Coates: The First White President

[Hawk]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...irst-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

[...]

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

 

[57Brave]

Frederick Douglass‏ @HITEXECUTIVE

Strange that Trump would attack Jemele Hill for calling him a White Supremacist but doesn't have much to say when David Duke calls him one.

yeah, I get it #whataboutism

 

[Krgrecw]

Frederick Douglass‏ @HITEXECUTIVE

Strange that Trump would attack Jemele Hill for calling him a White Supremacist but doesn't have much to say when David Duke calls him one.

If only there was a difference between the amount of people that watch and follow ESPN vs the opinion of a man who has a few followers on some website. I'm sure in your world they are the same exact thing.

 

[jpx7]

This is such a strong essay, and Coates is such an ebullient writer, even in light of his depressing subject-matter.

I do feel he's talking to me when he says,

At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that most Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by an unfettered capitalist economy.

—and I do feel he minimizes or trivializes that angle too much in his analysis. But damn if he's not persuasive, and damn if he's not a gifted author:

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

[...]

But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where “necessary conditions” and an “existing background” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent racism, and the “necessary condition” was a black president. The two related factors hobbled America’s ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administration to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

 

[Julio3000]

I read everything TNC writes, and though I don't always agree and have bones to pick, I find him essential reading and a great place to start for those of my brethren who are left scratching their heads about the term "white supremacism" as applied to the contemporary situation.

He echoes it in this piece, but I have a really salient memory of an interview of his discussing the subject of America becoming "postracial" or somehow inoculated from racism because a black man was elected president...it took Barack Obama, a singularly gifted communicator with every badge of American meritocratic achievement, who was also black but not TOO black, to become the first black president. That's the bar. For Donald Trump, what was the bar?

Answer that question honestly and it's a useful jumping-off point.

 

[jpx7]

For Donald Trump, what was the bar?

Answer that question honestly and it's a useful jumping-off point.

Whiteness, for sure—and vitriolic whiteness helped a lot—but also richness, and fairly vast at that. And that's one place I part with Coates. Joe the Dishwasher and Joe the Plumber might vote for Trump—and do so as much out of white anxiety as economic anxiety; but it's still only Joe the Banker that's going to be elected to higher office, much less attain and accrue real institutional-political power.

 

[weso1]

Whiteness, for sure—and vitriolic whiteness helped a lot—but also richness, and fairly vast at that. And that's one place I part with Coates. Joe the Dishwasher and Joe the Plumber might vote for Trump—and do so as much out of white anxiety as economic anxiety; but it's still only Joe the Banker that's going to be elected to higher office, much less attain and accrue real institutional-political power.

I have to say I don't think whiteness helped him much at all unless by "whiteness" you mean his inherited wealth or what your professors in college defined as whiteness. In fact I think his whiteness made him less likely to win. The racism angle is a lot tougher to play on folks with non white skin these days. Don't forget that Herman Cain was almost the first Trump.

I think Trump won first and foremost because Hillary was pretty awful. He also one because it was a revolution type of year and Trump was the biggest middle finger to the establishment outside of Bernie Sanders, who the left should have nominated. He is also damn good at negative branding his opponents. He was also ahead of the game by going populist in regards to economic nationalism. I think those on the left need to take a deep breath here. My politics are much more screwed then those on the left. We're moving closer to Europe then we are some right wing movement. The right has become big government nationalism and the left has become anti freedom identity politics socialism. It will likely meet somewhere in the middle in the relative short term.

 

[Julio3000]

Ta-Nehisi Popovich weighs in:

[tw]912389774140375042[/tw]

 

[Julio3000]

Ta-Nehisi Coach?