by PAUL STREET
PHOTO/ David Shankbone | CC BY 2.0
Numerous correspondents sent me the latest lengthy Atlantic essay by the brilliant and eloquent but bourgeois Black Identitarian Ta-Nehesi Coates and asked for my reflections. I reluctantly agreed to read and comment on Coates’ long treatise.
“The Mind Seizes”
There is plenty to concur with and even applaud in Coates’ prolonged reflection, which bears the provocative title “The First White President.” The author is, I think, quite correct to note that that Donald Trump is a vicious white supremacist dedicated to denigrating and even erasing the legacy of the nation’s first technically Black president Barack Obama.
Also accurate, by my judgement is Coates’ view that tens of millions of, yes, deplorably racist whites voted for the ridiculously unqualified and dangerous Trump out of a nasty sense of white racial identity and redemption.
…
What decent person cannot agree with Coates’ matchless evocation of the sickening racial double standard that lay beneath the staid Harvard Law graduate Barack Obama’s succession by the blustering buffoon Donald Trump. Look at this splendid paragraph from Coates:
“Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a ‘piece of ass.’ The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (‘When you’re a star, they let you do it’), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.”
Yes. Also instructive is Coates’ reflection that American politicians and pundits have been agonizing over an opiate crisis that has been reducing white working-class life spans while paying little attention to the fact Black life spans remain far below those of whites. Coates is also spot-on when he notes that U.S. media since the election of Trump has been rife with kindhearted discussions of the neglected and oppressed white working-class but has little to say about the millions of poor Black people who have been left behind in the neoliberal era:
“It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this ‘forgotten’ young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery… a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that.”
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