It seemed so ridiculous to teenage me that such a thing could be said. In 2020 it has been said. I’m no longer falling out of my seat laughing.
Assumption 1. If you are not a racist then you should not support racist policies.
Assumption 2. The opposition wants to enact racist policies while I do not.
Proposition 3. From 2, if you vote for my opposition then you are supporting racist policies.
Theorem 4. Therefore, from 3 and 1, if you don't vote for me then you are racist because you are supporting racist policies.
Assumptions 1 and 2 could be incorrect in certain circumstances (in particular assumption 2), but the reasoning is correct.
That may seem extreme, but what if candidate #1 is racist, but candidate #2 has vowed to eliminate funding for medical care I need to live and can't afford on my own? Is voting for #1 racist?
"A Kafka trap is a fallacy where if someone denies being x it is taken as evidence that the person is x since someone who is x would deny being x. The name is derived from the novel The Trial by the Austrian writer Franz Kafka."
I think this concept is better known under the name "witch hunt".
For each person who voted for Trump in 2016, at least one of the following statements is true. (A) The person was uninformed as to Trump's character. (B) The person was actively being misinformed as to Trump's character, in such a way that correct information was not believed. (C) The person did not believe that racism was a disqualifying factor for office.
Whether this statement reduces to the "vote for X or admit to being racist" depends on several additional statements that I don't think can be entirely stated. First, it asserts that (A) is false, that the amount of media coverage in an election is enough that no voters are uninformed. Second, it asserts that (B) is false, that there was no active misinformation being spread during the 2016 election. Given what we know now, (B) is most certainly true in some cases. Third, it asserts that (C) is equivalent to a person being racist, which is a valid position, but one that is harder to discuss without getting into the nuances of systemic racism.
This also gets into the point where racism will continue to exist so long as "not racist" is seen as one end of the spectrum. Rather, in order to be appropriately egalitarian, one must be anti-racist wherever society is racist.
There are people who believe abortion is murder and still vote in pro-choice candidates because the other policy positions are important to uphold.
There is research to indicate people respond to visual cues as an indicator of in-group/out-group tribalism, but that mental software can be overrun by observing the individual as opposed to categorizing the individual into a group. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/look_twice This would be connected to one's communication that can be overcome.
As well as this, G. Loury describes racial stigma, which is to observe existing race gaps as a combination of past racist policies, exacerbated by present egalitarian/meritocratic policies, where the inequality is incorrectly ascribed to innate, immutable characteristics of race, rather than a consequence of an individual/hobbled community starting 50 meters behind everyone else in a 100m sprint. https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc241a.pdf This would be connected with one's worldview which can be overcome by understanding racism within history, as well as global weather distributions, and geographical resource distribution (Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond).
And I don't think I need to cite anything about racist ideas not covered by the above can be overcome by using enlightenment values and unifying messages.
I'd say trump has proclaimed some very racist ideas which run against enlightenment values and consequently are repulsive. There are obviously some percentage of followers of trump that hold worldviews that I'd find repulsive due to my alignment with enlightenment values. That doesn't mean the ideas these people hold are immutable.
Whilst my main political priority is minimising inequality at large, which in this context will disproportionately assist populations currently in poverty and resolve a lot of racial tension and racial stigma, policies that DON'T assist communities suffering from poverty should not be assumed to be racist, but rather are exacerbating gaps generated from previous racist(read discriminating by skin colour) policies. Whilst it might be unpalatable, I believe it is more realistic when you consider a large part of the American dream is about pulling yourself up from your bootstraps.
Also, Trump holds positions on economics that resonate large swathes of the American populous in communities that have been decimated by both automation, and job exportation, as pointed out by Andrew Yang. And as scarcity replaces abundance, individual's sphere of compassion shrinks. As a general example, consider who you would be considerate to if you were in an unescapable location undergoing famine.
Whilst I appreciate the desire to simplify the world around you which all humans try to do, I think to try to compress an individual's political worldview into 3 binary dimensions is dropping the majority of an individual's motivation.
I'd say that the main cause of racial gaps is historical institutional racism, that are exacerbated by today's egalitarian/meritocracy policies practices. And since the 1970s, corporate America began it's ascendance to decimate the middle class, rural America, collective bargaining, profit over economic equality, and almost completely corrupt the political system. This means to me that the biggest problem in America is political corruption and corporate power/corruption which results in increased inequality. Solve that and I think America's other problems of racial stigma, various important gaps across populations, lack of national pride, strength of democracy locally and globally, and the decreasing ability to pursue happiness in America would be much easier to solve.
This is just one Australian's opinion though. I might be wrong about the whole thing.