For those victim to it, the grotesque fact of racism is difficult to overstate. In furtive glances, tightened chests and cracked bones, it asserts itself with lethal, overwhelming force.
For those of us considered white, the experience is more history lesson than obstacle. Certainly, racism injures us all — the stain of Donald Trump’s presidency will resist decades of furious scrubbing — whereas the fairer of us absorb its moral injury and benefit from its economic, social and political boosts, as the darker-skinned only suffer, often violently.
Few understand this with sharper clarity than writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His most recent essay in the Atlantic, “The First White President”, dubs Trump while inspiring a frenzy of counters and double-counters. Critics have balked at his flagrant use of “identity politics” and his “zealous pursuit of a single cause;” supporters have derided them for “whitesplaining.”
What the conversation around Coates’ essay lacks is any measure of nuance.
Coates’ brilliance does not make him infallible. He may well have turned away from sexism’s role in Trump support or placed too much of the election’s weight on racism’s back. He may have interpreted causal relationships from data inappropriately, or even downplayed the political value of whites in America, who far outnumber every other racial category combined. These are all fair subjects for debate.
Unfortunately, critics have dedicated too few of their sentences to debating them.
Again and again, those finding fault in Coates’ writing object to his “monocausal explanation” of Trump’s victory. In other words, they cry afoul that Coates would chalk a narrow electoral victory in a country as diverse as our own to so clean-cut a cause as racism, suggesting we ignore the very real plight of rural white America.
But racism isn’t clean-cut, and Coates never makes an argument for the dismissal of all non-race-related factors.
He doesn’t suggest the left should be faulted for scrambling to connect with the white working class; He suggests we fault them for their parallel unwillingness to scramble for connections with the black working class. They have endured the same derision and condescension as poor, rural whites with neither the banner of ‘true-blooded’ Americanism nor the unanimous pity of America’s intelligentsia for cushions.
For Coates, white supremacy made Donald Trump president the same way it made me an outgoing man, only in a more obvious and absolute fashion.
As a white male, I’m able to talk back to police officers during traffic stops without fear for my life; I can walk home alone drunk without fear of being raped; I can take risks at work without fear of punishment and be assertive without fear of being labeled a bitch. My parents can let me off their leash with little fear I’ll be killed before making it home and can punish me gently without fear that my next mistake will be my last.
The world is an easier, friendlier, more fertile place for me to navigate than for my darker, Y-chromosome-less peers, and I’m more confident and hopeful because of it. Those are intangible, invaluable advantages. In Donald Trump’s case, Coates argues that they were the only ones.
This disparate sense of opportunity is the goal of racism, as is the frustrating difficulty in which white people struggle to see it.
With Trump having handily won the white vote no matter how it’s cut (income, education, geography, etc.), it’s easy to imagine a world in which a thriving, white working class catapulted him to the presidency. Now consider the campaign of a black man with the same absence of experience, with any of the now countless career-ending missteps. Would this man win a seat in the city council, much less the oval office?
Privilege is a blindfold, and rather than producing a bitter objection to an 8,000 word article after sitting on it for a day, perhaps the privileged should first take time to digest the careful criticisms of a man who doesn’t wear one.
Champe Barton is a UF economics and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience senior. His column usually appears on Tuesdays.
