Yes, did you read Antonio Moore's response?
Donald Trump isn’t our First White President and he wont be our last
09/14/2017 06:09 pm ET
Updated Sep 19, 2017
Long before Trump was even a thought, we had presidents who leveraged their whiteness to inflict great amounts of pain upon black lives. From
George Washington and the 317 slaves that under-girded his white wealth, to Andrew Johnson
who stood in the path of 100 years of black civil rights advancement in 1866, continuing with Richard Nixon and the modern Republican strategy of winning the presidency with the white vote. Donald Trump, with his threats of cuts to Medicaid, proposed pullbacks on education spending, and cuts to housing for the poor, is one person in a long line he hardly started, and definitely will not end. To now repaint this billionaire opportunist as the face of white oppression is wading into dangerous historical water.
It’s tempting to conclude, given the weight of the evidence against his claim, that Ta-Nehisi Coates went with the “First White President” line because it’s clever. It calls back to Bill Clinton’s dubious title coined by Toni Morrison of the “First Black President,” which we can now look back on and question with much more in-depth analysis. Yet, to call President Donald Trump first anything is to give him power he has not earned, and a place in history that etches his name far too high on the Mount Rushmore of America’s racial failures. In fact it is a slap in the face to a centuries-old civil rights movement that has ebbed and flowed but has always known that the face it was battling was not based on a single man. But rather the power that emits from being able to claim whiteness, at the cost of all those who must be deemed black for that white privilege to exist.
Trump is not the face of whiteness; rather, he is its reflection, a glimmer of what happens when capital runs amuck. No more than a callback to when wealth was borne out of black bodies. The call by some to use the tragedy of black history to sensationalize his rise in the light of times past is seeing this problem through the wrong lens.
Coates does just that in his new piece for The Atlantic, titled
“The First White President”. He asserts Trump to be someone who moves past where prior white presidents had gone with white privilege. Coates piece puts forth a patently absurd argument, writing,
“To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”.
Donald J. Trump is far from the first manifestation of whiteness in the Oval Office. Trump’s ascension did not occur by happenstance, nor magic no matter how many amulets Coates presents to prove the case. We now live in a country where half of black homes, or
7.5 million black families are worth less than $1,700 without depreciating assets like the family car — while over 8 million white families are worth more than 1.4 million dollars each. Whiteness is not a magic power for an individual; it is a communal asset, which requires the failures of blackness to exist. Trump can not be used to escape the reality of our country’s deep-seated historical inequity. The asset of whiteness is one that millions of white Americans access and make use of daily, like a fraternal marking granting passage into a better America.
No matter how many ways you spin it, Trump’s rise is the result of the White politics Republicans have been running since at least 1968. This is a difficult counterpoint for Coates to grapple with, as it undermines so much of how we deal both with Trump’s rise — and how it fits next to the Obama presidency.
Coates analysis sets forth a critique of Trump that both sets him apart from preceding presidents, and as a contrasts to President Barack Obama, when neither could be more untrue. No different than George Washington that came before him, Trump’s wealth is an inherited privilege borne of black oppression. The former being in slaves owned by his stepfather, and
the latter being in housing discrimination done by he and his father. There is no elegant detachment for Washington, nor many of the other former presidents that serves as an eraser for the infliction of oppression on black bodies, and black lives that rooted their social stature. So what we really have before us in president number 45 is quite simply a continuation of more of the same.
After running through a litany of white subgroups that Trump dominated among — whites with college degrees, whites without degrees, whites making under $50,000, etc. — Coates acknowledges:
“Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012.”
But if white America voted largely as a bloc for Mitt Romney, and then four years later did the same for Trump, how are we to set Trump apart from the others, as Coates wants us to do? He tries it this way: “But unlike Romney, Trump secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency.”
In fact, we don’t know what precisely “secured” Trump’s support. Indeed, Romney ran a superficially decent campaign based on the accepted orthodoxies. But do we know how
he secured his support? If decency worked roughly as well as indecency, neither can be said to be the cause. Instead, it’s simpler: they both ran on whiteness. Coates said so himself: the GOP is “the party that has long cultivated white voters.”
He’s right. The entire Republican Party has been running on white identity policies since Nixon’s southern strategy. Voters who moved from Obama-to-Trump are more properly thought of as Obama-to-Republican voters. Trump ran as a Republican, and running as a Republican, he won white people.
This, as Coates rightly points out, is a meaningful thing. It means the racist limits of what white people will vote for when delivered to them explicitly are further out than conventional wisdom had allowed. But it does not make Trump the first white president. And by pretending that Coates is sending a number of wrong messages. For one, it suggests that if Trump is defeated, then white privilege is beaten. Yet Coates would never believe such a thing. And it says that if we interrogate the rise of Trump close enough, we’ll discover the roots of white supremacy’s dominance in our politics. Yet the closer you look at Trump, the less there is.
Continue Reading -https://
www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-isnt-our-first-white-president-and-he_us_59baf98ee4b02c642e4a1511
Did 2012 posters here talk about Mitt Romney co-founding Bain Capital for a year or more? :bpthink:
