Time to dust off what will undoubtedly remain a classic "The first White President" by Ta nehisi coates. It's still relevant.

[Scustin Bieburr]

It's a vast work that I can't fit into one post, so I'm breaking it down into multiple. I'll be highlighting the parts that are especially important and relevant to us now.

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred it for others. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars, held court in Paris, presided at Princeton, advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five, and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced President Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump then demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League university, and that his acclaimed memoir Dreams from My Father had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers. While running for president Trump vented his displeasure at a judge presiding over a pair of cases in which he was a defendant. “He’s a Mexican,” Trump protested.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later revealed as a proud violator. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. It is thus appropriate that Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male opponents as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear/fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dictums of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with rapacious Klansmen organized against alleged outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and a president now claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. He denounced David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, grudgingly. Bannon bragged that Breitbart News, the site he once published, was the preferred “platform” for the white supremacist “alt-right” movement. The alt-right’s preferred actual home is Russia, which its leaders hail as “the great white power” and the specific power that helped ensure the election of Donald Trump.

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. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. Perhaps more important, Trump is the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“And when you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of said assaults, becoming immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (and particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive—work half as hard as black people and even more is possible.

A relationship between these two notions is as necessary as the relationship between these two men. It is almost as if the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted Trump personally. The insult redoubled when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” writes the historian Nell Irvin Painter, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a ******. Before Barack Obama, ******s could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, Dusky Sallys, and Miscegenation Balls. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire ****** presidency with ****** health care, ****** climate accords, ****** justice reform that could be targeted for destruction, that could be targeted for redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his correct name and rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

 

[Scustin Bieburr]

The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular intellectual disbelief in it. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned commonsense everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats, and liberals at large, have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks white men as history’s greatest monster and prime time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working people.

“We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker’s George Packer. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.”

“The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.”

That black people who’ve lived under centuries of such derision and condescension have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by theories of intersectionality, throttled by bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

That Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for economic decline as a driving force among Trump’s supporters is, at best, mixed. In a study of polling data, Gallup researchers Jonathan T. Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that “people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “somewhat more likely to support Trump.” But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had higher mean household incomes ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were “less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”

An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median income for Trump supporters to be $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income for African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not confined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making between 50,000 and $100,000 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This bears out the profile of Trump’s primary base, but more important, it shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being much too modest, declining to claim the credit their own economic class so richly deserves.

Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won young whites, age 18 to 29 (+4), adult whites, age 30 to 44 (+17), middle-age whites, age 45 to 64 (+28), and senior whites, age 65 and older (+19). According to Edison Research, Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic Maryland (+12), and whites in sunbelt New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton broke that plane in states as diverse as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From beer track to wine track, from soccer moms to NASCAR dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you only tallied the popular vote of “white America” to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would defeat Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a “toss-up” or unknown.

Part of Trump’s dominance among whites is that he ran as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to that of Mitt Romney in 2012. But unlike the others, Trump secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: voters who identified as white.

The focus on one sector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony, the bloody heirloom remains potent—even after a black president, and, in fact, strengthened by the fact of the black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of the country’s political life. That acceptance frustrates the aims of the left, which would much rather be talking about the class struggles that might entice the working white masses, instead of the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support of Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firemen and observant evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, could be dismissed.

Consciences could be eased and no deeper existential reckoning would be required. T

 

[Scustin Bieburr]

This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as long. Like the black working class, the white working class originates in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In their early seventeenth-century primordial state, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the eighteenth century the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged—the descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages nor backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of being degraded to the level of “black” slave labor. This early white working class “expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery,” writes historian David Roediger. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.’ ”


Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a “master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported as saying. In law and economics and then custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the “help,” “the freemen,” the white workers and the “servants,” the “negers,” the slaves. The former was virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The other was servile and parasitic, dim-witted and loafing, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational and dependent upon the scorn heaped upon black labor, much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was then dependent upon the derision directed at a “loose woman.” And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor a lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.

