This is just a restatement of the argument and not any sort of evidence. Let me ask it this way, say we use our magic wand and poof slavery out of history. The USA effectively has no black people but otherwise sees the same immigration. Do you think today the Irish, for example, would not be considered white and would be discriminated against?
But that’s not white supremacy is it? I know I asked the question in the context of “minority rights” but the thread is about white supremacy. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Trump wishes to execute all gays and transgendered people. That has nothing to do with his “whiteness.”
The other examples given are the typical arguments regarding race neutral policies. Providing military equipment to the police, whether a good or bad thing, has nothing to do with racism. Any policy position which is race neutral on its face that only has an arguable secondary and unrelated effect of harming black people is not racist.
Well, I can’t put Roediger’s books into a post, but if you look them up I do think you’ll find they’re fairly well stocked with evidence. Not only Working Toward Whiteness but his earlier book The Wages of Whiteness discuss in quite a bit of detail the centrality of anti-black prejudice in developing a shared “white” identity among groups whose “whiteness” was not always taken for granted.
I have to say, I’m a bit puzzled as to why this seems so surprising to you. You seem to imagine that the category of “whiteness” just spontaneously expanded to include groups whose racial status was previously contested because well duh, naturally, Irish and Italian and Polish people are white, obviously, I mean just look at them!
But that’s projecting the attitudes of the present back onto the past. There’s no particular reason that Irish or Southern and Eastern European people had to make it into the “white” category.
Very possibly. I mean, it’s a pretty big counterfactual, but I don’t see why you think that in the absence of American blacks, the Irish would necessarily have had to “become white”. You think it’s inevitable just because they “look white”? Again, that’s you projecting modern assumptions about the scope and nature of “whiteness”.
George Packer’s response: George Packer Responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic
Double post
If this were true we would see an ethnic separation in countries like Canada or Australia where there were effectively no black people. The fact that we don’t is strong evidence that this change wasn’t dependent on black people.
And I think you are the one projecting a modern view to the past. Day to day, black people weren’t important for immigrants in the late 1800s-1900s. For no other reason than the number of black people in the north was just a bit more than a rounding error. In a city like New York, for example, where you have a million Germans, Irish, and Italians, 30,000 black people are hardly noticeable. It’s just extremely unlikely that black people played a significant cultural role in the North until the great migration after WWII.
Ta-Nehisi Coates was interviewed by Chris Hayes on his show tonight on MSNBC. It replays at 3 AM ET tonight, if anyone wants to set their DVR. I think it started about half-way through. And probably not surprisingly to anyone here, I highly recommend it.
They specifically addressed the criticism of Coates’ article about voters who voted for Obama and then Trump. Coates answer was good, I thought – racism and even white supremacism doesn’t mean necessarily that one would never vote for a black person. It can just mean standards are different for black people vice white people, which was tied closely to the main thrust of the article – that Trump’s success is, at least partially, a signal and symbol to the country that an unqualified disgusting mess of a white man is good enough for a job that only the most highly skilled and highly talented black man can hope to achieve.
Good article. Better than Ta-nehis’s.
You think some white supremacists voted for Obama?
Hmmm…Basically, Packer says “Ta-Nehisi, don’t give people the impression I don’t agree with you, because I DO agree with you! (I would have emphasized certain things rather than others, but I can see where you were going for maximum effect).”
So, I’m glad to hear you find their argument persuasive and thought-provoking.
Not at all. Look Packer does say Coates makes some good points. And sure, he does, but points that everyone else has made for 30 years.
But this election want won my white racism. I quote Packer: “Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even mention the estimated eight and a half million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump—even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban-rural divide is a sham.”
I think it’s possible. I’ve personally known white supremacists (that is, people who had personally stated that they believed black people were, on average, inferior in intelligence and personal character) who liked Michael Jordan, or Whitney Houston, or Denzel Washington.
That’s not a convincing argument. There were Plantation Owners in the antebellum south who “liked” the fiddle playing of some Negro slaves, but I doubt they’d vote for a black man for president.
