A 5 pages essay with MLA format

••• TA-NEHISI COATES

IN 2017, JOURNALIST, BLOGGER, and fiction writer Ta-Nehisi Coates won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. The MacArthur committee cited his abil- ity to bring "personal reflection and historical scholarship to bear on America's most contested issues." The citation singles out the qualities that make Coates's work so powerful: his ability to combine personal stories with historical, eco- nomic, and sociological research (often based on statistics and graphs) in a way that grabs at the hearts and minds of readers.

He learned this skill in his first paid gig at The Washington City Paper, whose freewheeling style was more to his taste than school. But he learned his love for research in the library. As he writes in his bestselling book of essays Between the World and Me, "The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free":

I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest col- lections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center .... Moorland held archives, papers, collections, and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works. I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention. I would arrive in the morning and request, three. call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard.

This diligent research is a habit that Coates maintains and one he explicitly hopes to inspire in others. His longer articles are often followed up by a slew of posts or articles about the scholarship he read in preparation; his blog is, as often as not, an annotated exhortation to readers to look up and read his sources. Coates equates "hard" scholarship with the ability to deal with "hard" truths. "I have," he writes, "great respect and love for people who dig through the archives, who do the calculations, who do the case-studies, and perform the field research."

"The Fiist White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates, first published in THE ATLANTIC, copyright© 2017 Ta-Nehisi Coates. Used by permission of publisher.

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TA-NEHISI COATES 25

The reading reprinted here, "The First White President," first appeared in The Atlantic in October 2017, eleven months after Donald Trump's election. In

, it, Coates argues that the victory should be seen as a retreat from the historic achievement of Barack Obama, the United States's first black president. But Coates also insists that Trump and his supporters are far from unique or unprec- edented. Instead, they represent a tradition of "political whiteness" reaching back to our Republic's earliest moments. Crude, bullying, and impetuous, Trump is quite capable of branding all Mexicans as "rapists" or denigrating Third World countries as "shit holes." But Coates warns that we should not allow Trump's Twitter feeds to di;tract us from the deeply entrenched system that has enabled his rise.

Not everyone admires "The First White President." The libel'al journalist George Packer acknowledges the power of the article but expresses reservations:

There's a lot to admire in Ta-Nehisi Coates's new essay. It's one of those pieces that grabs you with its first paragraph and never lets go .... At its heart is the undeniable truth that racism remains fundamental in American politics.

To Packer's way of thinking, Coates oversimplifies a more complicated reality:

At the heart of American politics there is racism. But it's not alone-- there's also greed, and broken communities, and partisan hatred, and ignorance. Any writer who wants to understand American politics has to find a way into the minds of Trump voters. Any progressive politi- cian who wants to gain power has to find common interests with some of them, without waiting for the day of reckoning first to scourge white Americans of their original sin. This effort is one of the essential tasks of politics.

The "original sin" Packer references here is slavery, legally abolished in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment. But laws are one thing; culture quite another. Coates argues that we have to change the culture first. Packer counters that this task will take too long. But both agree about one thing: the shadow of this "sin" hangs over us all.

REFERENCES

"Macarthur Fellows/Meet the Class of2015." Ta-Nehisi Coates. 28 September 2015 http:/ /rwinonajohnson. weebly .com/uploads/ 4/5/3/2/ 45322833/ta-nahesis-

Ta-Nahasi Coates. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. 46.

George Packer, "George Packer Responds to Ta-Nahasi Coates." The Atlantic: Notes, First Drqfis, Conversations, Stories in Progress. 15 September 2017.

The First White President

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 plun- der cleared the grounds for Trump's fo_refathers and barred others from it. 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 detach~ ment 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 ofbirtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the coun- try they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; 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 count- ing my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump deman~e~ t~e president's college grades ( offering $5 million in exchange for them), ms1stmg that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true-his ide- ?logy is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump maugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican "rapists;' only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump's rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as "cucks." The word, derived from cuckold, is specifi- cally meant to debase by fear and 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 dicta 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 marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent's email and who

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now, as president, is 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. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards-and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump's contentious claim that "both sides" were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas ~s forebears carried w~ten~ss like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowmg amulet open, releasmg its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also 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 ("When you're a star, they let you do it"), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then stroll- ing 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 (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work 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.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black presi- dent, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him 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 ofObama's legacy the foundation of his own.And this too is whiteness. "Race is an idea, not a fact," the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a "white race" is the idea of not be- ing a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent-an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruct~on or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white.Trump truly is something new-tlf e first president whose entire political existence ~ges ~n the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump 1s a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific-America's first white president.