And so southern intellectual George Fitzhugh could, in a single stroke, deplore the exploitation of white free labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved black labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were “ ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the larger.” Fitzhugh dismissed a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune” by exploiting his fellow whites:

Whilst making his fortune, he daily exchanged about one day of his light labor for thirty days of the farmer, the gardener, the miner, the ditcher, the sewing woman, and other common working people’s labor. His capital was but the accumulation of the results of their labor; for common labor creates all capital. Their labor was more necessary and useful than his, and also more honorable and respectable. The more honorable, because they were contented with their situation and their profits, and not seeking to exploitate, by exchanging one day of their labor for many of other people’s. To be exploited, ought to be more creditable than to exploitate.

But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The slaveholder “provided for them, with almost parental affection”—even when the loafing slave “feigned to be unfit for labor.” Fitzhugh proved too explicit—going so far as to argue that white laborers might be better off if enslaved. (“If white slavery be morally wrong,” he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true.”) But the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer—if it can be called that—because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic is greeted with a call for mandatory minimums and scorn. Op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the sympathetic plight of working class whites when their life expectancy approaches levels that, for blacks, society simply accepts as normal. White slavery is sin. ****** slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose—the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers who, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s master class.

This is by design. Senator and celebrated statesman John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working or not:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and the white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:

I say it is there true that every mechanic asumes among us the position which only a master workman holds among you. Hence it is that the mechanic in our southern States is admitted to the table of his employer, converses with him on terms of equality—not merely political equality, but an actual equality—wherever the two men come in contact. The white laborers of the South are all of them men who are employed in what you would term the higher pursuits of labor among you. It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race—the descendants of Ham.

Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim of the emerging capitalism. “I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery,” the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued in a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “This was before I saw that there was white slavery.” Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he asserted “the landless white” as worse off than the enslaved blacks, who at least enjoyed “surety of support in sickness and old age.”

The invokers of “white slavery” held that there was nothing unique in the enslavement of blacks when measured against the enslavement of all workers. What evil there was in enslavement resulted from its status as subsidiary to that broader exploitation better seen among the country’s noble laboring whites. Once the broader problem of white exploitation was solved, the subsidiary problem of black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps even fade away. Abolitionists focused on slavery were dismissed as “substitutionists” who wished to trade one form of slavery for another. “If I am less troubled concerning the Slavery prevalent in Charleston or New-Orleans,” wrote the reformer Horace Greeley, “It is because I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my first efforts.”The Civil War destroyed the charge of substitutionism and rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on.


This was a matter of rhetoric, not fact. The noble white labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself, break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, nor bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America’s original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price for even incremental gains for the white masses. It was this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign in the 1930s as someone who would “raise the same kind of hell as President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt” and endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.

The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the “working class” and the invalid and pathological interests of black Americans was not merely the province of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. Acclaimed scholar, liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for President Nixon, approvingly quoted Nixon’s formulation of the white working class: “A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” claimed Nixon, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”

Moynihan’s sense of history was creationist. It had been only eighteen years since the Cicero riots, eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania, three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins—which were parcel to the sins of white people of every class—needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was that working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863, and that terrorism could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every class of whites. Indeed, in the era of lynching, it was often the daily newspapers that served to whip up the fury of the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common—white women. But to conceal the breadth of white racism, these racist outbursts were often disregarded or treated not as racism, but as the unfortunate side effect of legitimate grievances against capital. By focusing solely on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.

When David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning the Republican primary for one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious—that Duke had appealed to the base, racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating—and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.

But this was the past made present. It was not important to these commentators that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negars.” “A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis,” Roediger wrote.

The challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imagined white working class remains central to our politics and our cultural understanding of those politics, not simply when it comes to addressing broad economic issues but also when it comes to addressing racism. At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that all
Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by the structure and particulars of an unfettered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races, and those who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which benefits everyone. “These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” wrote Senator Barack Obama in 2006:

Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.

Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but not so much because of racism but for reasons of geography and job sector distribution. This rendition—raceless anti-racism—marks the modern left, from New Democrat Bill Clinton to socialist Bernie Sanders. With few exceptions, there is little recognition among national liberal politicians that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.

 

[RickyDiBiase]

you seriously need to get laid.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Coates kinda lost me by equating everything to Palestine lately, but yeah he’s got gems.

 

[Scustin Bieburr]

In 2016, Hillary Clinton offered more rhetorical support to the existence of systemic racism than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to—black voters well remembered the previous Clinton administration as well as her previous campaign. While her husband’s administration had touted the rising tide theory, it did so while slashing welfare and getting “tough on crime,” a phrase that stood for specific policies but also as rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton for having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton evoked the old dichotomy between white workers and loafing blacks, claiming to be the representative of “hardworking Americans, white Americans.” By the end of the 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, her advisers were hoping someone would uncover the apocryphal “whitey tape,” in which an angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton’s earlier campaign for president, it was Hillary Clinton herself who had employed the “super-predator” theory of conservative William Bennett, who cast “inner-city” children of that generation as “almost completely unmoralized” and the font of “a new generation of street criminals…the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” The “baddest” generation did not become super-predators. But by 2016, they were voters who judged Hillary Clinton’s newfound consciousness to be lacking.

It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. They too toil in this new global economy. The unemployment rate for young black people (20.6 percent) in July of 2016 was double that of young white people (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other sociologists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in “hardworking” manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. And if anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past twenty years of the wealth gap between black families and their country. But the cultural condescension and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.

Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Long-suffering working-class whites do. And though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a trans-class, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.

From Joe Biden, vice president:

They’re all the people I grew up with….And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist.

To Bernie Sanders, senator and candidate for president:

I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.

To Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times:

My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they’re profoundly wrong, but please don’t dismiss them as hateful bigots.

These claims of fidelity and origin are not merely elite defenses of an aggrieved class but also a sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don’t share kinship with white men. “You can’t eat equality,” asserts Biden—a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or deportation of a breadwinner. Within a week of Sanders lambasting Democrats for not speaking to “the people” where he “came from,” he was making an example of a woman who dreamed of representing the people she came from. Confronted with a young woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sanders responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: “It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough….One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.” The upshot—attacking one specimen of identity politics after having invoked another—was unfortunate.

But other Sanders appearances proved more alarming. On MSNBC, Sanders attributed Trump’s success, in part, to his willingness to “not be politically correct.” Sanders admitted that Trump had “said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old, same old political rhetoric.” Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer Trump would have doubtlessly approved of. “What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested,” Sanders explained.


“And that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very, very powerful people.”

This was a shocking definition of “political correctness” proffered by a politician of the left. But it matched a broader defense of Trump voters. “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks,” Sanders said later. “I don’t agree.” This is not exculpatory. Every Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.

One can, to some extent, understand politicians embracing a self-serving identity politics. Candidates for high office, like Sanders, have to cobble together a working coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes, in the near term, necessitates the eliding of uncomfortable truths. But journalists have no such excuse. In the past year, Nicholas Kristof could be found repeatedly pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his old comrades in the white working class as “bigots”—even when that bigotry is evidenced in his own reporting. A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, found the anthropological Kristof wondering why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they depend upon. But the problem, according to Kristof’s interviewees, isn’t Trump’s attack on benefits so much as an attack on their benefits. “There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” a man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed—“Obama phones,” a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a longstanding government program into a scheme through which the (former) president gave away free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn’t shift his analysis based on this comment, and continues on as though it were never said, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked into parentheses.

Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much perturb Kristof. That is because his defenses of the innate goodness of Trump voters and of the innate goodness of the white working class are in fact defenses of neither. On the contrary, the white working class functions in the rhetoric and argument not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.

