By Erin Aubry Kaplan
Guest Columnist
In the final months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, pundits spent a lot of time speculating about what was wrong with Black people, specifically men. Why were they gravitating toward Donald Trump and why had Black support for Democrats overall declined since 2020?
Theories included the phenomenon of patriarchy across color lines and consequent reluctance to vote for a woman for president, even though she is Black (or maybe because she is Black). There also was ongoing consternation about Latino support for Trump, notably among men, which had also grown.
The driving question of these discussions was how could these groups support a party and a man so obviously against Black and Latino people? How could people of color stand against not just their own political interests, but against their very essence?
These were valid questions. But in its late-hour scrutiny, the media once again failed to similarly interrogate the bigger phenomenon of racial self-destructiveness that’s been staring us all in the face for more than a decade now. Trumpism is a crisis of whiteness, seeded by the anti-Blackness the Republican Party deliberately began to embrace when Barack Obama became president in 2008.
It was that embrace that set the stage for Donald Trump and Trumpism, which has become another word for mainstreamed white supremacy.
Trumpism and its trickle-down effects on American politics and American ideals is a grim reality that Black and brown people are reacting to and, unfortunately, some are supporting. But they didn’t create the reality.
We are at this racially terrible point because roughly half of the country, the majority of it white, has officially opted out of the multiracial democratic experiment and seems increasingly unlikely to opt back in. The reelection of Trump has made that painfully clear; post-mortems of a disaster that many found hard to even contemplate will likely go on for years.
But the question that the media assiduously avoided asking from the beginning, the question that still needs to be asked, is: how could that cohort of white people do this? How could America do this to itself?
With the reinstatement of Trump, there is every reason to believe that cohort will continue to do this to itself, and to all of us — vacate remaining ideals of justice for all and replace it with a moral entropy that it enthusiastically embraces as the true American ideal, the one way forward.
Whites who reject Trumpism but don’t challenge it on its own terms of racial antipathy simply don’t know how. They have no practice. You’d have to go back to the 1960s to find a critical mass of white people speaking unequivocally against racism and anti-Blackness.
After the ’60s, the conservative position was that racism had been solved and that racial justice efforts from that point amounted to just so much bellyaching. And yet many polls over the years, including during the Trump era, have shown Americans of all colors believe racism and race-based inequality remain a problem. Trumpism therefore represents a massive failure of leadership, a betrayal from the top of values Americans actually share. That’s the real tragedy of Trumpism, and because so much damage has been done in the last eight years, leadership is the thing that feels hardest to change or undo. Especially now.
Not that concerned white people have done nothing. In 2024 they rallied around reproductive rights and trans rights, decried hate, called for unity. But nothing was said about whiteness as the core of the existential threat to democracy.
Some Black activists say the way out of the stalemate that started in 2008 and mushroomed into a cold civil war is not educating or rehabbing white people, but continuing to build the voting power of constituencies of color. It’s a model that goes back to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s, but the stakes are much higher now.
Steve Phillips, political strategist and author of the 2022 book “How We Win the Civil War,” said building those constituencies is the only way to outmaneuver Trumpism and ultimately win the battle that the Confederacy has been waging against multiracial America since the 1800s.
Akili, 76, is a lifelong labor and political organizer and racial justice activist in Los Angeles who works with Black Lives Matter Grassroots, among other groups. He said Trumpism and the white backlash that created it is simply American history, citing the rise of avowed segregationist George Wallace as a presidential candidate in 1968 after several years of civil rights progress (Wallace lost but made an impressive showing in the South).
What’s changed is how technology can fuel that backlash, and the distortions and disinformation that go with it, all over the world at practically the speed of light. Akili said the challenge going forward, especially for Black people, is to not just remake politics, but to remake culture.
“If this is a racist culture, one with a certain set of conditions, you will continue to get outcomes like Trump,” he said. “It’s tough because we want to believe in the humanity of people. We want to say, ‘That can’t be,’ we want to believe that Trumpism is temporary or whatever.
“But it’s like water,” he continued. “If the water comes in the house and ruins your floors, you can get new floors, but if the water remains it’s going to ruin it again. We’ve got to get rid of the water.”
Erin Aubry Kaplan is an award-winning journalist who examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and opportunities for progress in an era of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and California. This article was produced by Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication focused on inequality. It is published here with permission.
LIFTOUT
Whites who reject Trumpism but don’t challenge it on its own terms of racial antipathy simply don’t know how.
