No it's not. Many prominent figures in the GOP have courted openly racist views over the years.
Some highlights:
Rep Steve King, who has a very long history of espousing racist views, openly questioned why "White Nationalism" is now an offensive term.[0] Do you believe that the concept of white nationalism or any of its ancillary movements to be offensive?
Deceased GOP strategist Tom Hofeller was an architect behind current efforts to gerrymander voting districts throughout the US, and his daughter handed over a hard drive containing documents he wrote that described in detail efforts to take voting strength away from voters of color by implementing a citizenship question on the 2020 census.
How can the desire to take voting power away from non-whites be construed as anything other than racist? The GOP is clearly threatened by the minority vote and have taken dramatic steps behind the scenes to remove them from the voting population[1].
> A lot of the young men I know feel disenfranchised in a system that does not value them even though they are not in any positions of power.
And how exactly does the GOP plan to deal with this? Bernie's Green New Deal guarantees thousands of jobs because the progressive movement sees stagnation among the youth. The GOP just cuts taxes and claims everyone wins when that's far from the reality.
> There's plenty of racism to go around in all major political parties. "Super-predators" anyone?
That was 30 years ago, and the history of that phrase was used against Hillary to great effect in 2016. What a fallacious claim to equate a statement made 30 years ago to multiple, repeated instances of racism on the right. Nobody on the left is defending the use of that term today.
> It seems totally rational and fair that people be asked about their citizenship on a census.
There's a very strong legal argument that the explicit goals for adding the citizenship question makes it unconstitutional.
Hofeller wrote in confidential memos that his daughter released stating that the explicit goal of adding the question was to scare members of the Latino community into not answering the question, given the current administration's crackdown on immigration. This directly contradicts the mandate laid out in the Constitution which clearly states that the Census is to be filled out by everyone living in the US, not just citizens.
By designing a question to explicitly suppress participation in certain communities, the motives to which were leaked by Hofeller's daughter, the administration could in no way argue that it had a legitimate legislative reason to add the question to the census, which is exactly why they stopped pursuing it.
Super-predators is the most obvious and famous example that comes to mind (one you're quick to dismiss), but do you really think there isn't racism on the left? Many would say that the objectification, tokenization and gamification the left does with minorities is racist. In fact, as non-white minority that's exactly how I feel.
> This directly contradicts the mandate laid out in the Constitution which clearly states that the Census is to be filled out by everyone living in the US, not just citizens.
It's absolutely absurd to suggest counting the number of citizens is racist. Not everyone has to answer yes to that question, thus sticking with the constitutional goal of accurately surveying the populace. Do you really not see any value in a country knowing how many citizens it has?
I'm not dismissing that term, which was undoubtedly racist and reflected the poor race relations of the democratic party back then. Nor am I suggesting that there aren't individuals who may express racist views, I have no way of knowing that.
What I do know is that racial division has been a hallmark of this administration, from equating white supremacist protesters (one of whom literally murdered a protester, btw) with counter protesters in Charlottesville, which the president did.
Nor am I suggesting that counting the number of citizens is racist. When a high-level GOP party operative writes to other members of the party that they need to implement the question in order to suppress the count of minority members in the US, you can't argue that you're trying to get an accurate count of people living in the US.
I'm not suggesting that this was implied somehow, Hofeller explicitly stated this in his memos. He wanted to scare Latinos into not filling out the census and put it writing. How is that not racist? This was one of the most powerful GOP strategists in the country putting this idea out among party officials.
I would argue that not including the citizenship question is racist. It makes logical sense to include it, to do otherwise is to manipulate the results based on race.
> He wanted to scare Latinos into not filling out the census and put it writing.
Again, I say this as a minority. It doesn't feel great to be used as a pawn. As a citizen I would have absolutely no problem answering that question. Many, many Latinos would also be ok with it, so putting words in their mouth is an example of racism coming from the Left.
> I would argue that not including the citizenship question is racist.
Well, the current administration abandoned this effort after the memos were leaked because they knew this argument wouldn't hold up in court. And it no way holds up here. You choose to willfully ignore the fact that the genesis of this question by the GOP was explicitly to keep Latinos on the sidelines.
> Again, I say this as a minority.
Asserting your identity as if that adds credence to your argument while ignoring the simple fact that it's illogical doesn't help you in any way. It doesn't matter what you look like or where you're from, you're argument is still illogical.
> Many, many Latinos would also be ok with it, so putting words in their mouth is an example of racism coming from the Left.
You literally just put words in the mouths of Latinos at the beginning of that sentence only to accuse the left of doing so. The census in its current form doesn't have any questions designed to keep minority members of the community from participating, can you provide a reason why the census in its current form is racist?
> Many would say that the objectification, tokenization and gamification the left does with minorities is racist.
Insofar as bigotry is proposed as a cause for something—a way you're suggesting a person or group thinks about the world, that leads them to the actions they choose—then I would suggest that such modelling only works to the degree that said behavior doesn't have a clear game-theoretic justification.
Or, less-flowery: if making some particular choice would help you win—in fact, would help anyone win—then that choice probably wasn't motivated by racism.
Or, by analogy: if an AI with no understanding of humans but a perfect understanding of strategy would do it, it's probably not racist.
You're discounting people's perception of others and themselves. Nobody wants to be "the token". It starts creating the perception that all people of that demographic exist in the workplace due to lowered barriers and thus are not as good. It's not entirely beneficial.
>Do you really not see any value in a country knowing how many citizens it has?
There is definitely value in that, but the Census' primary goal is to count everyone. And the experts in the Census Bureau believed the citizenship question would harm that count. That's a non-starter.
No it's not. Many prominent figures in the GOP have courted openly racist views over the years.
Some highlights:
Rep Steve King, who has a very long history of espousing racist views, openly questioned why "White Nationalism" is now an offensive term.[0] Do you believe that the concept of white nationalism or any of its ancillary movements to be offensive?
Deceased GOP strategist Tom Hofeller was an architect behind current efforts to gerrymander voting districts throughout the US, and his daughter handed over a hard drive containing documents he wrote that described in detail efforts to take voting strength away from voters of color by implementing a citizenship question on the 2020 census.
How can the desire to take voting power away from non-whites be construed as anything other than racist? The GOP is clearly threatened by the minority vote and have taken dramatic steps behind the scenes to remove them from the voting population[1].
> A lot of the young men I know feel disenfranchised in a system that does not value them even though they are not in any positions of power.
And how exactly does the GOP plan to deal with this? Bernie's Green New Deal guarantees thousands of jobs because the progressive movement sees stagnation among the youth. The GOP just cuts taxes and claims everyone wins when that's far from the reality.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/us/politics/steve-king-of...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/us/north-carolina-gerryma...