Week 6 Discussion

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

TA-NEHISI CO ATES | O CTO BER 2017 ISSUE | PO LITICS

Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty

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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 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 detachment

can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance

explicit.

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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, 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 counting

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 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 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 ideology is white supremacy, in all 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 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

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shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold,

is specifically 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

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.

Trump’s political career began in advocacy of birtherism. But long before that, he had made his worldview clear.

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. 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 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 (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 president, 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 of Obama’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

being 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 destruction

or 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 that Trump is 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 Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost

its way when it abandoned everyday economic 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 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-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 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.”

White Americans elected an orcish reality-TV star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

“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 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

arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new 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.

Asserting 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 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 “somewhat 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 ($81,898)

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 household income of

Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household

The Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. According to preelection polling, if you tallied only white voters, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81 in the Electoral College. (Gabriella Demczuk)

income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not

determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points,

whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This 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 too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. 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 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 Jones, based 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. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012. But unlike Romney,

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 Research

Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic

group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.

Video: “It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness”

The focus on one subsector 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’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 that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five

decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president;

An animated excerpt from a recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates

‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'

indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, 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 firefighters and 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, can be dismissed.

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

An opioid epidemic is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment; a crack epidemic is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums.

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 far. Like the black working class, the white working 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 hierarchy. “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 intellectual, 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 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.”) Nevertheless, 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 because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an

opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics

should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums.

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 slavery is sin. Nigger

slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral 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 substratum 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 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 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 that “the landless white” was worse off than the enslaved black,

who at least enjoyed “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 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. “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.”

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 “working class” and the invalid and

pathological interests of black Americans 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 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 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 class of whites. Indeed, in the era of lynching, 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

The fact of a black president seemed to insult Donald Trump personally. He has made the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. (Gabriella Demczuk)

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 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 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 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 left out. What was important was the

fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation 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 imagined white working class remains

central to our politics and to 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

most Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by an unfettered 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 benefits 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 modern 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 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 J. 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 sympathetic 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, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate

effect that the decline in manufacturing 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 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. 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 profoundly 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 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, 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.

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 rhetoric.” 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

The KKK and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, July 8, 2017. Not every Trump voter is a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one. (Gabriella Demczuk)

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 uncomfortable 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 in his own reporting. A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wondering 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 wasteful spending, so cut

other places,” one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a

fascinating target is revealed: “Obama 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 parentheses, continues on as though it were never said.

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 rhetorically not as a real community 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 not 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 sexual identity,” which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it from

becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he

says, 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 home to

Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own

conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would 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 does 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 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. What 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 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 of Trump’s rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white

workers’ views on “elites,” much less their views on 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 Trump and the white working class

would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is 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 between how

various groups in this income bracket voted 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 less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $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 Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white

voters, given that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties since the civil-rights 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, 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 light of anxiety over the growing independence

of women; 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 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 Democratic 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 years 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 incumbent 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 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 a 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 2002, President 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 similar 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. 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 would disagree.

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.

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 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 country

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. Leftists 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 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, 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 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 such as “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance to

the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor

women, resistance to the effort to deport 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-term 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 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 somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump bragged

in January 2016. 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, personally 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 obstruction

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 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 background” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent racism, 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 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

January 6, 2017. Republicans applaud after Congress certifies Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. The American tragedy now being wrought will not end with him. (Gabriella Demczuk)

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 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 and better schooled in the

methodology 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 exaggeration. 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 president—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.

This essay is drawn from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power.

A BO U T THE A U THO R

TA -NE HISI C O ATE S is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power.

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