 

[Scustin Bieburr]

Mark Lilla’s essay “The End of Identity Liberalism” is perhaps the most profound specimen of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted its message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, according to Lilla, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era—flying to see a black and lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector executed, upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference, signing the Defense of Marriage Act—consistently signaling his attachment to “Real America.” Nor would you know that “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity of politics of a white supremacist “solid South.” The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or the other, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of a first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics…is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. Whatever appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the blood heirloom.

White tribalism haunts even more nuanced and skilled writers. George Packer’s essay “The Unconnected” is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on the white working class, a population that “has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban ‘underclass.’ ” Packer believes these ills, and the Democratic party’s failure to respond to them, explain much of Trump’s rise. He offers no opinion polls to weigh their views on “elites,” much less their views on racism. He offers no sense of how their views and relationship to Trump differ from those of other workers and other whites.

 

[Scustin Bieburr]

That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase was doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support, among whites, came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the “working class,” the difference in vote is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this working class supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making under $100,000 and the majority making under $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.

Packer’s essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not available. But it should not be surprising that a candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white voters, given that racism has long been a dividing line for the national parties, at least since the civil rights movement. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia—a state that remained Democratic into the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively late rightward movement evidences, to Packer, a shift “that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race.” This is likely true—the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable “just to the politics of race.” The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism, the history of lynching must be seen in the light of anxiety over the growing independence of women, and the civil rights movement can’t be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement—one that is small comfort to those who live under its boot. And the dint of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary in the state, 95 percent of that state’s voters were white. Twenty percent of those—one in five—openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, an incumbent Obama lost in ten counties in West Virginia to Keith Russell Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison who racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote. A simple thought experiment should be run here—can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing the same?

But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay. There’s no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof, Packer is gentle with his subjects. When a white woman “exploded” and told Packer, “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat French fries or Coca-Cola—no way,” he sees this as rebellion against “the moral superiority of elites.” In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when the government first began advising Americans on their diets. As recently as 2003, President George W. Bush spoke of the benefits of his HealthierUS initiative, explaining an exciting healthcare plan that “says if you exercise and eat healthy food, you will live longer.” But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that similar advice now came from the country’s first black First Lady. Packer concludes in true tribal fashion, passively asserting that Obama has left the country “more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember,” a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers, which is to say those forced to carry the weight of slavery, would disagree.

The maintenance of white honor and whiteness remains at the core of liberal American thinking. Left politics are not exempt. The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly even because of it. Trump removed the questions of racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the realm of the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. It simply could not be that Hillary Clinton was correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a president because of bigotry. The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics, that the country is susceptible to that bigotry, that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos, that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—are just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure—yet again—of class unity in the face of racism. Technocrats and centrists would find no solace as their class proved just as susceptible. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion—the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.

Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from Lawrence Summers (of all people), the economist and former Harvard president, who labels the Democratic Party little more than “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues like “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance against the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance against the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance against the effort to deport parents, resistance against a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance against a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for those “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply evidences the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.

When Barack Obama came into office in 2009, he believed that he could work with “sensible” conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP’s primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a “one-term president.” A healthcare plan derived from a Republican governor and pioneered by a conservative think tank was suddenly rendered as socialism and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations when proposed by Obama. The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating Obama. It was thought by Obama and others that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump’s genius was understanding that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the presumed favorite of another.

 

[Scustin Bieburr]

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump once bragged. This statement should be met with only a modicum of doubt. Trump mocked the disabled, bragged of sexual assault, endured multiple accusations of sexual assault, fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed that lie by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction in the White House to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump—to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a ******.

But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evidences this too. In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that Russian interference in the election could only succeed where “necessary conditions” and an “existing background” were present. In America that “existing background” was a persistent racism and the “necessary condition” was the symbolic threat of a black president. The two related factors hobbled America’s ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of the Republican Party doubted that Barack Obama was born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. The party’s politicians acted accordingly, famously refusing his Supreme Court nominee a hearing, and then most fatefully refusing to work with the administration to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all of its affairs—the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food, the future of its vast system of education, the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase “grab ’em by the p*ssy” into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.


