Last week, in “White Like Trump? Plenty of Americans Are Saying No Thanks,” I argued that many white Americans are being spurred to re-evaluate what it means to be white in the face of Donald Trump’s unabashed appeals to racism. But at the time, and haunting me even more over the last several days, is the plain fact that I really don’t know if this assertion is true. I know it’s true for me that I’ve been thinking about how Trump has troubled my relationship not only to great swathes of other white people in new and profound ways, but with my own whiteness. Yet I’m instantly aware of the layers of potential bullshit in making a claim like this. For example, it’s not like I’m risking anything by exploring this sense of rift or alienation: no matter how I pretend to enlightenment, I’m still a white person who enjoys the status and privileges that this random accident of birth brings to me every day of my life. It costs me absolutely nothing to acknowledge this privilege.
But allow me to double-down and make the case that there are strong reasons that my feelings of repugnance and alienation should be shared by other white Americans, and that this could be something new and potentially transformative for our society and politics. First, at a profound level, by making explicitly racist, white nationalist appeals central to his presidency, Donald Trump is presenting white Americans with a choice that no president in any of our lifetimes has. By asserting again and again that his base is the only constituency he cares about, and that he intends to unite this base by explicitly racist policies and propaganda (including lesser but telling offenses, such as asserting in his Pennsylvania speech yesterday that 52% of women voted for him in 2016, when in fact it was 52% of white women who voted for him), the president would have us return to a time when full citizenship was synonymous only with white skin.
But this is not 1900, or 1950, 1975, or even 2000. Reality, in the form of political and social change, has slowly ground away the capacity of a political movement to sustain an explicitly racist appeal. White people have friends of other races; they work with people of other races; they marry people of other races. Trump’s appeal may work with some white people, but our reality puts a cap on how many it can work with; it’s a hard sell to ask someone to turn against their friends, or co-workers, or relatives, on the basis of the color of their skin.
Of course, a shocking percentage of the white population did vote for Trump, and does continue to support him, which is a decent counter to my arguments for the power of our multicultural reality to blunt his white nationalist demogoguery. And Trump’s racist appeals are inextricably linked to white fears of economic backsliding and loss of social status, both of which fears continue to be amplified by our increasingly unequal and potentially unstable economy, and so can be counted on to supercharge Trump’s race-based strategy so long as he remains president.
* * *
Over at Slate this week, Jamelle Bouie comes at the question of Trump’s white nationalist appeal from another angle — the backlash it’s potentially provoking among non-white Americans. But first, his overview of the resurgent role of race in American is bracing and not to be missed. Drawing on the work of Nils Gilman, Bouie notes that from the 1970's through the Obama era, a national consensus existed in which overt racism was not to be tolerated, but in which structural racism was allowed to continue. Barack Obama “stood as the embodiment and apotheosis of racial liberalism, promising racial transcendence and an end to the tribal conflicts of the past.” But now we’re seeing the end of this era, with the rise of both white nationalism and a growing civil rights movement that views institutional racism as unacceptable. Bouie sums up our current situation thus:
Politically, the new equilibrium of American racial politics is still taking shape. Yes, Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office, and Democratic politicians are increasingly willing to condemn “institutional racism” and call for the removal of civic symbols tied to white supremacy. But the institutional Republican Party has still not fully embraced the president’s demagoguery (even as it remains complicit in giving it a platform), while the Democratic Party has only taken small steps toward a message and platform of racial egalitarianism. Here, the parties are lagging somewhat behind the public.
I’d say that the GOP, with its party-wide emphasis on voter suppression and gerrymandering, has gone further in with the president’s racism, or is at least well on course to do so, than Bouie indicates — but his assessment that we're in a situation of political flux rather than some new end state is incredibly important for understanding our political situation and figuring out how to fight for progressive, egalitarian goals. We’re in a place where actively and loudly discussing the forces in play, in defining the terms of debate, can make a huge difference in where we end up going.
Relating this back to what I’ve been trying to work through about white people becoming more aware of the need to pick a side: whether or not white people actively feel revulsion towards Trump’s racism, a progressive politics should encourage people to understand the choice Trump is giving them, and argue with all the logic and passion at its disposal to urge white Americans to reject this noxious and evil path.
But Bouie goes on to talk about another enormous factor in halting and reversing the tide of white nationalism: the racial awareness and equality-mindedness of the millennial generation, particularly among its millions of minority members. Check out these statistics:
Millennials, now the most diverse generation of adults in American history, are at the vanguard of a shift toward greater color-consciousness in American politics. Fifty-two percent point to discrimination as the main barrier to black progress, a 14-point jump from 2016, when just 38 percent agreed with the statement, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, 68 percent of millennials (and 62 percent of Gen Xers) say that the country needs to “continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.” Millennials show the highest support for immigrants and immigration, and are most likely to oppose a border wall with Mexico. In a separate Pew poll, 60 percent of white millennials said they supported the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bouie cites other figures to back up a case that millennials are more aware than previous generations of discrimination and inequality in American society (likely, one suspects, because more members of this generation have been subject to or otherwise aware in their own lives of such realities). He concludes that while white nationalism may be on the rise, the attitudes and political power of millennials are an enormous counterforce that stands in opposition to it.
As I’m sure Bouie would agree, the rising power of this diverse cohort is one of the changes in America that politicians like Donald Trump are drawing on to stoke white fears of diminished economic power and social standing. Not surprisingly, but still depressingly, white millennials hold more regressive opinions on race than their minority counterparts: "59 percent believe blacks should overcome prejudice and 'work their way up' without any 'special favors,' and 48 percent believe discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as that against nonwhites." The good news is that white millennials are still more progressive than previous generations. The bad news is in figures like those 48% of millennials who believe that they are somehow subject to discrimination, let alone discrimination equal to that against nonwhites.
The tendency of whites to increasingly see themselves as a besieged and belittled group needs to be viewed not only through the lense of other groups achieving greater equality and relative economic power, but crucially as the victory of politicians who use racial animus as a smokescreen behind which the upper reaches of our society take more and more of the collective economic pie. Put bluntly, whites wouldn’t be nearly so receptive to the argument that they’re losing their relative position in society if, for the past 40 years, most people hadn't seen their wages and wealth stagnate. Trumpism is both the logical endpoint and most glaring example of this dynamic: a millionaire president who claims to advocate for his white base while passing laws and regulations (a regressive tax bill, roll-backs of safety rules that protect blue-collar workers, steel and aluminum tariffs that will hurt more working Americans than they help) that benefit the rich at the expense of other Americans. And as I’ve pointed out before, this approach is self-reinforcing: as Trump and GOP policies continue to squeeze working Americans, white Americans will continue to be vulnerable to explanations that involve the scurrilous behavior of blacks and Latino immigrants as the actual reason for their economic malaise.
And so I end where I began, wondering what combination of logic, moral suasion, and reminders of our lived, shared experience as Americans will suffice to break the hold of racist appeals that dehumanize non-whites, degrade whites, and defile our American experiment. . .
