Charles Blow’s column, “President Donald Trump is a raging racist, period” does an excellent job exposing how Trump’s attack on the four progressive congresswomen of color is both racist and sexist. As Blow points out, it is not only the color of their skin, but their gender that makes them “other” to Trump’s rampaging, patriarchal, white-nationalist sensibilities. Another highly significant aspect of this debacle is the flagrant red-baiting by Trump and his supporters.
As a member of Radical Women, a socialist and feminist multiracial organization, I can attest to how bigotry, nationalism and anti-Communism go together. “Go back to Russia,” they used to say when I sold leftist newspapers on Seattle streets. “Go back to Mexico,” they told my Chicana sister whose family was in the Southwest before the U.S. conquest. They yelled crude remarks at us women’s libbers. The defense of socialists, women, people of color and immigrants — including Seattle’s own embattled councilwoman Kshama Sawant — is crucial if free speech and diversity of opinion are to be allowed for anyone.
Helen Gilbert, Seattle