It's Gotten A Lot Harder To Act Like Whiteness Doesn't Shape Our Politics
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/13/477803909/its-gotten-a-lot-harder-to-act-like-whiteness-doesnt-shape-our-politics
Ahead of our forthcoming podcast, I've been heads-down in some reading and interviews about the way we talk about, well, white people. Whiteness has always been a central dynamic of American cultural and political life, though we don't tend to talk about it as such. But this election cycle is making it much harder to avoid discussions of white racial grievance and identity politics when, for instance, Donald Trump's only viable pathway to the White House is to essentially win all of the white dudes....
This is much closer to Saying The Thing than we normally get, an acknowledgment that the reason "hard-working Americans" — the quotes underscoring the euphemism — don't really rock with Hillary Clinton is a sense that some of the concerns she's championing are, if not anathema to them, then at least not theirs. And that this time around, there isn't a black candidate to ensure that some white voters will vote for her, however grudgingly, despite her platform....
It's telling that Chait finds it easier to imagine that huge swaths of Republican primary voters are childlike and naive, rather than folks who quite rationally dig Trump's direct appeals to their interests — their racial interests. Among Trump's most notorious policy proposals is a moratorium on Muslims entering the country. He has called Mexican immigrants "rapists." Maybe we should concede that these declarations are not incidental to his appeal among his supporters, but central to them. Calling them "idiots" posits that they've been duped, when perhaps Trump is saying precisely what they want to hear.
There have been outlets and pundits this election cycle who've shown they're willing and able to dig into the role that racial grievance plays in How Trump Happened. Others haven't, and continue not to. And that's a problem. When we don't grapple with whiteness in our politics directly and explicitly — to talk about the fact that not-insignificant numbers of white voters are motivated more by identity politics than by ideology or faith — we're essentially agreeing to misidentify some of the most important dynamics of this cycle.
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