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How white liberals share blame for the rise of Trump

By Public Affairs

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Many U.S. voters, including white liberals and progressives, are upset by images of black people being driven from Donald Trump rallies. But where is the outrage that African Americans are being driven from San Francisco (and Oakland and Berkeley) by the skyrocketing cost of housing?

Jeremy Adam Smith

Jeremy Adam Smith

Jeremy Adam Smith, a writer with the campus’s Greater Good Science Center, draws a connection between the open expression of racism, fostered by Trump’s candidacy, and segregation — nowhere better exemplified than in the rapidly gentrifying, once-liberal bastion of San Francisco.

Educated white Bay Area liberals and progressives “simply lost our commitment to building a multiracial society,” Smith writes. “We all let Donald Trump happen. Hillary Clinton let it happen. Bernie Sanders let it happen. So did the San Francisco supervisors and Board of Education.

“We all did, by gradually dropping our guard against white supremacy — by step-by-step accepting that ‘choice’ [as in where to live] was the goal, instead of ‘justice’ or ‘equality’ or ‘diversity.'”

Read Smith’s opinion piece, “ The birth of a new white supremacist movement ,” on the Berkeley Blog .