Quote of the Day: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in "Donald Trump is the First White President," is worth reading in full, but here's a snippet. After noting that Donald Trump won every class-based group of whites, he writes:

"The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of."

Of course, the focus on the white working class - particularly men - is not puzzling at all.

White men dominate the media narratives across the political spectrum. The white male media elite were largely enamored, entertained, and/or fascinated by the rise of the two angry white male populists who ran in the 2016 election. Many of these men, in the wake of their complicity, now demand that we ditch identity politics, stop listening to Hillary Clinton, and/or stop saying accurate things about Bernie Sanders because Trump is the "true" enemy.

We were close, in 2016.

We know how scared so many men were because of how they are acting now, desperate to stay at the center of all things.