Reading Du Bois in the Trump Era
To understand Donald Trump'south ballot equally president, it is useful to remember the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. Trump won on the nostalgic slogan of "Brand America Great Again." The word "dandy" had detail significant for Du Bois, who wrote in 1920 that it was easy for leaders to brand people believe that "every great deed the world ever did was a white man'south deed."
Baldwin seconded that in 1964, observing that white superiority made it and then difficult for white men to share power with people of color that they instead "set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications," a organisation which destroys "their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense."
There is no better style to put it when Trump tin can win the White Business firm in 2016 with a system of racist rants, misogyny, bullying, and walling off the nation from dark-brown and Muslim immigration. The election cannot exist about the economy when a majority of white Americans who claim to be economically forgotten entrust the Oval Office to a billionaire with a record of multiple bankruptcies, one who has denied the public his taxation returns. Non to mention a Republican Party that bequeathed a recession to President Obama.
Of course many economic problems remain, but somehow, aroused white voters are conveniently oblivious to the fact that unemployment under Obama was cut by half. And it'southward not like black people stole their jobs for viii years — black unemployment remains double that of white Americans.
This election was really nigh white Americans having such cold feet about the new America represented by Obama and the possibility of the showtime woman president that they chose the hottest head possible to pour kerosene onto smoldering resentment.
A Pew poll last summer found that a minority of Trump supporters idea diversity made America a better place to live while a bulk wanted American Muslims to exist bailiwick to higher security scrutiny. According to a PRRI survey only before the election, 72 percent of Trump voters said American society and our style of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s, an era where white privilege was protected by discrimination and segregation.
Truthful to Baldwin'south observation, Trump voters displayed petty grasp of reality in the CNN election exit poll. Autonomous candidate Hillary Clinton made serious missteps, such as calling half of Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables." But at the end of the mean solar day, she still scored much higher than Trump in the leave polls equally beingness the best to handle the economy and foreign policy and in three of four categories regarding which candidate quality mattered nearly: feel, judgment, and "cares nigh me."
Withal Trump won on "tin bring change."
Alter meant that Clinton received an even smaller percentage of the white vote — 37 percentage — than Obama ever did. Clinton'due south gender and Trump'south boasting about grabbing vaginas meant nothing against the sentiments whipped up by Trump. White women went for Trump 53-43 percentage.
White noncollege women voted for Trump by nearly a ii-to-1 margin, and Trump near split the vote amongst white female college graduates. Such graduates voted for Clinton in some battleground states such every bit Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but went overwhelmingly for Trump in the battlegrounds of Ohio, Due north Carolina, and Florida. There was also no evidence of gender defections past Republican women — 89 pct of them voted for Trump.
And any assumptions that white millennials are predisposed to vote for a diverse America are premature. In 2008, Obama beat John McCain by 10 percentage points among white voters 18-to-29 years old. Tuesday dark, Trump won that segment by v percentage points.
Du Bois said the identity of whiteness confers "ownership of the globe forever and ever." No i knows what economical or foreign policy chaos we may get from a Trump presidency, simply it is nearly sure that white privilege will exist protected for decades, since Trump will probably appoint Supreme Court justices predisposed against legal remedies for racial, gender, gay, and economical equality. It is almost every bit certain he will give us a Justice Department blind to injustice.
Trump's voters knew this. Of the respondents who told CNN that the Supreme Courtroom was the most important factor in their vote, the majority voted for Trump. In the confront of abundant videotaped bear witness of constabulary brutality, 74 per centum of Trump voters think the nation's criminal justice system is fair.
Du Bois would not have to change a word in observing how Trump and his supporters "strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness." An egregious arrangement of denial is nigh to occupy the White House, on the promise that white people will own America forever.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Earth contributing columnist and a climate and energy young man with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
Boston Globe video
Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/11/11/make-america-great-again-here-what-dubois-thought/jb1OQyMaIBxBX1f0BnECIJ/story.html
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