The scope of Trump's commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. 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 Dunliam's America and Jeff Foxworthy's. The collective verdict

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holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday eco- nomic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history's greatest monster and prime-time television's biggest doo- fus. 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-class people.

"We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them" the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The_ New Yorker, speaking of the white working class. "The only slur you ~an- use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck-that wont 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 the celebrity chef 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 have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not tro~ble the~e theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump's racism and the rac~sm ~fhis 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 bigo~ itself. C?sten~ibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments ab~ut mter~ect10nality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless wh~te 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.

Asserting that Trump's rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic :eversal has b~c~me de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that "people_living in areas with diminished economic opportunity" were "some- what more likely to support Trump:' But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ~!81,~98) than those who did not ($77,046).Those who approved ofTrump 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 predic- tors ofTrump support."

An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income ofTrump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, _and $15,_000 above the ~erican median. Trump's white support was not determmed by mcome. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 29

making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites makin~ $50,0~0 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 pomts.This shows ~atTrump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when whi_te pun~ts cast the eleva- tion ofTrump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for the~r own_eco~omic class.T1:1mp's dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger domman_ce 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 whites ages 18-29 (+4), 30-44 (+17), 45-64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19).Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt's New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump's white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton's did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky'. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to NASCAR dads, Trump s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother ]_ones, bas~d on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.

Part of Trump's dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. !rump's share of the white vote was sinlilar to Mitt Romney's in 2012. But unlike Romney; Trump secured this support by running against his party's leadership, against accepted campaign orthodo;cy., and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trum'p's approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identifie~ as whit~- .

The focus on one subsector ofTrump 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's presidency 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 th~t the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martm Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony--:--even a~ter a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black pr~sident-is, to a~c~pt that racism remains, as it has since 177 6, at the heart of this country s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the 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 for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville fire~ghters ~nd evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors mto voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the

30 TA-NEHISI COATES

heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.

This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and blackAmericans 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 far. Like the black working class, the white work- ing class originated in bondage-the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th 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 or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class "·expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery," according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. "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 hierar- chy. "None but negers are sarvants," the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the "help" (or the "freemen;' or the white workers) and the "servants" (the "negers," the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor-much as the honor accorded a "virtuous lady" was dependent on the derision directed at a "loose woman:' And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the "whore," planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved. _ And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery mtellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites' labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks' 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 inveighed against a "professional man" who'd "amassed a fortune" by exploiting his fellow whites. 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

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 31

loafing slave "feigned to be unfit fo~ labor:' Fitzhugh. proved too ,~xplic~t-going so far as to argue that white laborers rmght be better off if enslaved. ( If white slavery be rnorally wrong;' he wrote, "the Bible cannot be true:'.) Nevertheless, the argument ·that America's original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white la~or by whi~e capit~sts-"w~i~e slavery" -proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on m our politJ.cs today. Black worke~s s~- fer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffe:r, s~mething ~ nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people_ is greeted with calls for compassion and treatm~nt, as all ep~demics should be, while

:ack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory ~urns. Sympathetic op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slave17 is sin. Nil?:ger slave17 is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and rnoral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands

closest to America's aristocratic class. This is by design. Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as

the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and 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 white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:

I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substra- tum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community ... 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 surik to the degradation ofbeing 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 emerging capitalism. "I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm ad~ocate of the abolition of slavery;' the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued m 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 ass~rted that "the landless white" was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least en Joyed

"surety of support in sickness and old age:' · 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 a subsidiary of the broader exploitation better seen among the country's noble laboring whites. Once

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the larger problem of white exploitation was solved, the dependent problem of black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps would fade away. Abolitionists focused on slavery were dismissed as "substitutionists" who wished to trade one form of slavery for another. "Ifl 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."

Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War 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, or 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 of even incremental gains for the white masses. It was this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would "raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt" and later endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.

The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the "work- ing class" and the invalid and pathological interests ofblackAmericans was not the province merely of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. The acclaimed scholar, liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for

President Richard 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;' Nixon claimed, 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;'

It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out ofLevittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther KingJr.had been stoned while walking through Chicago's Marquett~ Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was, working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863 · terrorism could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every clas; of whites. Indeed, in the era oflynching, the daily newspapers often whipped 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 ~nfortunate side effect oflegitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.

When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning 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 racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegre- gating--and instead decided that something else was afoot. "There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 33

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 c~untry it actually was. .

But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists 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 le~t out.What was important was. the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degrada- tion of white workers to the level of"negers:' "A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis;' David Roediger, the University of

Kansas professor, has written. That challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imag-

ined white working class remains central to our politics and to our cultural under- standing 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 most Americans-regardless ofrace-are exploited by an unfet- tered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which ben- efits everyone. "These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts;'

Senator Barack Obama wrote 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 less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution.This notion-raceless antiracism-marks the modem left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton acknowledged the existence of systemic racism more explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to-black voters remembered too well the previous Clinton administration, as well as her previous campaign. While her husband's administration had touted the rising- tide theory of economic growth, it did so while slashing welfare and getting "tough on crime," a phrase that stood for specific policies but also served as rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton from having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, she 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

34 TA-NEHISI COATES

hoping someone would uncover an apocryphal "whitey tape," in which an angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton's presidential-reelection campaign in the mid-1990s, Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed the "super-predator" theory of William]. Bennett,John P.Walters, and John J. Diiulio Jr. This theory cast "inner-city" children of that era 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 young adults, many of whom judged Hillary Clinton's newfound consciousness to be lacking.

It's worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympa- thetic portraits of this "forgotten" young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s,WilliamJulius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufactur- ing jobs has had on African American communities. 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 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward 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 oflong-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and right- fully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that. And though much has been written about the distance between elites and "Real America;' the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.

Joe Biden, then the vice president, last year:

"They're all the people I grew up with ... And they're not racist. They're not sexist."

Bernie Sanders, senator and former candidate for president, last year:

"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:'

Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, in February of this year:

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

These claims of origin and fidelity 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 Joe Biden-a statement worthy of

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 35

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 the 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 where she came from. Confronted with a young woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sand- ers responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: "It is not good enough for someone to say, Tm 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.

Other Sanders appearances proved even more alarming. On MSNBC, he 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 rheto- ric." Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer Trump surely would have 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 definition of political correctness was shocking coming from 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. Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was 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, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfort- able truths. But journalists have no such excuse. Again and again in the past year, Nicholas Kristof could be found pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his old comrades in the white working class as bigots-even when their bigotry was evidenced iIJ. his own reporting.A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wonder- ing why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they depend on. 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 waste- ful spending, so cut other places;' one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed:"Obarna phones;' the products of a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a long-standing government program into a scheme through which the then-president gave away free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn't shift his analysis based on this comment and, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked between paren- theses, continues on as though it were never said.

36 TA-NEHISI COATES

Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much perturb Kristof. -r:hat 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 rhetorically not as a real commuruty of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.

Mark Lilla's New York Times essay "The End of Identity Liberalism;' published n?t long after last year's election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into "a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and ~exual id:n~ty;' which distorted liberalism's message "and prevented it from be~ommg _a unifying force capable of governing:' Liberals have turned away from_ the": working-class base, he says, and must look to the "pre-identity liberalism" of Bill_ Cli11:ton 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 home ~o Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstagmg Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor wo~ld you know _that the "pre-identity" liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist "solid South:' The name Barack Obama d?es not appear in Lilla's essay; and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics-the possibility of the ~st black pre~ident-that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, win- rung the elect10n 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. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled.What appeals to black workers, an~ ~ others outside t1:~ tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. A] politics are identity politics-except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.

