Ta-Nehisi COATES On "WHITENESS" & TRUMP

by

Gilbert NMO MORRIS

In the October 2017 issue of the ATLANTIC Magazine Ta-Nehisi Coates names Mr. Donald Trump the "First White President"; meaning the first of his kind to be not merely racist, but to have risen to the office of the presidency by force of and on a tide of whiteness as a distinct political category.

Mr. Coates' focus and analysis are - as ever - salient.

It has been my concern for some time that Mr. Coates' general thesis on race is overwrought; which has led to and can be found bubbling sadly on the pages of his previous book "Between the World and Me"; a stunningly dreary, hope-forlorn bequest to his son.

The issues in Mr. Coates' current article - an excerpt from his new book "We were 8 Years in Power", are quite subtle and overlapping:

On the one hand, Coates wants to show the ubiquity of "Whiteness" as a stamp of prestige, preserve of power and fount of privilege.

At the same time, he wishes to show that whiteness is ahistorical, contentless and dependent upon an active negation of Blackness; which means: the assertion of whiteness denigrates blackness, necessarily.

Coates presents two wheels of a dialectic - thesis and anti-thesis - with no hope of synthesis; since power lies in the disequilibrium of the negation of Blackness, not in the recognition of a potentially higher interdependence - synthesis - between black and white.

It's the ages old American moral problem being flogged now, shamelessly, as an explicit, divisive politics.

The problem is these two intensities cannot be held together, as they force all racial elements of social discourse into a single universal perspective incapable of accommodating causal or intentional complexity.

For these reasons, Coates never imagines that Trump could be a racist - which is not a feeling but a belief in systems of racial preferences - yet not a white supremacist. He fails to imagine Trump instead, as a virulent opportunist who uses white supremacy as a tool of manipulation to gain and hold power.

That is, racism - though not a feeling or attitude - is a systemisation - a Foucauldian 'power relation'. It is an institutionalised approach to the apportionment of benefits and privileges within an economic and social system, based on race: such as "redlining" in Federal Housing Policy or withholding GI Bill benefits from Black persons who served with whites who received those benefits or incarceration of Blacks and Whites differently for use of the same drugs.

Such systems can be dominate or characterise fully the operations of a social or economic system, and those who believe in such systems need not hate Black people. The problem is where the civic narrative of a polity is based on equality and all races pay taxes into its system, yet one race benefits from these systems more than others. Wherever the members of the race enjoying disproportionate benefits from such a system are - generally - unaware or fail to question the system's inherent unfairness or historical biases, this is the essence of "racism"; in a sense in which the term is never used in America.

Trump is surely that.

Yet, in the same sense that a racist need not dislike Black peoples, a racist need not be a "White supremacist"; which is a feeling of right. As such, a case should be considered and could certainly be made that Trump does not believe necessarily in the supremacy of the white race or less concretely, of whiteness.

Rather he believes in the supremacy of Trump and whiteness is a useful mechanism for the advancement of Trumpism.

Coates ignores this option precisely because he is so certain that whiteness motivates rather than is employed by Trump; he assumes full knowledge of Trumps interiority.

If we take a more modest approach based on the facts of which which are confirmed repeatedly, we know the following: Trump knew, for instance, that Mr Obama was not born in Kenya because no fact of the world could show or prove such a falsity. But the audience for birtherism were racists and white supremacists in the Republican Party; known by Trump to believe Mr Obama was Kenyan. The benefit to Mr Trump was their political support, which outweighed for Mr. Trump the disgrace of the nonsense of the claim.

He used that to drive their support.

In the same vein Mr. Trump knows that the net flow of Americans to Mexicans across the border is weighted towards Americans crossing into Mexico. He knows that the flows of illegals are from Guatemala and El Salvador et.al. But that fact cannot fit a sound bite neatly, so he says "Mexicans", calls Mexicans "rapists" specifically, and the xenophobic crowd roars. The benefit to Mr. Trump was the allegiance of a rabble, uninterested and undeterred by the truth, which allegiance outweighed the disgrace of besmirching an entire people.

I believe also - beyond or apart from whiteness as Mr. Coates argues rightly - people also voted for Mr. Trump because there were particular issues - supreme court, abortion, increased defense spending - for which they thought policies could be executed under Trump; not to mention those who voted for him just to poke the political establishment in the eye.

I think even in the earlier iterations of Mr. Trump's mistreatment of Black peoples in housing - for instance - was because he thought he could get in front of and marshal the odious sentiments to his financial advantage; since his tenants preferred to live with Whites over Blacks. For Trump the only issue - never principle or ideology - was discrimination meant more money or 'prestige' as he saw it - and he was sufficiently without conscience or grace to exploit those opportunities, such as they were.

It is unfortunate that Coates ignored these categorical facts; as mere consideration of these subtleties may have forestalled Coates' valorisation of the very whiteness he believes to be contentless. It may have compelled greater powers of prescient analysis from Coates, whilst proving more consistent with the active propensities of the President's implacable strain of narcissism.

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