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Immediately after the 2016 election, I wrote a piece on Trump's victory. Like other JOCs, I pointed to racism as the center. It's striking to me how so many mainstream journalists 4 years later still struggle to deal with the realities of this country. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/20/magazine/donald-trumps-america-iowa-race.html
FROM 2016: "Trump clearly sensed the fragility of the coalition that Obama put together — that the president's support in heavily white areas was built not on racial egalitarianism but on a feeling of self-interest."
"A recent study by sociologists from Harvard and Tufts found that white Americans believed that they experienced more discrimination than black Americans. Trump spoke openly to those Americans, articulating what many Iowans felt but could never say. It was liberating."
"There has never been a moment in America in which black people’s gains have not been perceived by some white p as their loss. History is littered with ex of how economic and racial anxieties can create a wedge with which to destroy interracial political and economic alliances."
"White supremacists overthrew the biracial fusion party in NC in the late 1800s and, with the support of the white population in the state that had once supported the sharing of power, worked to disenfranchise black North Carolinians and usher in seven decades of Jim Crow."
"What’s missing from the American conversation on race is the fact that people don’t have to hate black people or Muslims or Latinos to be uncomfortable with them, to be suspicious of them, to fear their ascension as an upheaval of the natural order of things."
"A smart demagogue plays to those fears under the guise of economic anxieties. Things not as good as you hoped? These folks are the reason."
"White Americans have ignored race when it serves them and defaulted to it when it suits them. “We think of interest as an objective thing that floats above, but it is subjective,” historian Robin Kelley said. “Race always plays a role. It never disappears.”
