Who is the real racist?

In many political discussions, perhaps all of them this year, eventually the topic of racism comes up, it's gonna happen, all the major candidates have had their issues with race but we all know who I am talking about, Donald Trump is the only one who literally cannot go a week without saying something terrible.

It's interesting to see racists getting confronted with their views, since they very rarely are willing to use the term racist with regards to themselves, even if they hold, and are proud of, views that are obviously racist to everyone. They are perfectly happy with their view of various minority groups as being subhuman, or at least sub-white person, but the term racist is inextricably linked to being a bad person and they don't think they are a bad person, so they can't possibly be racist.

So begins the tortured justifications for their beliefs, which include cherry picked news articles, grand stereotyping, and of course half remembered, or made up on the spot, talks about differences in genetics. When that doesn't work, eventually we get to the accusation stage, in which their opponents, generally liberal, are called the real racists and they are totally not, so there.

Their argument tends to include stuff like "Well if black people are really equal, then why do you liberals keep pushing for policies that favor them?" To this flavor of racist, the Civil Rights Act was the end of racism, sometimes that is still too much and it's actually the Civil War and emancipation that ended racism forever in America, so obviously if racism is over, then minorities don't need specific legal protections and now they have an unfair advantage.

There is little you can do to argue against it, because you aren't starting from the same place as they are, or even accepting the same definition of terms, I tend to support descending to name calling at that point, but your own mileage may vary.

I want to mention virtue signalling though, now virtue signalling is pushing a viewpoint that you feel will be thought of as "the right one" by enough people that you are seen as a good person for having it.
Virtue signalling exists, and can be pretty annoying, we are all guilty of it at some point I imagine, I certainly am, let's be honest here, this blog in a lot of ways exists for me to let everyone know how many great ideas I have. I like to say this isn't its primary purpose, but I would be lying if there wasn't an element of that involved anyway, and I would also be lying if I said I knew how big of an influence it is on my writing.

But the point I want to make, is that annoying doesn't actually equate to bad, those who accuse liberal speakers of virtue signalling generally want their listeners to feel taken advantage of and assume the views they are hearing are not honestly held, but this falls down in the face of motivation, specifically, why would they do that? The answer is clear for some people, it is all but certain that Hillary Clinton is not as liberal as she has been claiming to be this year, to what extent is as of yet unknown, but we all pretty much know we are getting a conservative who wouldn't have been too out of place in the Reagan years. Her speeches hammering on liberal talking points like gender equality are very much virtue signalling, most politicians speeches are anyway. So her motivation is to become president, that is clear.

The small scale becomes a bit harder to judge, let's take me for example, what exactly do I have to gain by virtue signalling views I don't actually hold? My friends and family all pretty much hold similar views and mostly like me already, that is why they are my friends and family, I get nothing out of this other than a little bit of attention, there is no cabal of liberals who are sending me prizes in the mail for holding the right opinions(though if one exists I am totally not against getting prizes), no gang of liberal ladies are throwing themselves at me because I talk about feminism once in a while(If one of those exist I have to say no anyway). Outside of a small psychological boost when I see a bunch of people read something I wrote, I get no benefit from my opinions.

I am hardly unique in that, most people just aren't important enough for their opinions to directly affect their quality of life.

So if there are a large amount of people who are going through life lying about their viewpoints in the hopes that society likes them more, how do you tell the difference between that and someone who honestly holds the same views?
It all seems to end up about the same to me, so the answer is that Donald Trump is still the real racist, and so are his supporters, each and every one of them.