MSNBC’s Reid on Hispanic Trump Support: Immigrants Want to ‘Be Super American’ and There’s ‘Anti-Blackness’

During MSNBC’s election coverage on Wednesday, MSNBC host Joy Reid said that “there is this sort of trying to be super American when people come here, because I know some African immigrants who are all the way Trump. And it’s this idea of I want to be with the side that’s waving the biggest flag, I want to fit in. And there is a huge element — to be honest — of anti-blackness in a lot of this, anti-black Americanness specifically.”

While discussing the shift among Hispanic voters towards Trump MSNBC host Chris Hayes said that “people sometimes view Trump’s comments about immigrants through the lens of race. And that’s 100% understandable, because it is a racial appeal. But people across the world, demagogues, have had a lot of success with xenophobia against people that were not racially different than them. There are huge demagogic political movements in Colombia about the Venezuelans who are from next door. Pakistan just kicked out a whole bunch of Afghan refugees. This idea of the foreigners are coming does not necessarily appeal to people’s racial solidarity if they see the foreigner as different.”

Reid responded, “[C]oming from an immigrant family, there is this sort of trying to be super American when people come here, because I know some African immigrants who are all the way Trump. And it’s this idea of I want to be with the side that’s waving the biggest flag, I want to fit in. And there is a huge element — to be honest — of anti-blackness in a lot of this, anti-black Americanness specifically. … Even though Enrique Tarrio, who’s the head of the Proud Boys, is a black Latino, but he’s down with white supremacists, down with them. And there’s this idea that I’m black, but I’m not black. I might look black to you, I may be black if I’m walking through Bloomingdale’s and get followed around, but, in my mind, I’m identifying with whiteness because whiteness means privilege and it means not being a black American. This has to be unpacked because this shift among Latino men is significant. And it says something about where we’re going in this country, about whether we can create an appeal. There’s also — the last thing I will throw in is the creation of the idea that everything that Vice President Harris was proposing is Communism. That is a potent argument for a lot of Latinos, and it worked.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett