Donald Trump: The First White President [article in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates]

Great Debates
481

Yes. The icky emotional reactions explain the ubiquity of the ‘Trump won because working class/rural whites felt ignored’ theory, as you point out. And the voting patterns (as you also point out) do not support the ‘it was the working class/rural whites’ theory.

Coates may have been aiming at being incendiary (and newsworthy) by using “white supremacy” to stand in for the entire range of positions that led various voters to give the nod to Trump. And of course that gives many readers an opening to reject Coates’ thesis: it’s easy to pretend he was claiming that every Trump voter either wears the KKK robe, or wants to. That, of course, is clearly false.

But that’s not the claim. The claim is that many white people who voted for Trump did so not because they felt ignored or even because they genuinely believed Trump would improve the economy–but instead, because Trump stood for white privilege (which is how I would put it) or for white supremacy (which is how Coates put it).

Trump voters fell along a wide range:
[ul][li]the overtly ‘white supremacists’ who do belong to the KKK and Stormfront and the skinheads [/li][li]the overtly 'white supremacists who belong to organizations named with plausible deniability: the National Policy Institute, the Sons and Daughters of Liberty, the Council of Conservative Citizens, etc.[/li][li]the people who would never join either of the above types of organizations, yet do openly state racist views[/li][li]the people who would neither join w.s. organizations, nor openly state racist views–but who do believe that “the races” have differing characteristics and that the USA is fundamentally “white” (and that this status should be preserved)[/li][li]the people who wouldn’t feel comfortable stating that “the races” differ fundamentally, but who do feel an active unease when it’s mentioned that demographic trends are leading to minority status for white people[/li][/ul]

I would argue that it’s the last group that may account for those who voted for Obama, then voted for Trump. In neither of Obama’s races was his opponent a person who, like Trump, openly stated views that indicated that he valued keeping racial groups in their ‘proper place.’ I’m thinking of remarks such as

[ul][li]“they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists” [about Mexicans][/li][li]“thousands of Muslims were cheering” [the fall of the Twin Towers][/li][li]“there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population”[/li][li]“I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”[/li][li]“He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.” [to explain his claim that an Indiana-born judge would not be fair to Trump in his rulings][/ul][/li]
Trump signaled consistently that he was deeply concerned with race and that he felt there was a proper hierarchy, organized by race (and by gender, too), that should be upheld, supported, and preserved. In the 2008 and 2012 races, neither McCain nor Romney signaled such a thing as consistently. **This is why so many Trump supporters talked about Trump “telling it like it is” and “saying what the others won’t say.” **

So in 2008 and 2012, though some voters might have had at least a vague preference for a ‘traditional’ (white male Christian) candidate, they were open to giving Obama a try because the alternatives were failing to say what Trump later did say: that the status quo was changing in unacceptable ways by moving the straight white Christian male out of his proper place of dominance.

I believe Coates is quite correct in rejecting the standard ‘Trump won because of the economic anxieties of the poorer whites’ explanation, in favor of ‘Trump won because of race.’ I think he was being a bit disingenuous to use “white supremacy” as his term of choice, when “white privilege” fit his actual argument better.

But on the whole, the article deserves the wide attention it has garnered.

Trump quotes:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/donald-trump-speech-debates-and-campaign-quotes-1.11206532

482

“The thing that always attracted me and has stuck with me, that I can’t shake, is the idea of agency, of, as my dad used to say, doing for self. That’s a line from Garvey, from Malcolm X, even up through hip-hop, up through now. I’m not going to sit here and wait for somebody else to do for me, I can do it myself, and not only that, I can do it in my way, I can walk how I walk, I can talk like I talk, I don’t have to change for you.”

Of course agency features in hip-hop prominently. It is glaringly absent from his writing however.

Sad. He doesn’t understand the concept of agency. Like, at all. His entire position is based on the premise that American “Blacks” prosper to the degree “Whites” allow them to. He begs the Liberal Elite Whites for salvation. Yes he wants to be free to do inane things like “talk Black” or handshake like Barack Obama, but when it comes to building a strong community off of the ingenuity of “Black” Americans, he is unable to form a vision. Of course his Marxism is key to understanding all of this.

483

Coates would rather the Black community devote itself to political action than their preferred entrepreneurial action. If they follow his lead, they will fall further behind. Ethnic minorities do not prosper from political maneuvering but from entrepreneurial ingenuity. See the Japanese, Italians, and Jews of the past and all modern immigrant communities in the US today. Hispanics have gained a foothold in American society through courageous economic civil disobedience.

484

So you’re saying it was “entrepreneurial ingenuity” that ended slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, lynching, and gave them legally protected civil and voting rights?

485

Slavery: Widespread disobedience among enslaved Africans was instrumental in bringing down slavery. The slavers were furious that slaves could escape to sympathetic places in the US. This was among the most important reasons the states gave for secession.

