Donald Trump

Supporters cheer during a campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016, in Kissimmee, Fla.

(AP Photo / Evan Vucci)

The results of a social media poll I conducted earlier this week probably won't surprise you. I asked my Facebook friends and Twitter followers to complete the following sentence by filling in the blank: "I don't eat everybody's ___________."

Potato salad. That backyard-barbecue and church-potluck mainstay was cited more often than any other food. Everybody, it seems, has had a bad potato salad experience, or at the very least, it seems that everybody has been warned by mama, auntie or granny to proceed with extreme caution lest they have a potato salad experience for the books.

Here's an abridged list of the things responsible adults warn their children against: strangers, drinking and driving and "everybody's potato salad."

A day after that initial poll it occurred to me to ask another question: "Raise your hand," I wrote, "if yours is the potato salad that not everybody eats."

A cousin in California responded with an emoticon of a woman with a hand raised, and three other friends acknowledged using family recipes that depart from what most potato salad connoisseurs expect. But the number of folks who allowed that their potato salad might be considered bad was a tiny fraction of the number of people who are actively avoiding bad potato salad.

From this we can conclude that a bad-potato-salad maker is far rarer than bad potato salad. There's a glut of bad potato salad out there, but almost nobody cops to having made any of it.

You might guess that you could put the number of bad potato-salad makers on an x axis, the number of bad potato salads on a y axis and a draw a straight diagonal line illustrating a direct relationship between the two. That would make logical sense, but, apparently, that's not how bad potato salad comes into existence. Bad potato salad - even that which can rightly be called deplorable - happens without human agency.

That conundrum, the mystery of how we get bad potato salad when nobody's a bad potato-salad maker, is similar in kind to the sexism conundrum, the racism conundrum, the homophobia conundrum - to say noting of the toxicity that has accompanied a certain presidential candidate's 2016 campaign.

Have you ever noticed how many anti-gay remarks are uttered by people who begin with "I'm not homophobic, however...?" or how often folks who don't have anything against women still manage to say things against women?

In 2014 Duke sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva presented his thoughts on a similar phenomenon in a book called "Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America."

"How is it possible to have this tremendous degree of racial inequality," he asks "in a country where most whites claim that race is no longer relevant? More important, how do whites explain the apparent contradiction between their professed color blindness and the United States' color-coded inequality?"

It's possible in the same way that it's possible that there's a lot of bad potato salad and almost no self-identified bad-potato-salad makers.

What about the nasty, stomach-turning language and the equally nasty, stomach-turning aggression at Donald Trump's campaign rallies? What about the prevalence of "Trump that B----!" T-shirts? Or those other T-shirts: "Hillary Sucks - but not like Monica?" What about the July rally in Raleigh, N.C. where the air reportedly rang out with shouts of "Hang that b----!" What about the physical attacks on protesters? Or David Duke's man crush on the Republican presidential candidate? What about the attaboys for Trump's inappropriate use of the Star of David? The cheers for his proposed Muslim ban and his denunciations of Mexicans as rapists?

All that behavior is awful, but it's a political no-no to suggest that the awfulness is attributable to awful people.

When Hillary Clinton slipped up and said that "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," you'd have thought she'd defamed a Gold Star family or attacked a federal judge's ethnicity or attributed a female debate moderator's tough questions to her being on her period.

All of a sudden, the crowd that has made it a point to eschew sensitivity, the crowd that has shouted down tact, diplomacy and basic human decency as namby-pamby political correctness decides that it's just tore up over Clinton calling that crowd benighted. Trump - whose primary form of communication is the insult - accuses Clinton of insulting "hardworking Americans." Trump's running mate Gov. Mike Pence says that Clinton's deplorables remark "disqualifies her" for the White House. Has Pence forgotten he's running with a man who praises Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin?

The sexism, racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia hanging in the air over Trump's rallies have got to be coming from somewhere, right? Unless it's like bad potato salad - which somehow manages to be prevalent despite almost everybody making it well.

Jarvis DeBerry is deputy opinions editor at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. He can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com. Follow him at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry.