“Black People”or “The Black People”

May 31, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s a subtle but important difference between talking about “Black people” and taliking about “the Black people. Here’s Trump yesterday. (I’m usins Sarah Cooper’s version because she’s physically so much more expressive than Trump playing his invisible accordion.)

“By the way, they love African American people. They love Black people. MAGA loves the Black people.”

Does anybody really believe that Trump was being sincere? Or accurate? Does team MAGA love “the Black people”? The definite article, that the, gives him away.

During the 2016 campaign, when some suggested that Trump presidency would not be good for women, Trump said, “I’d be phenomenal to the women.”

At the time, I wondered how “I’d be phenomenal to the women” is different from just “I’d be phenomenal for to women.”  The blog post (here) continued:   

when you add “the” to a demographic group and speak of “the women” or “the Blacks,” you are separating them from the rest of society. Without the definite article, they are included. To say, “In our society we have Blacks, Jews, women. . . . .” implies that they are all part of our group. But, “We have the Blacks, the Jews, the women . . . .” turns them into separate, distinct groups that are not part of a unified whole.

This construction using the definite article fits well with the MAGA notion that America is their country. In their view, they are, as Sarah Palin put it, “the real America.” Republicans, when they are out of office, talk a lot about “taking back our country,” as though the Democratic party were a bunch of foreign usurpers. (See this post from when Obama was in office and running for second term.)  Now that they have taken back the country, they may allow others — the Blacks, the women, and others — to live in it.