Trump's tactics widening the racial divide in the US
By raising the bogeyman that white America is under threat, he hopes middle-class whites will vote for him. He may yet succeed - but will worsen US race relations.
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SKIM through American newspapers of the last five decades, and you are bound to run into more than a few op-eds and commentaries each year that predict that the country has reached the inflection point in race relations, and that they were about to change. ("We shall soon overcome the deep divisions between whites and blacks that go back to the founding of the republic and which even led to a bloody Civil War. You will see!")
There is no doubt that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s helped end racial segregation in the southern states and spawned a series of historic legislations and court rulings to protect the rights of blacks in America.
Legendary African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, in one of his epoch-making addresses that created the expectations that American blacks and whites were about to enter the promised land of racial equality, said: "We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
