In the final months leading up to the election, pundits spent a lot of time speculating about what was wrong with Black people, specifically men — why they were gravitating toward Donald Trump, and why Black support for Democrats overall had declined since 2020. Theories included the phenomenon of patriarchy across color lines and consequent reluctance to vote for a woman for president, even though she is Black (or maybe because she is Black).
There was also ongoing consternation about Latino support for Trump, notably among men, which had also grown. The driving question of these discussions was, how could these groups support a party and a man so obviously against Black and Latino people? How could people of color stand against not just their own political interests, but against their very essence?
These were valid questions. But in its late-hour scrutiny, the media once again failed to similarly interrogate the bigger phenomenon of racial self-destructiveness that has been staring us all in the face for more than a decade. Trumpism is a crisis of whiteness, seeded by the anti-Blackness the GOP deliberately began to embrace when Barack Obama became president in 2008. It was that embrace that set the stage for Trump and Trumpism, which has become another word for mainstreamed white supremacy.
Trumpism is a crisis of whiteness.
Trumpism and its trickle-down effects on American politics and American ideals is a grim reality that Black and brown people are reacting to and, unfortunately, some are supporting. But they didn’t create the reality. We are at this racially terrible point because roughly half of the country, the majority of it white, has officially opted out of the multiracial democratic experiment and seems increasingly unlikely to opt back in. The reelection of Trump has made that painfully clear; postmortems of a disaster that many found hard to even contemplate will probably go on for years. But the question that the media assiduously avoided asking from the beginning — the question that still needs to be asked — is: how could that cohort of white people do this? How could America do this to itself?
With the reinstatement of Trump, there is every reason to believe that cohort will continue to do this to itself, and to all of us — vacate remaining ideals of justice for all and replace it with a moral entropy that it enthusiastically embraces as the true American ideal, the one way forward. Trumpism has always been chiefly concerned with evicting, with pushing out and delegitimizing, many of those living in the American house. The fight for space in the house is not new to Trumpism or to America, but the institutionalization of the view that justice and equality are no longer relevant, that any efforts at justice must be fought at all costs, is new. So are the big players in the movement, billionaires and tech giants and evangelicals and startup white supremacists like Proud Boys who have taken center stage with little fear of pushback or reprisals. (Capital & Main recently produced a video series on the infiltration of white supremacist philosophy in the first Trump administration and how that bodes ill for any future administration.)
But the biggest group aiding and abetting Trumpism hasn’t been contemplated at all: non-MAGA white people. This includes Democrats and disaffected Republicans, among others, who share a hatred of Trumpism and what it’s done to the country. But their support of justice for all has proven too soft to provide an effective counter. Put another way, white people’s conviction that multiracial justice must be maintained and expanded has been vastly outmatched by other white people’s conviction that it must be dismantled.
The good white folk, to borrow a Black phrase, have been taken by surprise. In his new book, “The Message,” Ta-Nehisi Coates says that because many white people are being confronted with racial vulgarity on a scale they’ve never seen in their lives, they have been slow to react. And there are complicating factors, such as the fact that they may be too invested in white supremacy to truly fight it.
They may hate MAGA as personified by Trump and the more repugnant aspects of Trumpism, but they are not against the benefits of white supremacy — i.e., living in “safe” suburban neighborhoods with low crime rates that MAGA explicitly connects to the absence of people of color. To wholly condemn Trumpism would be, in part, to condemn a lifestyle many white people closely identify with themselves.
But the lack of experience is key. Whites who reject Trumpism but don’t challenge it on its own terms of racial antipathy simply don’t know how. They have no practice. You’d have to go back to the 1960s to find a critical mass of white people speaking unequivocally against racism and anti-Blackness. After the ’60s, the conservative position was that racism had been solved, and that racial justice efforts from that point amounted to so much bellyaching. And yet many polls over the years, including during the Trump era, have shown Americans of all colors believe racism and race-based inequality remain a problem. Trumpism therefore represents a massive failure of leadership, a betrayal from the top of values Americans actually share. That’s the real tragedy of Trumpism, and because so much damage has been done in the last eight years, leadership is the thing that feels hardest to change or undo. Especially now.
Trumpism represents a massive failure of leadership.
Not that concerned white people have done nothing. In 2024 they rallied around reproductive rights and trans rights, decried hate, called for unity. But nothing was said about whiteness as the core of the existential threat to democracy. Some Black activists say the way out of the stalemate that started in 2008 and mushroomed into a cold civil war is not educating or rehabbing white people, but continuing to build the voting power of constituencies of color. It’s a model that goes back to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s, but the stakes are much higher now. Steve Phillips, political strategist and author of the 2022 book “How We Win the Civil War,” said building those constituencies is the only way to outmaneuver Trumpism and ultimately win the battle that the Confederacy has been waging against multiracial America since the 1800s. The Rev. William Barber in North Carolina has called his Poor People’s Campaign a revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last project, the Third Reconstruction. With that in mind, it launched a voter registration drive this year.
Greg Akili, 76, is a lifelong labor and political organizer and racial justice activist in Los Angeles who works with Black Lives Matter Grassroots, among other groups. He said Trumpism and the white backlash that created it is simply American history, citing the rise of avowed segregationist George Wallace as a presidential candidate in 1968 after several years of civil rights progress (Wallace lost but made an impressive showing in the South). What has changed is how technology can fuel that backlash, and the distortions and disinformation that go with it, all over the world at practically the speed of light. Akili said the challenge going forward, especially for Black people, is to not just remake politics, but to remake culture. “If this is a racist culture, one with a certain set of conditions, you will continue to get outcomes like Trump,” he said. “It’s tough because we want to believe in the humanity of people. We want to say, ‘That can’t be,’ we want to believe that Trumpism is temporary or whatever.
“But it’s like water,” he continued. “If the water comes in the house and ruins your floors, you can get new floors, but if the water remains, it’s going to ruin it again. We’ve got to get rid of the water.”
Copyright 2024 Capital & Main
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