The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half-true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington, schooled in the methodology of governance, now liberated from the pretense of anti-racist civility, doing a much more effective job than Trump.

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, but the larger threat was to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion…because they think they are white,” the instinct is to claim exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also its most dangerous president—and made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

But not damned by it. There is nothing done in the service of whiteness that places it beyond the boundaries of human behavior and history. Indeed, what makes the epoch of Indian killing and African slavery, of “war capitalism,” as Sven Beckert dubs it, so frightening is how easily its basic actions cohere with all we know of human greed and the temptations of power. There is something terrible in being able to imagine oneself as the plunderer, something discomfiting in knowing that moral high ground is neither biological nor divine. This understanding does not require a flight of fantasy. Americans, too, belong to a class—one responsible for and intrinsically tied to a history of torture, bombings, and coups d’état carried out in our name. And Trump has only heaped more upon that burden. In the global context, perhaps, we Americans are all white.

Still there was nothing inevitable about Donald Trump’s election, and while great damage has been done by his election, at the time of this writing it is not yet the end of history. What is needed now is a resistance intolerant of self-exoneration, set against blinding itself to evil—even in the service of warring against other evils. One must be able to name the bad bargain that whiteness strikes with its disciples—and still be able to say that it is this bargain, not a mass hypnosis, that has held through boom and bust.

And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related—but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal—a world more humane.

The First White President

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

www.theatlantic.com

I think in light of all the discourse blaming democrats for not speaking enough on the economy, this essay is more relevant than ever before. There is nothing new under the sun. America is still a racist country, and voters are still motivated by bigotry.

And before people wanna say "oh that was different tho" look at the exit poll stats for yourselves. White people across all economic and age groups voted for this man:

How Trump won the 2024 election — CBS News exit poll results

Trump's election victory was a product of voter discontent with the state of the country, the economy and a desire for change, and he made inroads with some Democratic groups.

www.cbsnews.com

 

[Neuromancer]

Subs

 

[HarlemHottie]

The maintenance of white honor and whiteness remains at the core of liberal American thinking. Left politics are not exempt. The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly even because of it. Trump removed the questions of racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the realm of the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. It simply could not be that Hillary Clinton was correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a president because of bigotry. The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics, that the country is susceptible to that bigotry, that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos, that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—are just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure—yet again—of class unity in the face of racism.

I was a big Coates fan back before the Obama years. Passages like this one are why I don't fw him no more. It's like, he walks right up to the edge of a proper conclusion, closes his eyes, and runs the other way.

 

[Afro]

I was a big Coates fan back before the Obama years. Passages like this one are why I don't fw him no more. It's like, he walks right up to the edge of a proper conclusion, closes his eyes, and runs the other way.

How do you think he should have ended that passage? I'm honestly not well versed in his works. But I agree with most of what he said.

 

[HarlemHottie]

How do you think he should have ended that passage? I'm honestly not well versed in his works. But I agree with most of what he said.

It's not about the ending of particular passage. The passage itself- nay, the entire essay- wastes at least 200 words simply because he won't state the obvious conclusion aloud: ALL political actors in this country operate from a base of white supremacy. He gets close with the Hillary "hard working Americans" quote, even closer still in the portion I quoted, but, as a reader, it's frustrating. Like sex with no orgasm. Like, what are we even doing here? Is there a point? Or was the title the point and the words just filler? (It's doubly frustrating because, like me, and Pac, he's a child of Panthers and does, in fact, know better.)

Obvious, forthright white supremacists can make the argument- and do - that white supremacy can't really be a problem for us because our 'greatest' contemporary black writers/ spokespeople can only see it when it's wearing a MAGA hat. It starts to look more like partisanship than actual grievance.

I miss black writers who weren't afraid of hurting white folks feelings.