White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer's New Yorker 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 that these ills, and the Democratic Party's failure to respond to them, explain much ofTrurnp's rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers' views on "elites," much less their views ?n racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship to Trump differ from other workers' and other whites'.

That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between !'ru~p and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase :s doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plural- ity support among every econ01nic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be so:11ething more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how var~ous_ gro~~~ in t1:is inco~e bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites m this working ~lass supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 37

$100 000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic didate. So when Packer laments the fact that "Democrats can no longer really

can hi ,, h . laim to be the party of working people-not w te ones, anyway, e comm1ts

c kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren't the party of :hite people-working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact oflabor 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 Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers am?ng _white vot~~s, ~iven that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties smce the civil-nghts era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia-a state that remained Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to Packer, a shift "that couldn't be attributed just to the politics of race:'This is likely true-the politics of race are, theinselves, 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 light of anxiety over the growing inde- pendence of women;, the civil-rights movement c~'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 the people-black, Muslim, immigrant-who live under racism's boot.

The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Dem- ocratic primary there, 95 percent of the 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 ye~rs later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison;Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incum- bent white president doing so well?

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 that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof Packer is gentle with his subjects.When a woman "exploded" and told Packer, "I w:mt 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 a rebellion against "the moral superior- ity of elites:' In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when th~ government first began advising Americans on their diets.As recently as 2002, Preside~t George W Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that siinilar advice now came from the country's first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country "more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember;' a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Cer~ainly the ~en and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching

38 TA-NEHISI COATES

of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian's home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther KingJr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.

The triumph of Trump's campaign ofbigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country's thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The implications -that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the coun- try is susceptible to such 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-were just too dark. Left- ists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. 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 ofits 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, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party "a coalition of the cosmopolitan elite and diversity." The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as "diversity." It'.s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of "diversity"-resis- tance to the monstrous incarceration oflegions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to de- port parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches "no excuses" to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives "too big to jail." That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as "diversity" simply reveals 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. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP's primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a "one-terin president." A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama, suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. 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 one

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 39

man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump's genius was to see 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 heavily favored nominee of the

other. "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someb9dy and

I wouldn't lose any voters," Trump bragged in January 20i6. This statement should be met with only a modicum of skepticism. Trump has mocked the disabled, withstood multiple accusations of sexual violence (all of which he has denied), fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, person- ally exposed those lies by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into _his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstructJ.on 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 oppo- nent's father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physi- cal endowment with that of another candidate and then 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 nigger.

But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where "necessary conditions" and an "existing back- ground" were present. In America, that "existing background" was a persistent rac- ism, and the "necessary condition" was a black president. The two related factors hobbled America's ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administra- tion 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 its affairs-the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 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 pussy 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 ful:filled.

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

40 TA-NEHISI COATES

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 ofWashington and better schooled in the methodol- ogy of governance-and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility- doing a much more effective job than Trump.

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world.

There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was "singularly disastrous for modern civilization" or James Baldwin claims that whites "have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white," the instinct is to cry exaggera- tion. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous presi- dent-and he is 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.

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

WITHIN THE READING

1. Coates writes about a contemporary event-the election of Donald Trump-but he does it in a way many readers might not appreciate. Responding to the barrage of the President's lies (more than five a day, according to the New York Times), many journalists have chosen to put their energies into countering the lies with facts-objective evidence. But in "The First White President," Coates takes a strikingly different approach by historidzing the present. "Historicizing" means that he provides an historical or "diachronic" context missing from responses that focus on the contem- porary moment exclusively. Fighting lies with facts is essential work that journalists should never abandon, but facts by themselves cannot explain why some facts escape attention while others crowd out everything else. Reread Coates's essay, looking at the moments when he injects history into the discussion. What effect do these moments have on your experience as a reader? How do they change the way you understand contemporary events?

2. The most important term in Coates's essay is, of course, "whiteness." Underline or highlight all the places where the word appears. What is "whiteness," according to Coates? Does he view it as a biological category or does he see as a cultural and historical construct? What does it mean to say that whiteness is a "cultural construct"? In other words, how did it get constructed, by whom and

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 41

for what purposes? Be sure to consider the relationship between race and class. In what ways, according to Coates, did the invention of "whiteness" distract working people of European descent from making common cause with other working people? How did whiteness help to bolster the distinction between a "worker" and a "slave"? What are the differences?