Jim Crow/ segregation/ lynching: Civil War and subsequent occupation caused a backlash from poor southern whites against blacks. American Blacks migrated in droves from the South. Despite fierce opposition from northern racist whites and especially trade unions, Blacks created increasingly prosperous communities that became centers of cultural advancement and innovation.

Voting/Civil Rights: Though remaining largely poor, like everyone else in the South, Blacks that remained in the South built solid social structures based around the churches. These organizations were bulwarks against the state. After years of state-mandated segregation and isolation, Blacks internally developed an impressive social structure through mutual exchange and no help from the state apparatus. Bourgeois and intellectual figures, including MLK Jr., demonstrated to the society at large that American Blacks were a key part of American society.

Blacks were rapidly improving in social and economic standing in the decades prior to securing universal voting and “civil” rights. The fact that they were able to obtain such guarantees is a symptom of their come-up, not a cause.

486

Certainly. Freed and escaped slaves were instrumental to ending slavery. But what does this have to do with “entrepreneurial ingenuity”?

Leaving the South wasn’t why these institutions ended. They ended because of political pressure that force the federal government to change the law and make these practices illegal (plus SCOTUS, for segregation).

It was the local and state governments that threatened black people. With the VRA and CRA, the federal government became their allies, and the enemies of these white supremacist state and local governments. Legally protected rights came from black people demanding rights, and a white majority outside the South finally agreeing that these demands were just.

It wasn’t “entrepreneurial ingenuity” that made these advances happen. In a sense, it was “entrepreneurial ingenuity” from the POV of slavers and plantation owners that created the necessity for these advances.

Ingenuity is great and all, but starting small businesses weren’t the drivers of these advancements. Political activism and action were what made these things happen. The VRA and CRA wouldn’t have been signed into law without the activism of MLK Jr. and his allies.

487

Black History from a progressive perspective: Good Whitey saved the po’ Blacks from Bad Whitey.

Anyway what I said is that ethnic minorities do not prosper from political action but entrepreneurial action. This is demonstrated in the Black History 101 course I just gave you. You view the ending of Jim Crow and Civil Rights passage as prospering. These are symptoms of prosperity. The real work was done in the building of Black social structures without help from and in spite of the state. You choose to emphasize Whitey’s role in Black History for your own peculiar reasons. I choose to acknowledge and respect a culture that flourished through hard work.

Quite frankly your analysis would be shut down with quickness at any HBCU. I’ve seen it happen. Lol

488

WillFarnaby: You might appreciate this article.

489

Nothing, which is why it is pointless for you to have brought it up.

Correct. “Entrepreneurial ingenuity” didn’t end slavery. It is, however, much of the reason that Jewish people and Chinese people are disproportionately well-off and black people are not.

So, we eliminate legal discrimination against Chinese people and Jewish people and black people. No more slavery, no more Jim Crow, no more restrictive covenants, etc. Jewish people and Chinese rise to the top; blacks sink to the bottom, relatively speaking. IOW removing legal discrimination and so forth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a group to succeed. Therefore, there must be another factor or set of factors.

Getting politicians elected who are the same ethnicity as me doesn’t seem to be that factor. Blacks did that, and they’re poor. Asians and Jews didn’t, and they aren’t. So it must be something else.

Regards,
Shodan

490

Certainly not from my perspective, or the progressives I know.

Not the first time you’ve been wrong about how progressives feel. I trust that you know more about how anarcho-libertarians think than I do, but progressives probably understand how progressives think better than someone who hates progressivism.

LOL at your incredible mischaracterization of what I said.

The VRA and CRA were driven by the political action of black activists. That’s a fact.

491

The difference in our opinions is that I don’t believe that legal discrimination (and I’d include systemic and institutional discrimination in that “legal” category) against black people has ended. Therefore, I don’t believe that “necessary condition” has been met, in general.

492

I surely don’t agree with that and I’m not quite sure where you think where it would go off the rails.

493

Even on its own terms, this classic model minority argument has the timelines wrong. If it were the case that Jewish household wealth, Chinese household wealth, and Black household wealth were equal in 1975, and then in the intervening decades Jews and Chinese suddenly achieved much higher levels of household wealth, then I’d think you at least have a prima facie argument that racist laws were not the primary cause of the disparity. But, of course, that’s not at all what happened. So you don’t even have that prima facie case.

Like all of this discourse, your “model minority” attack on black antiracism arguments has a long and dark history. It is quite wrong.

494

I’ve had my fill of Rothbard slanders without quotes, thanks.

495

I think its a bad thing to focus on the dog’s tail.

496

I wonder what the strongest correlates were in 2012.

497

No, it doesn’t have the timelines wrong. Blacks, Jews, and Asians started out behind whites. Jews and Asians are now ahead of whites, even though Jim Crow laws are no more. Blacks aren’t, even though Jim Crow is dead. Therefore the removal of racist laws are not the reason that blacks underperform whites, Jews, and Asians.

