Racecraft

Ever since Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign in 2016, critics have often described his politics and his supporters’ as “racist.” It’s been a common view of Trump personally for longer than that—going back at least to 2011, when he started questioning whether Barack Obama was really born on American soil. In The New Yorker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called Trump’s first term a “white-power presidency.” At Vox, Nicole Narea wrote that “Trump has made himself an icon of white extremists.” And according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, then writing for The Atlantic, “whiteness … is the very core of his power.” Others, meanwhile—notably, in The New York Times’ 1619 Project—extrapolated this view of Trumpism as being fundamentally racist to America as a whole.

And yet Trump won this year’s U.S. presidential election with a significantly increased share of non-white voters. The progressive-leaning cable news network MSNBC analyzed the result as showing Trump’s electorate was now the “most diverse” Republican electorate “in modern political history”—and cited statistics to back that up: In the last presidential election Trump wasn’t running in—2012—black people voted for the Democratic candidate by 87 points; Latinos, by 44 points; and Asians, by 47. In this election, those numbers had slumped to 72, 6, and 15. Within days, commentators in various quarters of American media began speaking of Trump as having built a “multiracial coalition”—by building a new working-class coalition. Has he? 

Adolph Reed is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, and the co-author of No Politics but Class Politics. Reed says the idea that the Republicans have begun to win over non-white groups is misleading because they’re not electoral groups, properly speaking. There’s no “black vote,” as Reed sees it, because blacks don’t vote as a bloc but as particular people, each with his or her own economic interests and political priorities. And the chronic failure of American politicians from either major party to see this reality has meant a chronic failure to act on it …

Gustav Jönsson: What do you make of the idea that Trump has now built a “multiracial coalition” across the American working class?