Filmmaker Ken Burns appeared on The Late Show this week, and explained to host Stephen Colbert why a section of America has fallen in love with Donald Trump, in just five words: America has always been racist. I think the American question of freedom is a big one, the tension between individual freedom and collective freedom is a big one, but I think the sub-theme of American history is race,  Burns said. We were founded on the idea that all men were created equal, but oops the guy who wrote that owned more than 100 human beings and didn t see in his lifetime to free any one of them; didn t see the contradiction or the hypocrisy. And so it set us on a journey where we are constantly having to struggle not with race, but racism. Burns  latest film focuses on the life and trials of Jackie Robinson, one of the greatest players in baseball history   and the first non-white player in the professional leagues. He makes the parallels between how many of the same problems faced by Robinson, and dismissed as  historical  are actually still alive and well in modern America. We thought it might be possible to liberate him from the barnacles of sentimentality that attach, because what Jackie Robinson has to teach us now is exactly the same as when he was alive,  he says. So, if we re curious, but are not comfortable talking today, having a courageous conversation about race, let s look at Jackie Robinson s life and see how many of the same tropes that are part of our life today Jackie addresses. [He s] not only the most important person in baseball, but the most important person in American sports. Burns certainly has a point. Whether we look at incarceration rates, unequal prison sentences handed down for equal crimes, stop and frisk, the pay gap (African American men earn just 74.5% the pay of white men), police brutality, felony disenfranchisement, or the school to prison pipeline   it s abundantly clear that racism still permeates American society in a way that hurts the life chances of non-whites.Now that latent racism has a candidate willing to put a voice to it   and to some such-minded people, it feels like liberation.But they should not confuse the collective release of unspoken privilege, with an honorable quest for freedom. Trump supporters have more in common with Hitler s brownshirts than the Freedom Riders.They are angry and vengeful, worshipping a leader who looks like them, blaming everything wrong with their lives on people who don t look like them. They are nothing new. Their bigotry is as old as the constitution. They ve been outnumbered and defeated in previous generations, now they ve risen again to fight for their right to be racist in this generation  and the scoreboard is not in their favor. Featured image via screen capture