Page 6
November 2, 2016
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Disarming Racist and Anti-immigrant Attitudes
Healing the
divisions of
wedge politics
by i saiah
J. P oole
Since
2011,
Maine’s bombastic
Republican Gov.
Paul LePage has
given America a
taste of what it
might be like to live under a Don-
ald Trump presidency.
Like Trump, LePage has made
outrageous comments against
immigrants and communities of
color. They include telling the
NAACP to “kiss my butt,” public-
ly complaining about “guys with
the name D-Money, Smoothie,
Shifty” selling drugs and impreg-
nating “young, white” girls, and
blaming “illegals” for spreading
diseases like HIV — all while cut-
ting funding to cities that offered
health care and other assistance to
undocumented immigrants.
After five years of LePage prac-
ticing an extreme form of wedge
politics, people like Ben Chin are
working to heal the resulting divi-
sions in Maine.
Chin, the 31-year-old grandson
of an undocumented Chinese im-
migrant, has been working with
the Maine People’s Alliance to
rally support from white working
class neighborhoods for a series of
progressive ballot measures this
November.
Countering the racist and na-
tivist appeals of candidates like
LePage and Trump, their goal is to
get people to reject the politics of
scapegoating immigrants and peo-
ple of color and to instead focus on
the real causes of — and solutions
to — their economic distress.
“We’re starting out a conver-
sation in which we’re making it
clear we’re on their side,” Chin
said in a recent phone interview.
“That’s the foundation that gets
laid for whatever comes next.”
These conversations are based
on the research and experience of
a broad range of grassroots organi-
zations that have been struggling
to get working-class white voters
across the nation to see beyond the
color line.
Chin got a personal taste of divi-
sion politics when he was racially
caricatured during his 2015 run for
mayor of Lewiston, Maine. During
his campaign, a local businessman
paid for billboards that said, “Don’t
vote for Ho Chi Chin. Vote for
more jobs not more welfare.”
Since then, Chin’s turned his
political focus to ballot initiatives
that include increasing the state’s
minimum wage and levying a 3
percent tax on household incomes
over $200,000 a year.
Chin and his fellow Maine
People’s Alliance members don’t
have a “silver bullet” set of talking
points that disarms the people they
encounter with racist or anti-im-
migrant attitudes. Instead, they
focus on questions that get people
to think about their economic anx-
ieties in a deeper way.
One question they ask is, “Why
do you think some people are poor
and other people are rich?”
That opens up a discussion
about the ways a small group of the
wealthy and powerful are stacking
the economic deck against ordi-
nary people of all colors, with their
black and brown neighbors feeling
it the most because of America’s
history of systemic racism.
Chin said he was particularly
struck by a recent conversation
with a voter in Auburn, Maine.
The voter was undecided about
whether to support a referendum
that would increase the state’s
wage to $12 an hour by 2020.
“One of his ideas was that ‘cer-
tain people’ were going to get a
wage increase,” Chin said. “We
tried to unpack that.”
They talked about his life ex-
periences and whether he really
believed that increasing the min-
imum wage was about helping
some “certain” group of undeserv-
ing freeloaders.
Chin said that though this voter
wasn’t a “raging justice activist”
by the end of their conversation,
he was more thoughtfully consid-
ering the minimum wage.
Conversations like these are
happening in many states around
the country this election season,
as progressives grapple with the
mainstreaming of racist and na-
tivist appeals by Trump and other
far-right politicians.
These types of empathetic con-
versations are the nemesis of the
conservative-corporate elite who
have engineered extreme wealth
inequality and, for too many, the
disappearance of the American
dream.
The last thing politicians who
benefit from wedge politics want
to see is working people across
the nation transcending racial and
cultural lines, and realizing those
same politicians are the common
source of their pain.
Isaiah J. Poole is the commu-
nications director at People’s Ac-
tion. Distributed by OtherWords.
org.