Undoubtedly. Somewhere between a slave owner and someone who is slightly and unconsciously afraid of black people probably lies some folks with white supremacist beliefs (if far less than supporting slavery) who might vote for a black politician if they were talented and able enough.
Let’s assume for a minute that you are correct. (I don’t think you are, but let’s just assume so, arguendo).) Do you think those people make up the bulk of the ~8 million people who voted for Obama and Trump? If not, I don’t see it being any kind of rebuttal to the actual issue.
I think it’s very possible that they form a significant portion. At the very least, many might be people with few or no personal white supremacist beliefs of their own, but who are indifferent to white supremacist beliefs and positions of others. If so, that also is consistent with the thrust of the article.
Further, I think it’s highly likely that many people, whether or not they personally have white supremacist beliefs, still have different standards (consciously or unconsciously) for white and black politicians, which is also consistent with the thrust of the article.
Whether you want to call all these individuals white supremacist is up to you, but I don’t think it matters. It’s the big, wide, white supremacist system that allows (and maybe encourages) such ideas and beliefs to flourish and continue with significant numbers of people.
I’m not go to argue with anyone who says that it’s more difficult for blacks to be elected to national political office than it is for whites. If that’s Coates’ central thesis, then I’ll catch it at 11 on the news. What people are objecting to is his casual use of the term “white supremacist”, and I remain unconvinced that any significant number of white supremacists, if any, voted for Obama.
That just sounds like a semantics argument. Is someone white supremacist if they thought “holy shit, a black man can be this brilliant? Shit, maybe my dad was wrong about them. I’m gonna vote for him…” and then later – “Damn it, he didn’t do shit. I’m still unemployed. My town is still a shit town. Maybe my dad was right after all. Let’s give Trump a try.”
Is that guy a white supremacist? I’m not so certain he’s not. At the very least, he’s very strongly influenced by white supremacism.
Let me ask you a question. If you can see that white supremacists could vote for Obama, can you see see that Trump’s pushing of the Birther cause might not have been motivated by white supremacist thinking?
It could have been, but I don’t think that’s likely, based on Trump’s history and rhetoric before and since. And even if that wasn’t the motivation, the fact that despite the overwhelming evidence of its falsehood, it wasn’t anathema in the Republican party, is proof (to me, anyway) of the very significant influence (and tolerance) of white supremacism both in the modern Republican party and in politics at large.
I’ll try to put things a little differently. Things are way, way better now than 50 years ago or 150 years ago. But way, way better is a long, long way from good. And I think many of us got kind of complacent and proud of ourselves and assumed that, even if white supremacism wasn’t gone for good, it was at least no longer a very major factor in national politics. But it still is – if we were at a “no credit”, like a 0/100, in 1850, in terms of how we as a society deal with white supremacism and race overall, we were still at a deep F in 1950 (maybe a 40/100), and now we’re just barely earning a D- (let’s say 60/100), or maybe not even that. That remaining tolerance, acceptance, and significant impact of white supremacism today allows birtherism to get a seat at the table. It allows tolerance of racist rhetoric (and retweets of white supremacist things like false stats about black crime), rather than immediate horror that a politician would never be able to get over. It allows pretty openly white supremacist politicians like Steve King to not be booted from the party after spouting about the superiority of European culture. And more.
So in national politics, I think we’re at a place that’s maybe kind of like baseball in the 50s or 60s – a Jackie Robinson, incredibly talented and able, has a decent chance of succeeding while black. They’d have to continuously thread the needle – never get angry, don’t talk about the remaining influence of white supremacism, etc. But some white jackass who’s famous can be given the same shot, and will get many more chances after fucking up.
I think a main point in Coates’ article is the following: only in a significantly white supremacist society (or a society with a significant tolerance for white supremacism, which seems like another way of phrasing the same thing) could someone like Trump have any possible chance of succeeding someone like Obama. All the above is just the rock-solid evidence of the truth of this assertion, IMO.