A DEI employee. Dumb as a rock. Never passed the bar exam.

These are just some of the attacks launched by Donald Trump and his surrogates after Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race paved the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to become our country’s first black candidate.

Although Republican party leadership urged their colleagues not to comment further on Harris’ campaign, Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, recently followed suit, reducing the former California Attorney General and U.S. Senator’s career in public service to that of a freeloader who has “collected government checks for the last 20 years.”

Since 2008, when Trump questioned President Barack Obama’s citizenship, Right-wing politicians and activists tend to attack their opponents – whether Democrats or others – with racist motives.

During last year’s election campaign, Trump rehashed claims about the birther movement to attack his main rival in the Republican primary, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian American.

While left-wing pundits rightly describe these racially motivated slanders as part of the now all-too-familiar tactics of Trump’s campaign, they actually existed more than a century before his time.

Demonization of minorities

At the beginning of the 20th century, members of ethnic minorities who rose into the middle class through employment in the expanding public sector were regularly demonized and widely associated with criminality, corruption, and even sexual danger to white women.

In Gilded Age Atlanta, where racist labor practices limited the employment prospects of African Americans, the Pendleton Act of 1883 offered college-educated black men employment opportunities with the U.S. Postal Service as letter carriers and postal clerks. The stability and prestige of federal employment made these men pillars of an emerging black middle class. Nevertheless, white Atlantans began to spread stories that “ignorant” blacks were given preference over “skilled” white men at postal jobs, which they believed led to widespread mail theft.

In the months leading up to the Atlanta race riots in 1906, black mail carriers were verbally or even physically attacked on the street or on public transportation because they were accused of not showing due respect to white people.

In San Francisco, the limited employment of Chinese men in the nascent federal immigration apparatus created to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 sparked similar outrage. A culture of corruption among the predominantly white Chinese Bureau agents was blamed on the presence of persons of Chinese descent and led to a ban on the employment of “persons of Chinese descent in or around” the agency.

Local newspapers reinforced this impression by falsely claiming that “dozens” of suitable white men applying for interpreter positions were “passed over” in favor of hiring Chinese men.

A similar story played out in San Antonio in the 1880s. There, the Tejanos recruited into the city’s new police force were initially celebrated by the Anglo-Saxon press as heroes in the fight against crime and portrayed as something different from the dangerous and racially ambiguous “Mexicans.”

But within a decade, new flows of Mexican immigration to the city reinforced the stereotype of Mexicans as the urban criminal element. This stereotype increasingly included police officers from the Tejano community, who were portrayed as corrupt or violent.

An 1894 editorial in a nationally circulated magazine completely ignored the Tejano police officers. He describes the “Mexican-Texan” population as dishonest and “below average in citizenship issues.”

A changing middle class

Today, as a century ago, the familiar lament is heard from the political megaphone: the changing demographics of the American middle class are relentlessly interpreted as a threat to the whites who “rightly” occupy this middle class.

Today’s moral panic about race and social mobility has shifted to the national stage, with new narrative cliches about “white replacement,” “unfair advantages” for racial minorities, and the supposed danger of critical race theory for schoolchildren.

They fuel political extremism among those who fear that their privileged social position within the country will diminish.

British sociologist Les Back has linked popular narratives of “inundation” by newcomers, accusations of “injustice” and the “treachery” of outsiders to “old and familiar themes” of racism within the middle class that emerge in times of social unrest and economic uncertainty.

Research on today’s middle class shows that a more ethnically pluralistic group has emerged over the past 40 years, with more black, Asian and Latino families represented in the country’s middle-income households. In addition, a recent study by Opportunity Insights shows that the wealth gap between blacks and whites has narrowed significantly over the past 15 years.

Analysis of the 2016 election showed that despite his claims to appeal to the working class, the majority of the former president’s supporters came from the middle and upper middle classes, a class that remains predominantly white.

Exploiting racial disparities within the middle class poses real dangers for America’s political future. We must recognize the deep historical roots of race and class narratives that fuel fears of upward mobility, and recognize the true political goals of the demagogues who weaponize these narratives.

Joseph O. Jewell is professor and chair of the Department of Black Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.

The views and opinions expressed by the authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Chicago Sun-Times or its affiliates.

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