Trump is a racist president, but it's patently false that he's Americans'
first racist president.
--
Edit,
I see the T
a-Nehisi Coates piece from the Atlantic a couple years ago is getting play again. I think the people taking issue with it haven't actually read it.
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.
Coates is making the now conventional, but at the time rarely made in mainstream, argument that Trump's election wasn't because of "Rural working class people not thinking that America worked for them," but rather, "*white* Americans feeling threatened by perceived black progress." This argument is now conventional: Of course Trump's election wasn't about working class pain, it was about white fragility. In 2017, commentators and pols were trying to explain away Trump's presidency ... "The rust belt was still feeling the recession while the elite coasts had come out of it," "Trump won because he embraced economic populism like Sanders while Clinton didn't," "non-college educated white people feel abandoned by the coastal elitist Democratic party..." There were lots of pundits dancing around the facts in front of us to try to make some argument about how they could "win back" those votes that they lost. Coates is making the argument that Trump is the first president who won
because of his whiteness.
George Wallace, perhaps America's most famous segregationist, ran for Governor of Alabama in 1958. At the time, Wallace was considered to be from the progressive, populist wing of the Southern Democratic party. He was endorsed by the NAACP in that race. He was running against another white guy who accepted the endorsement of the KKK openly, and the other guy won the election. Wallace remarked after losing the election that he "was out-ni**ered by his opponent, and he'll never be out-ni**ered again." (FYI, I usually don't write even the censored N-word, I don't feel like I have any right to and so I don't, but in this case Wallace's quote does not come across unless you quote it) He would go on to win Alabama gubernatorial election in '62 and that launched his career as America's most famous segregationist. Sure, there were other segregationists who had been president from the beginning of Jim Crow up until the civil rights act and desegregation, no president had ever square run simply on the issue of segregation, and that was Wallace's platform. Had Wallace pulled an upset in '64, 68, or 72, I think this description would apply to him, even more so than Nixon and the Southern Strategy in '72, or Goldwater in '64 or GHWB and Willie Horton in 1988.
When Coates called Trump "The first white president," it's like Wallace not being "out-ni**ered again." Trump ran on white grievance, he ran on white fragility. When he won, people tried to find excuses ... "If Clinton had adopted Sanders' populist economic rhetoric, she would have won in rural [white] America..." Bull shit. They voted for Trump not because he was a populist, but because he is a white racist juxtaposed against America's first black president. Coates makes the argument much more eloquently than I can, and before you dismiss it just from the headline -- which is intentionally provocative, it's written to make you say "huh? wtf are you talking about?" -- I'd suggest reading the whole piece.
www.nbcnews.com
