Yep. What he said.
The “why did Obama win if people are so racist” argument is another one that Coates addresses in the article in multiple ways. So making the argument without addressing Coates’ points just makes it seem like you haven’t read it.
First, Obama won in no small part because of how many nonwhite people voted for him. If Hillary had Obama’s nonwhite turnout, she would have won too. Pointing to Obama’s victory, on the strength of his nonwhite turnout, as evidence against white racism as an explanatory factor in contemporary politics is pretty silly.
And second, the whole point of the article is that Trump ran on whiteness. Romney did not. If you don’t understand what that means, consider whether you’ve really understood the argument in the article or not. Maybe try reading it again.
But just to be clear, had I actually gone to Law School, I would have been the best Law Student ever. No one knows more about Law School than I do! It’s just that… no one could have known that Law School was so difficult.
So the argument is that Romney didn’t run on whiteness, at which point nonwhite turnout for his opponent stopped him; but, upon hearing that Trump posed a unique threat by actively running on whiteness, the nonwhite turnout for his opponent – dropped so precipitously as to make all the difference?
Trump’s opponent would’ve won, if only the nonwhite opposition had stayed intact when a guy actually ran on whiteness – only that’s when they lost interest? That’s the argument?
No, I don’t think anybody’s arguing that the reason fewer nonwhite voters voted for Hillary Clinton than for Obama is because of the “whiteness campaign” issue. I don’t think most anti-Trump voters, of whatever race, consciously realized just how entangled he is with this whole “whiteness” movement until quite recently.
And just to add in a speculation of my own: I tend to think that the “whiteness” voters were madder and more resentful after Obama was out of office than before. I suspect that on some level they were just waiting expectantly for him to do something really dumb or disgusting that would confirm their convictions of blacks’ essential unfitness to be in charge of things.
But what happened instead? Obama served his full two terms, admittedly far from perfectly, but with reasonable competence and effectiveness, and he actually managed to enact at least a modified form of one of his major policy goals over the massed obstructionism of Republicans; he was mostly thoughtful, intelligent, dignified and prudent in his interactions and his statements; and he finished his stint at the White House having accumulated a fair amount of admiration and respect from Americans and the rest of the world.
Imagine how frustrating that must have been for the whiteness voters. No “stupid n****r” debacles to embarrass the “libtards” about having bought into that PC bullshit that one of Those People would be able to do a white man’s job! No international howls of laughter at the comic dismay of “President Jugears” as he fumbles around cluelessly like Stepin Fetchit trying to carry a tray! No tut-tutting glee about all the lurid sex scandals that his savage animal nature inevitably led him into! He was confidently expected to bring universal contempt and shame on himself and his entire race, and he didn’t! SO unfair!!
So that’s what I think the whiteness voters hated most about Obama: he didn’t fuck up egregiously enough to allow them to comfortably despise him as obviously inferior (just like all the rest of Those People). In 2012 they were still expecting that he might, but by the 2016 election they realized it wasn’t going to happen, and They. Were. MAD. Hence the mass mobilization for the candidate who was sending them the messages they wanted to hear about the persistent importance of whiteness.
I haven’t read the article, but what Coates is apparently saying (if I understand the summaries correctly) is similar to what a Yale professor David Blight has said in the past, which is that “revolutions” tend to result in “counter-revolutions”. In fact I think Blight was paraphrasing the work of another intellectual on the subject, IIRC. But the point is, Barack Obama’s election was on the one hand evidence to many that Americans had moved past race; and yet it’s also fair to say that it simultaneously heightened racial anxieties among those who either didn’t support Obama or at best were neutral to his election victory.
The challenge for Coates in defending his argument is that there are multiple factors at play in an election, one of which is the fact that many people didn’t like Obama’s successor. There’s that aspect which must be considered. The election was also possibly a reaction against feminism and intellectualism. As with any election, it meant different things to different people, even among people of the same ethnic group.
It’s possible that you and treis are both correct. Trump did technically run in 2012 but I agree that it wasn’t really much of a run; it was a disorganized, half-assed production at best. If I understand treis correctly, though, he also opined that the electorate changed in the four years between races and I think he’s right about that. Four more years under Obama gave whites four more years of racial anxiety.
Predictably, the reaction among many is “Oh Christ, stop blaming everything on racism” and I actually get it to a large degree. The thing is that a lot of the anxieties aren’t really conscious forms of racism; they’re unconscious biases and fears that people have. They’re feelings, and they’re often vague and ill-defined. A lot of people who have ‘politically incorrect’ thoughts aren’t people who subscribe to white supremacist movements, but they might agree with many of the things they say if you were to do a blind taste test of sorts.
How did he “technically run”? He didn’t say “I’m running” or anything equivalent. He didn’t actually have any campaign staff, or a campaign website. He didn’t file any paperwork with the FEC. How does a couple of months of saying “I might run for President” count as “technically” running?
Colbert made more of a run in 2012 than Trump did.
Perhaps “technically,” is now going to go the way of “literally.”
Trump literally ran in 2012. And it literally made my head explode.
Meaning, of course, that neither event actually happened.
I would have expected that literal running would have been more likely to cause him problems with his heart. He’s fairly old and didn’t appear to have very good cardiovascular fitness.
