Like obscenity, you know racism when you see it
SINCE the publication of Omarosa Manigault Newman’s book about her time in the Trump administration, the president’s political opponents have been indulging in a charmingly old-fashioned debate. Ms Manigault Newman suggests she was fired because people in the White House thought she knew the whereabouts of a recording from the president’s reality TV days in which he used the N-word. Given President Donald Trump’s fondness for derogatory epithets, it would be mildly surprising if he had avoided this one. Yet to imagine that a tape of the utterance would damage him irrevocably would be to forget the past three years. The president’s opponents, it seems, are condemned to be taught the same lesson over and over again.
The kind of epithets Mr Trump uses are nowhere near as shocking to many people as progressive Americans imagine. The Economist asked YouGov to do some polling on the use of the word “nigger”. The results came in this week, and they are that 35% of those who...