*Ta-Nehisi Coates penned an essay for The Atlantic which states that white supremacy is the backbone of Donald Trump’s appeal and that even many journalists and so-called progressive Democrats have been complicit in failing to acknowledge this.
Do you agree?
Coates’ piece, titled “The First White President,” was drawn from his forthcoming book on President Barack Obama’s eight years. In his 8,200-word October cover story, he writes, “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. . . .”
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The National Book Award winner and 2015 MacArthur Foundation fellow also cites the following for failing to be forthright about Trump’s racist appeal: Bernice Sanders, then-Vice President Joe Biden and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof — with Hillary Clinton and Obama criticized for varying reasons.
“One can, to some extent, understand politicians’ embracing a self-serving identity politics.” Coates writes. “Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths. But journalists have no such excuse. . . .”
Coates also wrote, “Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican ‘rapists,’ only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself.
“White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as ‘cucks.’ The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy — the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue.
“So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of ‘the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.’
“In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own . . .”
Coates also writes, “For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally.”
Read the full essay here.
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