I admit it: Ta-Nehisi Coates drives me nuts.
Having spent the Obama Administration complaining that Obama was too white, calling for white people to pay reparations, and arguing that white people are fixated on breaking the bodies of black men (not something I’ve ever once thought about, and neither have you), he has belatedly discovered the virtues of the Obama years, and is appropriately indignant about Trump and his supporters in a new article in The Atlantic. As usual, however, he goes way too far, and insists that the outcome of the election was solely dictated by racial views, and had nothing to do with the economic frustrations of white working people.
I don’t accept that West Virginia voted overwhelmingly for Trump because its citizens are bigots–not because they wanted their coal mining jobs back. I don’t accept that businessmen voted for Trump because they are bigots, and not because they wanted deregulation and a big tax cut. I don’t accept that evangelical Christians all voted for Trump because they are bigots, and not because they think their morals and their way of life is under threat. I don’t accept that the vast majority of the white working class cares more about racial issues than their own economic well-being just because small farmers in the South were willing to fight for the Confederacy 150 years ago.
And what if he’s right? How, exactly, is the Democratic Party supposed to regain power if it has no chance to regain the votes of millions of bigoted white workers? Going to West Virginia and telling unemployed miners that they should pay reparations is not exactly a winning electoral strategy.
I agree with Coates that Bernie Sanders’ class-based approach to American politics is simple-minded, and that identity issues, by and large, are much more important. I do not agree, however, that race is the only part of identity that truly matters to the average voter. Coates is almost as simple-minded and wrong as Sanders on that point.