Obama did not run a post-racial campaign. He ran a campaign of hope & change. A promise that a rising tide lifts all boats. It didn’t quite go as well as was expected by many. In the end, it’s always the economy, stupid.
Poor, working class & middle class who were ambivalent about racial politics saw their wages stagnate (at best) or watched their jobs vanish (at worst) during the Obama administration. It was a short walk for many whites to go from racial ambivalence to making Obama & Dems responsible for their disenfranchisement. Trump was the release valve for all their anger and fears. On the other end, the same negative economic forces kept traditionally democratic voters (whites & minorities) from turning out to support a lack luster Democratic candidate.
That makes absolutely no sense to me. Why would it be an “empty statement” to say that the rise of Trump is about more than racism just because minorities suffer from racism? That may be the most important thing about Trump to minorities, but if you want to get rid of Trump, you need to understand him in totality, not just as he is seen through the eyes of one segment of society. To me, that statement says that truth is only significant to the extent that it is seen through the eyes of the oppressed, and is subject to their approval or disapproval.
@Richard Parker - That seems like a catch all defense without substance. It’s more than just racism, but since everything is more than just racism, it’s totally racism.
I read the article, and while I typically appreciate Coates’s writing, this was not very good. His insights and criticisms seem very surface level without bringing anything new to the table. It may be a nitpick, but right at the beginning Coates says, “His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, …”. But that’s not true. Trump ran a presidential exploratory campaign for the Reform party in 2000. The rest of the article seems like a half effort to basically say white people are racist and will bring about armageddon. Meh.
You are reading a lot into it that is coming from you, not from Coates.
The point he is making is that if you wouldn’t tsk tsk someone for saying chattel slavery about about racism, then you shouldn’t do the same for saying Trump is about racism. And I suspect he’s right that you wouldn’t bat an eye at someone observing that, say, lynching was about white supremacy (even though it was also very much about masculinity and other things as well).
That article was literally unbelievable. It raises alot of good questions, such as: Does Coates have an editor? Is he being paid by the word and owe the mob money? Is he ever going to have a point?
He says that Trump is WHITE and presents no evidence. He is arguing that America is so mad at itself for electing Obama twice that it took that anger out on Hillary Clinton. That would mean somehow this WHITE person got a higher percentage of blacks, latinos, and asians than Romney and McCain because they were mad at Obama too?
No one (at least, no one here) questions the dire impact of Trump on Blacks, Muslims and immigrants.
That direness doesn’t prove the article’s thesis though.
No doubt, the Democratic targets of the article would argue 'want to lift that boot of racist oppression? Then try to win elections. You won’t win them by espousing this theory, which is both incorrect in fact, and not appealing to the electorate".
You have missed the point of that paragraph. It’s like you cannot even see it for some reason.
I’ll just reiterate what I said earlier and meant with all sincerity: this article is just clearly not meeting you where you are on these issues. There is context and premises and background and subtlety being lost on you. Sentences and ideas that are salient if you have that background are missed if you don’t. This is the nature of all writing, but especially writing that talks about identity and history.
I’m not saying you would agree with Coates if only you had read more books about white supremacy in the 20th century. I am saying that you, and the rest of the people dismissing this article as superficial (Bone too), would be making a different and more sophisticated set of arguments and critiques if you spent more time reading and understanding this stuff.
No-one would dispute that lynching was primarily “about” racism (though no doubt also a bunch of other factors played some part), because it is self-evidently true.
People would dispute that the presidency of Trump is “about” racism, because it isn’t self-evidently true.
The argument that the truth or otherwise of the claim is cold comfort to his victims simply doesn’t prove the thesis. It isn’t convincing. It leads to the suspicion that, by the same logic, basically everything can be “about” racism.
I’m not seeing a meaningful comparison between Trump and Chattel Slavery, so I think that is a bad analogy.
Explain to me why “a significant factor in the rise of Trump is economic nationalism” is an empty statement. I am not reading anything into the phrase “empty statement” that isn’t inherent in the statement. If he didn’t mean “empty statement” he shouldn’t have said it. It’s not incumbent on me to interpret “empty statement” as meaning “important, but not quite as important as something else”.
I think your nitpick is a nothing-nitpick. Trump was totally out of the picture in national politics before he went all-in on birtherism in 2011 (I think that’s when he started getting into it). That he flirted with a minor party in '00 has pretty much zero to do with Trump’s recent rise, nomination, and election, and birtherism very reasonably can be stated to be intimately tied to his rise and nomination (and election as well).
I don’t think any amount of my reading for context would magically transform the bad argument you quoted from the article into a good one.
Arguments can be bad or good regardless of the objective truth of what they are supporting. It may well be that this person’s thesis is true (and that if I read all the books you recommend I’d recognize that truth) - but the article isn’t convincing, because the arguments used to support that thesis are, to put it bluntly, bad.
The paragraph is making one point. The rest of the piece is making other points. To say that the paragraph does not on it’s own prove that race is the primary factor is to ask the paragraph to accomplish something it isn’t trying to accomplish. The purpose of that paragraph is to disprove the argument of the type you made earlier–that somehow it is a rebuttal to merely observe that there are other factors at work.
It’s only “self-evidently” true to you because of more than half a century of argument and scholarship. It still isn’t accepted by a lot of Americans, and certainly wasn’t taken as self-evident at the time.
No. But it isn’t supposed to. You’ve fixated on the closing rhetorical flourish of a paragraph making a very clear argument, ignoring the rest of the paragraph
It isn’t an empty statement. The empty statement–in relation to the thesis that race is the critical factor here–is the observation that there are other important intertwined factors.
I can only read and interpret with the experience I possess. I grant there is likely context I’m missing. My critique is not on the content of the article itself per se, but that Coates did not do a good job making his argument.
This article is a bad article. For you. That’s my point. It is obvious from your first post that it is not reaching you and not going to reach you. I don’t think this is because of some weakness in the argument, but because of a disconnect. The sentences and paragraphs aren’t landing. That disconnect is a problem for the author to the extent that you are the author’s intended audience.
You cannot expect to understand a complicated social phenomenon without spending some quality time with it. If you’ve read more Charles Murray than you have Isabel Wilkerson, then Coates is probably not going to reach you.
