There's nothing complicated about the argument that African-American civil rights protesters in Charlotte are making. They believe that police are too quick to shoot black civilians; that officers treat black suspects as dangerous in situations where white suspects would get the benefit of the doubt; and that this a problem that's been going on for a long time.
Other people can respectfully disagree with that diagnosis, or with the prescription that police should change their tactics and make amends. But that's not what Representative Robert Pittenger of North Carolina did.
Asked by the British Broadcasting Corporation what was motivating the protesters, the Charlotte-area Republican congressman replied, "The grievance in their minds is that — the animus, the anger — they hate white people because white people are successful and they're not."
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Here's the video:
Protesters in #Charlotte "hate white people" - North Carolina Congressman Pittenger tells #newsnight https://t.co/q6ELYD01QV
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) September 22, 2016
Within hours, Pittenger backtracked, implausibly insisting that he was just quoting protesters. More likely, what he said reflects what he truly thinks. In the fragmenting media landscape of 2016, even a congressman can live in an alternate reality where he never even has to hear what people unlike him are actually saying — much less debate their arguments on the merits.
Earlier on Thursday, another UK-based news organization, The Guardian, released a jaw-dropping video featuring Kathy Miller, who was chairing Donald Trump's campaign in Mahoning County, Ohio.
In the clip, Miller said, "I don't think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this." As a factual matter, this statement is delusional. Black Americans lived through slavery, not to mention a Jim Crow era that lasted the better part of a century.
Miller soon resigned her volunteer post and emphasized she wasn't speaking for the Trump campaign. But she was certainly echoing it. The GOP nominee himself insisted the other day that "our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they've ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever." It was as if the 1960s, or the years before the Civil War, had never happened.
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Maybe it's not a coincidence that both Miller and Pittenger were lulled into, well, candor by British interviewers. When talking to other Americans — and especially American reporters for news organizations with a general audience — most Americans still have a sense that race is a touchy subject, and that one should at least make an effort not to offend. But the general audience is rapidly splintering, amid the rise of social media outlets that allow us to hear only from people exactly like ourselves.
Recently in The New York Times, the writer Lee Drutman bemoaned the bifurcation of American politics. "Rather than being one two-party nation," he wrote, "we are becoming two one-party nations." He noted that, in the 2012 presidential election, only four states were decided by fewer than five percentage points — compared with 20 in 1976.
If anything, the situation is worse than Drutman is letting on. North Carolina and Ohio are swing states precisely because their electorates are diverse enough — by race, education level, and other demographic factors — to make their politics unpredictable. Yet even in those states, politically active people like Pettinger and Miller can and do exist in a separate reality from that of other people living a few miles away. It's toxic for all of us when we're sharing a country but living in completely different worlds.
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Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Facebook: facebook.com/danteramos or on Twitter: @danteramos.