Trump’s racial ignorance
In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Kanye West appeared on live TV during a celebrity fundraiser for victims of the disaster and said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” This wasn’t based on intimate knowledge of Bush’s racial views, but rather on his treatment of black people in a time of crisis.
Donald Trump, who met with West this past week to discuss “multicultural issues,” according to the rapper, hasn’t been in charge yet to steer black Americans through a crisis. But we have seen enough of his views and behaviors to hazard a guess at how he thinks.
It may be that Trump’s views reveal something just as devastating as not caring for black people: not knowing us.
Trump is not alone in this deliberate ignorance, as postelection calls on the left to forget about identity politics have shown. If there is a dirty secret in American life, it is this: The real unifying force in our national cultural and political life, beyond skirmishes over ideology, is white identity masked as universal, neutral and, therefore, quintessentially American. The greatest purveyors of identity politics today, and for the bulk of our country’s history, have been white citizens.
There is a cost to ignorance and the hate that can grow from it. In his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in 2015 by Dylann Roof, President Barack Obama spoke of the proud history of Pinckney’s church and community. He noted that we couldn’t know what the killer understood of the community or the lives he was taking, but he did know hate. Roof was found guilty of that Charleston massacre Thursday, his violent acts a reminder – not one we needed – of the price ignorance and hate can exact.
“I would be a president for all of the people, African-Americans, the inner cities,” Trump declared during the second presidential debate. “Devastating what’s happening to our inner cities,” he lamented. “You go into the inner cities and – you see it’s 45 percent poverty. African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities.”
Trump’s views on black people, poverty and cities were quickly challenged as myopic and ill informed. But the administration he is building is emblematic of his ignorance.
The only African-American member of his designated Cabinet is Ben Carson, who was tapped for Housing and Urban Development. Carson was a beloved icon, a man who endured a hardscrabble childhood in Detroit to become a famous physician. But his turn to rightwing petulance, with a bow to kooky comparisons of Obamacare to slavery, considerably soiled his reputation. If his story was once emblematic of beating the odds to become a success, he is now a different kind of symbol – of how little Trump knows, or cares, about African-Americans.
Similarly, his pick of Sen. Jeff Sessions as his attorney general – a man who according to testimony before Congress once joked that the only problem with the KKK was the group’s drug use, deemed a white lawyer with black clients a race traitor and dismissed civil rights groups as “un-American” – proves Trump cares little for the interests of the African-American citizens he will serve in the Oval Office.
During his presidential campaign Trump tweeted out a grossly inaccurate image from a nonexistent “Crime Statistics Bureau” that suggested that the bulk of white people are killed by black people – a belief that white bigots have long parroted as the reason for their racist revenge.
Trump argued that “African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.” Obama drolly declared, “I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow.”
The unifying force in the United States is whiteness
Obama’s retort underscores a troubling truth: Trump’s vast ignorance of black life leads him to exaggerate the perils confronting black Americans in all the wrong ways. He overlooks the nation’s vicious history of racism to proclaim that this is the worst racial epoch ever. It is a convenient ruse to make the period under Obama a foil to his heroic rescue of black people through his magical political powers.
The road ahead is not easy, primarily because Trump’s ignorance about race, his critical lack of nuance and learning about it, exists among liberals and the white left, too.
From the start of his 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders was prickly about race – uncomfortable with an outspoken, demanding blackness, resistant to letting go of his preference for discussing class over race. He made efforts to improve the way he spoke about the realities of racial discrimination. But Sanders seemed to remain at heart a man of the people, especially if those people were the white working class.
Since the election, Sanders has sounded an increasingly familiar theme among liberals that they should “go beyond identity politics.” He warned that “to think of diversity purely in racial and gender terms is not sufficient,” and that we need candidates “to be fighters for the working class and stand up to the corporate powers who have so much power over our economic lives.”
In a recent speech in California, Sanders said that it is “very easy for many Americans to say, I hate racism, I hate homophobia, I hate sexism,” but that “it is a little bit harder for people in the middle or upper middle class to say, maybe we do have to deal with the greed of Wall Street.”
This is a nifty bit of historical revisionism. For the longest time there was little consideration for diversity, even among liberal elites, much less the white middle and working classes. It seems more than a little reactionary to blame the loss of the election on a brand of identity politics that even liberals were slow to embrace.
Attention to diversity and identity does not undercut our nation’s embrace of democratic ideals; it strengthens them. The black struggle for freedom has ensured that other groups could follow along in the wake of our demand for equality. When the 1964 civil rights bill was in doubt in Congress, white opponents of the bill thought they could sink it by attaching the issue of gender, hoping to appeal to the sexism of those who might otherwise be cajoled to offer their support. Instead, the bill passed, and paved the way for both black rights and those of women. What’s good for black people is good for the nation.
When it comes to the white working class, however, that is almost impossible to see.
The interests of the white working class have often been used by white political elites to stave off challenges to inequality and discrimination by black folk and other minority groups.
In the middle of the 20th century, labor unions curtailed opportunity for black workers by protecting the race-based interests of the white working and middle class. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon even supported a version of affirmative action because he deemed it useful to break unions by accusing them of racial exclusion. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan appealed to disaffected white Democrats who resented being forced to share a small measure of the gains they had accumulated through bigotry and often official discrimination.
Now we hear again the cry that the neglected white working class is the future of US progressive politics. The tragedy is that much of the professed concern about the white working class is a cover for the interests of white elites who evoke working-class solidarity to combat racial, sexual and gender progress.
Identity has always been at the heart of American culture. We must confront a truth that we have assiduously avoided: The most protected, cherished and nurtured identity of all has been white identity. After all, the needs of the black and brown working classes, which are not exclusively urban, are, again, even in progressive quarters, all but forgotten.
Trump, and to a degree, the liberals and progressives who advocate a vision of the United States that spurns identity politics, make one thing clear: The real unifying force in US political life is whiteness, no matter its party, gender, region or, at times, even its class.
His lack of knowledge leads him to exaggerate the perils black Americans face
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown, is the author of the forthcoming ‘Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America’ and a contributing opinion writer.