On the basis of your reading of the essay, would you define Coates as a 3. . liberal or a Democrat? Would you define him as a conservative or a. Republican? To what degree does he fit within any of these ca~ego~es? What specifically does Coates have to say about lib_erals and :heir attitude~ towards black Americans? Describe the nature of his reservations about Bill and Hillary Clinton. What seems to be his attitude towar~ liberal r~formers like Senator Bernie Sanders, the political scientist Mark Lilla or the Journal- ists Nicholas Kristof and George Packer? Do you think that Coates sees both parties as complicit in the perpetuation of whiteness? Would h~ see them as equally complicit or complicit in_ the s~~ wa,:s? Why does whiteness play such an important role in Amencan political life?

QUESTIONS FOR WRITING

1. Drawing from the information that Coates provides, explain th~ m~_alof d "whiteness." As you develop your explanation, be sure to consider its soe1 an cultural roles. What kinds of distinctions and divisions does "whiteness" create, and how do those distinctions and divisions function in our society today? Who benefits from the persistence of whiteness and who is disadvantaged? Why :iave so many observers, progressive as well as conservative, attributed Trump's victory to working-class resentment instead of a racism that can be found ~ong all classes, including the wealthiest and best educated? To what degree 1s the system as a whole dependent on the existence of a racialized "other"?

2. Starting in 2015, the United States ceased t~ b~ classifi~d as a ":full dthemocra1' by the Economist magazine's respected Intelligence Urut (EIU). At e top o the top of the EIU's list of :full democracies were Norw~y, Icela~d, Sweden, New Zealand and Denmark, with Ireland and Canada tied for sixth place.

The writers of the report explicitly say that Donald Trump is not t~ blame because he was a symptom, rather than the cause, of the country s decline. The cause, they conclude, was a loss of trust in government:

By tapping a deep strain of political disaffection with the function- ing of democracy, Mr. Trump became a beneficiary of the low esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected repre- sentatives, and political parties, but he was not responsible for a problem that has had a long gestation.

42 TA-NEHISI COATES

What role might whiteness play in discrediting our political institutions? To what degree is whiteness at odds with democracy itself? To what is it an expression of democracy? Does the problem of whiteness force us to choose between different definitions of democracy: democracy as equality and democracy as majority rule?

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

BETWEEN READINGS

1. In "Biographies of Hegemony," anthropologist Karen Ho describes the process of socialization that naturalizes inequality-that makes it seem "nat- ural" and normal. People learn to accept that special privileges rightfully belong to those endowed with "smartness":

The "culture of smartness" is central to understanding Wall Street's financial agency, how investment bankers are personally and institutionally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic change. On Wall Street, "smartness" means much more than indi- vidual intelligence; it conveys a naturalized and sense of "impressiveness," of elite, pinnacle status and expertise which is used to signify, even prove, investment bankers' worthiness.

To what does the whiteness described by Coates also support a form of "hegemony"? Explore the parallels between smartness and whiteness, but also the ways they might differ. Is smartness also racialized? Does whiteness rely on competition and merit to justify the advantages it conveys? Does smartness do the same---or does it only appear to?

2. In his chapter, "Son," Andrew Solomon introduces readers to two different kinds of identity:

Because of the transmission of identity from one ie:ene1rao,on to the next, most children share at least some traits with their parents. These are vertical identities. Attributes and values are passed down from parent to child across the generations not only through strands of DNA but also through shared cultural norms. Ethnicity, for example, is a vertical identity .... Often, however, someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a peer group. This is a hori- zontal identity .... Being gay is a horizontal identity.

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 43

To what degree does whiteness qualify as a horizontal identity, and to what degree is it vertical? To what extei:t do :Whiteness and its correl~te, ~lackness, complicate Solomon's account of identity? Generally, people ~ent a vertical identity whereas they chose a horizontal identity. Is this true of whiteness? Is it true of blackness?