You’re right and I was incorrect for suggesting that he technically ran – he didn’t run. But I think he did test the waters to see what his candidacy might look like and decided at that point that it wasn’t going to work. So in that sense I agree with treis in that 2012 would not have been a year for a campaign like Trump’s, but by 2016, something had changed. My view is that the success of the left and the rise of the left’s profile had a lot to do with the rise of Trumpism (revolution and counter-revolution). Between November of 2012 and 2016, there was the Trayon Martin trial, there was Ferguson, there was the University of Missouri protest, Black Lives Matter, and violent attacks on police officers. I would also not completely discount some of the images from overseas of Islamist violence in Europe as well, which was exploited by some here as a cautionary tale about what can happen when you let too many non-whites into your country. Such fears were amplified by violence in San Bernardino and Orlando. All of these heightened racial anxieties, even among people who probably don’t consider themselves racist or use the language of racism.
But I’d also express rare agreement with some of the conservative skeptics here that race and reactions to liberalism alone might not really be the only factor. You can’t discount Hillary’s ongoing image problems, nor can you dismiss the very real distrust in political institutions that Americans have right now. With respect to these two factors, some of the most damaging attacks came not from the right but from Bernie Sanders on the left, who weakened the enthusiasm among progressives to support a candidate who somehow lacked authenticity. I’d agree that social anxieties, particularly race, was probably the single most important variable, but it’s always been present.
In the context of American history in its entirety, Trump’s campaign and election on racial animus isn’t remarkable. Most American presidents have been, by today’s standards, white supremacists. We might not have their words as evidence, but that’s only because it never had to be said in the first place. For most of our history, it was understood. What’s remarkable is that Trump won a campaign using racial animus in the post civil rights era. We were supposed to be better than that, but the reality is more complicated.
No one, certainly not Coates, is arguing that racism was the only factor.
Here you’ve essentially restated Coates point in the article. Or, as he puts it:
Lots of people in this thread could stand to read that paragraph again.
The irony is that he is not pointing that out to discourage identity politics but to encourage it. The South had nothing but identity politics for almost 90 years and was by far the most poor and backwards part of the US. While the rest of America politicians could talk about issues, in the south politics was all about keeping the blacks down. The result was bad government, bad infrastructure, corruption, and poor schools. Since the South has stopped with identity politics it is the fastest growing part of the country both in terms of population and economy.
Coates and his ilk seem to want to replay this in the black community. Inner cities are full of huge problems of crime, drugs, poor schooling, poverty, and corruption yet Coates wants the focus of politics to be on the mythical specter of white supremacy.
That must explain why hookworm, which normally is only a problem in poverty-stricken countries, is thriving in Alabama: Hookworm, a disease of extreme poverty, is thriving in the US south. Why? | Alabama | The Guardian
This is a good example of his work. The makes a crazy assertion “Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed” and does nothing to defend or support it. Then uses that unsupported wild assertion as the basis for even more outrageous argument “that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos”. Throws in a little Marxism “Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism”. Then makes a sweeping conclusion based on nothing, “the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry”
Can anyone make a rational case that voting for Trump is anything like participating in a lynching? Utter nonsense.
The fastest growing and economically vibrant part of the South* is* the black community there. We are seeing the slow return of the children and grandchildren of the people who fled the terrorism and economic piracy of the first half of the twentieth century. They are returning in large part because of the work done by leaders who have identified and destroyed the legacies of white supremacy. Coates “and his ilk” absolutely want that to continue. As they should.
The problems you identify are caused in substantial part by white supremacy. Certain white people have been blaming black people for the results of white supremacy for over a century. It has never stopped, as your posts evidence.
All these “unsupported” and “based on nothing” show you haven’t read the article. You’re just responding to clips as if they must stand on their own apart from the other paragraphs of evidence. You should consider reading it.
It was actually 7 minutes. I downloaded and listened to it here. The interview is also printed at that link. I’m not sure if I should interpret the spoken interview a part of the original article, but I think it does clarify both Coates’s position, as well as my opposition to his position.
I think Coates’s strongest argument is one he didn’t make explicitly in his article, but describes in the interview when responding to the idea that Trump won primarily because of the white working class and economic issues, rather than race. He says:
It would have been great to illustrate this point with data in his article. Perhaps there would be confounding factors that would explain a variance in behavior at various economic levels, but this is a very strong argument he’s making. Coates does touch on this in the article, describing support levels among different income brackets for whites, but doesn’t go so far as to compare that level of support to other demographic groups. I think this challenge to the convention wisdom of the victory as a result of the white working class would be great if fleshed out.
After that though, I think Coates gets much less persuasive with his message. When the interviewer asks him, what about people who voted for Trump not because of racist reasons, but for other reasons and race relations weren’t a motivating factor. Coates simply handwaves this away:
It’s like saying, too bad, even if they weren’t motivated by racism, they were because reasons. He goes on to say:
This is the crux I think. Lots of things can be disqualifiers for people. I have lots as I’m sure others do to. Coates’s mistake is to think that everyone should share this disqualifier (I agree with him that they should), but even moreso, that if they don’t then they must support that disqualifying behavior.
That is a non-sequitor. Hookworms used to be endemic in the South with an estimated 40% of southerners having it. Now only rural people in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states have it.
If you look at a real indicator such as personal income per person in 1960 it was an inflation adjusted $13,114 and now it is $39,231.