The left's expansive definition of who is a racist

Emily Jashinsky:

“If you voted for Donald Trump, you are a racist. You have no wiggle room,” tweeted Jemele Hill on July 19. Hill is a writer at The Atlantic and the daughter of a Trump voter. While her contention might puzzle the average American, it would raise few eyebrows on college campuses, where racism and bigotry have been defined differently for years.

Those expanded definitions, so broad they implicate almost everyone, now operate in the institutions populated by graduates of those schools. As a consequence, we are increasingly beholden to a binary system that relies on these broad definitions to categorize people either as progressives or bigots. There is, to borrow a phrase from Hill, “no wiggle room.”

This—the progressive-or-bigot binary—explains our head-spinning summer of “cultural insanity,” from the resignation of a Boeing executive over an innocuous 30-year-old op-ed to the resignation of a New York Times editor over publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). It explains why the ultra-leftist mayor of Minneapolis was booed out of a protest for disagreeing with calls to defund the police, and why a white woman in expensive yoga pants shouted in the face of a black female cop.

Fernando Martinez is an immigrant and the owner of a Cuban restaurant in Louisville, Ky. When a local Black Lives Matter group sent a threatening letter with a list of demands, Martinez had questions. “How can I be called a bigot and a racist when my family is Black? When my son is gay?” he inquired. “I’m the proud father of a gay son, and I’m gonna fight for him against anybody.”

If you’re scratching your head, wondering how our culture spiraled so quickly, look to the binary. This has been brewing for decades in academia, which has now exported enough graduates into the professional world that cultural arbiters in newsrooms and boardrooms are either intimidated or persuaded into cooperation.
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This is a good example of language abuse by the left.  This expansive definition of the term is now used as a slur against anyone who disagrees with the left about much of anything.   It is why they falsely accused people like Trump of being racist and the Democrats have adopted the slur.