the things that Mr. Trump has said, and as much as anything, the way he has said them. I simply can’t understand why he is being called a racist. From my own readings, he has advocated two distinct policies that have been interpreted as “racist”:

1. He wants to actually enforce immigration laws.
   1. He has proposed building a wall to prevent/reduce illegal immigrants from arriving in the US by crossing the border with Mexico.
   2. He did refer to Mexicans as criminals, and bad people.  His point, though was that the purpose of immigration policies is to prevent those exact people from entering our country.  By not stopping illegal immigration, we are by default letting criminals and bad people in, and we don’t even know it.
2. He wants to prevent radicalized Muslims from entering our country.
   1. He proposed stopping all immigration from Muslim countries until we can figure out a way to accomplish identify radicalized Muslims.
   2. He also proposed some kind of extreme vetting protocol to accomplish this goal.

I am sure that there have been other things that he has said that people have called racist – but most of those claims stem from these two policy proposals.

My problem is not whether Trump is actually a racist, but whether any reasonable claim to racism can be made from these proposals. In short, it can’t. These policies are not racist. Let’s start with one simple statement. Neither Muslims nor Mexicans are a race. End. Of. Discussion. Muslims are practitioners of Islam – a religion. They are neither a race, nor a nationality. So at worst, Trump is discriminating based on religion not race. Mexicans are citizens of Mexico, a nation. So here we at least have some ethnic discrimination – but still, no racism. None.

But the confusion is caused by insipid attempts at persuasion – like this one that came up on my facebook feed a few days ago shown on the right.

Race is based on biological characteristics, and there are 4 main races – Australoid, Caucasoid (White), Mongoloid (Asian), and Negroid (Black). Most of us recognize that the biological factors are really minute differences, and so it is ethnicity that matters which includes more social and cultural factors.

What this piece of persuasion purports to say is that the only thing that white people have to be proud of is their skin color, but what it actually says is this, the hundreds of ethnic groups that make up the other races are not necessary to imply pride does not equal racism, but white people are required to specify which ethnic group they participate in so that their “pride” is not considered racist.

The really dopey part is that when you add Mexican and Muslim in, it directly implies Trumps policies and it makes it less about race than about other human groups.

Racism is the belief that one race is somehow inherently superior to the others, especially when it is expressed as  discriminatory or prejudicial treatment or other form of oppression toward the inferior race(s).

But races are truly made up categories.  They may have some genetic basis, but the lines are artificially drawn.  Moreover, the probability that any one of us has multi-racial ancestors is very, very high.  I think I have about 1/128th Native American in my DNA and a lot of northern European and Jewish (which implies some middle eastern, somewhere). So what does it all mean?  Answer, nothing.

What really matters is culture and values.  When we fight over culture, that is where things get ugly.  Frankly, culture includes values like religion, sexuality, economics, and more stylistic values, dress, art, music, activities etc.  It gets uglier when we attribute these values as sets to groups rather than individuals.

Nobody really has a problem when we disagree about cultural values as individuals.  When we assign those values to groups, we have created our own categories, and assigned properties to them.  That is the ugliness.  Now it as if everyone in that group is the same.  It doesn’t matter what group it is, and how that group is identified.  Lets take democrats and republicans – self -identifying groups?  or Liberals and Conservatives?  Christians and Muslims and Jews?  Gays and Heteros?  Blacks and Whites? Men and Women? Puerto Ricans and Mexicans?  Italian Americans and Irish Americans?  When we act or talk like membership in a group, whether self identified or by birth, automatically imputes ANY of the cultural values that can be attributed to that group to individuals in that group, we are expressing our prejudice.

But it’s not racism, it’s not bigotry, and it’s not chauvinism.  It’s just plain old prejudice, and we pretty much all do it.  The closest word that I find that describes the behavior is ethnocentrism.  This is judging members of other groups by the culture and standards used within our own groups culture.