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, 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


And indeed, the roiling civil war between the Republican Party's elites and a huge swath of its base 

has prompted an unusually candid public grappling with whiteness

. Take this paragraph from a post by Bloomberg's Sasha Issenberg 

on "Hillary Clinton's Appalachian Problem:"

 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.
But then, there's the liberal commentator Jonathan Chait's recent essay at 

"The Real Reason We All Underrated Trump,"

 in which he openly wonders whether Republican voters who've fallen for Trump are "idiots":



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 —

. 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 

 to them. Calling them "idiots" posits that they've been duped, when perhaps Trump is saying precisely what they want to hear.


When Trump's supporters aren't being written off as intellectually incapable of knowing a huckster when they see one, their motivations are often ascribed to their being "working class." But the working class today 

 — and among people of color, Trump is profoundly unpopular. His coalition is nearly entirely white. Even the class part of the "working class" narrative is inaccurate; 

 than most Americans, and have higher incomes than supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The "working class revolt" explanation for Trump's rise is overstated — and it can be a useful dodge to avoid talking about explanations involving racial grievance.
There have been outlets and pundits this election cycle who've 

 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.  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Politics and Government News

Social Issues

Election 2016

Gene Demby

Author

When we don't acknowledge the role whiteness plays in how Americans vote, we're essentially agreeing to misidentify some of the most important dynamics of this election cycle.

It's gotten a lot harder to act like whiteness doesn't shape our politics

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