I read your article, but I didn’t see anything besides some hand-waving that being in an internment camp seventy years ago doesn’t count, but slavery a hundred fifty years ago does. The idea that Bhutanese-Americans aren’t doing as well as Japanese notwithstanding.

Regards,
Shodan

498

Maybe it’s worth laying out the basic lefty view of what’s going on with black poverty in America.

The story goes like this: Most black people in the US are the descendents of slaves. By design, they could not accumulate wealth of any kind, and even human capital accumulation like literacy was punished. The period following the Civil War was not much better. For decades, if you tried to get married as a black family and live on your own and grow your own crops, you could expect lynching. If you wanted to work outside agriculture, you had to get state permission to do so in many Southern states. If you tried to do side work on Saturday, you were liable to be imprisoned for vagrancy and forced to work for free for white people. Black lives were marked by white plunder punctuated by white terrorism.

Until WWII, the overwhelming majority of black people lived in the South under Jim Crow. In that regime, black wealth accumulation was, by design, rare and extremely difficult. Barriers to education remained high. If you were smart, hard-working, and ambitious, for the most part you became a preacher or a teacher. Even people that escaped (literally fleeing in the middle of the night in many cases), often found themselves property-less in cities where white landlords could charge them higher rents and white employers could pay them lower wages. When you fought for equal treatment, whites would kill your family and burn down your neighborhood. I assume nothing more needs to be said of the period before 1945 to explain why racist laws were why black people were poorer than white people, on average.

That brings us roughly to World War II. So already we’re talking about the grandparents of the people who are heads of households today. Even putting aside any discrimination after that period, it would be quite remarkable if in the space of a few generations a few centuries of plunder and terrorism was washed away.

Certainly, only the extraordinary were going to be able to do it under the legal regime that prevailed from 1945 to 1975. The white classes, including the newly-considered white, built their household wealth with, well, houses. They got loans restricted to white people and access to neighborhoods with rising housing prices and restrictive covenants for four decades. Beyond the effect on the ability to develop intergenerational wealth, residential segregation also concentrated poverty (and kept black people with middle class incomes in poor neighborhoods, with all the obstacles that brings from job opportunities to crime). And, of course, Jim Crow persisted in less severe ways for this entire period, including in particular in educational institutions and in many fields like medicine.

That takes us roughly to when the current heads of households were born. You don’t even really need to appeal to forms of state discrimination after that period to explain the current disparities. But, in fact, the 1980s and 1990s marked the period when we decided to explode our prison populations and arrest significant proportions of all black men. We decided to keep them in prison longer, offer fewer options for early release, and offer fewer resources while in prison. We policed and arrested black men at rates disproportionate to underlying crime rates, and focused on crimes disproportionately committed by black people while ignoring crimes disproportionately committed by white people. The result was as intended. 20% of Black Floridians are barred from voting. 9% of Black Wisconsin residents aren’t allowed to vote, warming Lee Atwater and Steve Bannon’s hearts mightily.

And all of that is just discrimination enforced by the state. Indeed, I mostly just touched on the negative discrimination. But there’s also the other side of the coin–the billions spent to enrich white people, from race-based work programs, to agricultural universities, to restricted access to the GI Bill, and all the rest. There is also rampant private discrimination by unions, employers, educators, neighborhood associations, and all the rest, continuing through to 2017 (though, thankfully, less in degree than in 1975). Plus, this period of the end of state discrimination is also the period when there has been very little real wage growth. The engines out of poverty that chugged along successfully for three decades have been sputtering for quite some time. Before colleges were desegregated, you could pay for school by working a part-time job. Now, a fulltime job isn’t enough.

Wealth accumulation, where people live, the education levels of children–all these social phenomena have momentum. You have to get them going in the right direction, and then give them time to work. The United States hasn’t even lifted all the forms of state discrimination, much less private discrimination. And it has made almost no effort to affirmatively lift up the people it plundered for so long.

I don’t offer that account because I expect conservative critics to agree with it. But it seems to me that if you want to critique it, you have to understand it. When you say things like, “well the Jews did fine,” you betray an ignorance of this history.

499

Do you have any cites for the economic circumstances of the three groups in various decades?

This looks like a correlation/causation error. That means that those specific laws were not the entire and immediate barrier to propserity for black people, but it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have been a part of it.

It also had some not-handwaving about other forms of discrimination that black people have faced long after slavery.

I’ll put it this way, as a question – do you at least agree that the difference in our opinions on this issue is whether or not one believes that there is still significant race-based discrimination against black people today?

500

Wow, thanks for putting the effort into laying this out like this. If it’s okay with you, can I use it in discussions elsewhere (with attribution unless you’d prefer I didn’t)?