Make America Great Again Shad of Blue
To understand Donald Trump's election equally president, it is useful to think the writings of Westward.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. Trump won on the nostalgic slogan of "Brand America Great Again." The word "great" had item meaning for Du Bois, who wrote in 1920 that information technology was piece of cake for leaders to make people believe that "every groovy deed the world e'er did was a white homo's human action."
Baldwin seconded that in 1964, observing that white superiority made it so difficult for white men to share power with people of color that they instead "prepare up in themselves a fantastic organisation of evasions, denials, and justifications," a system which destroys "their grasp of reality, which is another manner of saying their moral sense."
At that place is no amend 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 brown and Muslim clearing. The election cannot exist about the economy when a majority of white Americans who merits to be economically forgotten entrust the Oval Function to a billionaire with a record of multiple bankruptcies, one who has denied the public his tax returns. Not to mention a Republican Political party that ancestral a recession to President Obama.
Of course many economical problems remain, but somehow, angry white voters are conveniently oblivious to the fact that unemployment under Obama was cutting by one-half. And it's not like black people stole their jobs for viii years — black unemployment remains double that of white Americans.
This election was really about white Americans having such common cold feet about the new America represented by Obama and the possibility of the first woman president that they chose the hottest head possible to cascade kerosene onto smoldering resentment.
A Pew poll last summertime found that a minority of Trump supporters thought diversity made America a better identify to live while a majority wanted American Muslims to be discipline to higher security scrutiny. According to a PRRI survey just before the election, 72 percent of Trump voters said American order and our way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s, an era where white privilege was protected by discrimination and segregation.
True to Baldwin'due south observation, Trump voters displayed little grasp of reality in the CNN ballot get out poll. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton made serious missteps, such as calling half of Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables." But at the end of the day, she even so scored much college than Trump in the exit polls as beingness the best to handle the economy and foreign policy and in three of four categories regarding which candidate quality mattered most: experience, judgment, and "cares about me."
Even so Trump won on "can bring change."
Change meant that Clinton received an even smaller pct of the white vote — 37 percent — than Obama always did. Clinton'southward gender and Trump's boasting about grabbing vaginas meant nothing confronting the sentiments whipped up by Trump. White women went for Trump 53-43 percent.
White noncollege women voted for Trump by nearly a 2-to-1 margin, and Trump nearly split the vote among white female person college graduates. Such graduates voted for Clinton in some battleground states such as Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, just went overwhelmingly for Trump in the battlegrounds of Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida. There was also no evidence of gender defections by Republican women — 89 percentage of them voted for Trump.
And any assumptions that white millennials are predisposed to vote for a diverse America are premature. In 2008, Obama shell John McCain past x percentage points among white voters 18-to-29 years erstwhile. Tuesday dark, Trump won that segment by 5 percentage points.
Du Bois said the identity of whiteness confers "ownership of the earth forever and ever." No ane knows what economic or foreign policy chaos we may get from a Trump presidency, but it is almost certain that white privilege will exist protected for decades, since Trump will probably appoint Supreme Courtroom justices predisposed against legal remedies for racial, gender, gay, and economic equality. It is nearly every bit certain he will give us a Justice Section bullheaded to injustice.
Trump's voters knew this. Of the respondents who told CNN that the Supreme Court was the most important gene in their vote, the bulk voted for Trump. In the face of abundant videotaped evidence of police brutality, 74 percent of Trump voters think the nation's criminal justice organisation 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 system of deprival is about to occupy the White House, on the promise that white people will own America forever.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe contributing columnist and a climate and free energy boyfriend with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He tin be reached at jackson@world.com.
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Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/11/11/make-america-great-again-here-what-dubois-thought/jb1OQyMaIBxBX1f0BnECIJ/story.html
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