Technically speaking, not ‘brown’ people

The backbone of Trump’s campaign is support from the white working class, who believe him when he claims that “our jobs are fleeing the country” and proceeds to demonize Mexico and China and immigrants in general. But in many cases, it is technology that made those jobs disappear; nobody has taken them, they are just gone. From 2000 to 2010, the United States lost 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, and only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University. Most of the rest of the losses are due to technology, with robots replacing manufacturing workers and computers replacing clerical jobs.

So the biggest ongoing and unchallenged fallacy of Trump’s racist narrative of how “they” are stealing “our” jobs is that those jobs have simply disappeared because of advancements in technology. They were not stolen, they are just gone and are not coming back.

Technology is replacing workers; it’s been happening for decades but it’s just worse now. Of course it’s easier for Trump to demonize brown people than to demonize robots, and it fits with the larger racist narrative of his campaign, but despite all his false promises to the contrary, he cannot unring the bell.

— by Chris Davison