Jim Acosta, a Washington-based CNN reporter, visited South Carolina to cover President Trump’s rally on Monday night. Accordingly, Trump supporters chanted, “Go home, Jim!” at the correspondent, who’s become a favorite target of the president’s base (a status he clearly relishes to some extent).
The chant for Acosta to “go home” was described in a Buzzfeed report on the rally as “a taunt that sounded especially menacing when aimed at a reporter with a Hispanic surname and a father who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba.”
Put in less tactful language, the contention is that it was racist. It wasn’t — it was South Carolinians chanting for an adversarial reporter who had traveled from Washington to their state to leave an event. If there were actual reasons to believe it was racist, they were nowhere to be found in the report.
People love to chant “go home” at visiting adversaries. As it turns out, Trump supporters have chanted the same words at Hillary Clinton too, who is both white and wealthy. Students have shouted “go home” at Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
But when the lens through which you see the kinds of people who attend Trump rallies assumes widespread racism, those kinds of judgments flow naturally. It’s just one line in one article, yes, but the accusation is instructive as an example of the flawed conclusions those presumptions lead people in the press to disseminate. And in major outlets.
