Basically every major national publication has done some version of a particular story. You know the one; they send a reporter to some place (often a place that had voted for Democrats in the distant or recent past) where Donald Trump is performing well (Youngstown, Ohio![1] or West Virginia![1:1]) or even somewhere he won’t do well (Chevy Chase, MD[1:2]). The reporter then talks to these voters, listens to their troubles with decreased economic opportunity, or free trade closing the factories, or general discontent with the political establishment. The best of these stories do actually at least point out the racial animus behind the political preference of many of the people who are interviewed.
Even more insidious, however, is the newly popular genre of nonfiction, where a white person with “elite” credibility (a Yale Law School graduate[1:3] or a Berkeley professor[1:4], say) writes sympathetically about the (very much non-elite) white people who make up a large chunk of Trump’s loyal support. These narratives weave a tale of woe about how these people feel left behind by the economy, how they feel “the culture” disdains them and their way of life, and their concerns for the future of their communities. These stories do have a kernel of truth to them, of course, but they also seem to treat the racism that comes along with these concerns as an unfortunate disease that some of these people have, as if they forgot to put on a jacket when they went out on a cold day and now have runny noses. To be clear, I am not suggesting that racists don’t deserve health care, food, shelter, or even economic opportunity. However, treating racism like an abstraction, without considering the real people who are its targets, is inconsiderate at best, and dangerous at worst.
To take one of the above examples, Arlie Hochschild’s book (Strangers in Their Own Land)[1:5], is based on her (a liberal Berkeley professor) going to Louisiana and meeting and trying to understand conservatives whose values are so directly in conflict with hers. Having read and listened to a few interviews with her about this project, you would be surprised to hear that although Louisiana is the state with the third-highest proportion of African-Americans in the country (32%), they don't seem to be part of the story. The reasons that people develop and maintain racist attitudes are complex, but discussing them without also discussing the people in the same community who are affected by them is irresponsible.[1:6] Racism is an ideology that actually impacts people’s lives; it’s not like following a sports team, and it would behoove everyone to be more serious about its impacts, and to understand the people who respond favorably to it (for example, in the white nationalist campaign of Donald Trump) as consciously embracing it.
The other side of this coin is that largely missing from the discourse (and must be considered a substantial failure of the media in portraying today’s political landscape) are the perspectives from those voters utterly repelled by Donald Trump’s message. In a recent high-quality poll of North Carolina, Donald Trump was getting 2% of the black vote[1:7], and this result is consistent with many other polls. This is despite not having Barack Obama on the ballot, and Hillary Clinton’s decidedly mixed history on racial issues. To go further, the ZIP code that went most heavily for Obama in 2012 contains a Sioux reservation in South Dakota[1:8], and there have been whispers of their potential pivotal role for Clinton in Alaska and Arizona. Why has there been barely any coverage of Native American voters, especially at a time when more attention is being paid to how Native Americans are portrayed in mass media[1:9] and the Standing Rock protests? Why don’t we hear more from Muslims, who have been consistent targets of Trump's animus and the animus of his supporters?
Why do we rarely hear from these voters, either those who are enthusiastic (or not) about Hillary Clinton, but look set to soundly reject Donald Trump, despite his ham-fisted attempts to appeal directly to some racial minorities? Surely part of the problem here is that most political reporters, as far as I can tell, are white[1:10]. But I think there’s a deeper problem, that goes beyond media coverage, and hits to a problem at the very core of American democracy today.
The political preferences of people who aren’t white are simply not valued. Of course, this starts at the very beginning of the republic, where the majority of black people in America were not even included as human beings with rights and privileges. It continued into the violent and state-sanctioned campaigns against black political power that eventually ended Reconstruction after the Civil War, into the violence and resistance that faced and has faced the descendants of those freed slaves until, during, and after their citizenship in our democracy was finally backed by the full force of federal law in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.[1:11]
It is not hard to see that backlash continued in the nomination of a virulent bigot and xenophobe to potentially succeed the first black president, and while it seems that he will fall short, it is also clear that these politics of white revanchism have a frighteningly large constituency. I believe that the Republican Party and its elected officials have been the most egregious offenders in this regard, from not doing more to strongly condemn the racist “birther” campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency, to sending the message through their actions that the first president elected due to a historically active coalition of non-white voters[1:12] cannot use his power like other presidents have before him. It is also true that liberal politicians have also dabbled in this when it suits them, from the Clintons’ behavior during the 2008 Democratic primary, to Bernie Sanders’ dismissal of the overwhelming support of black voters in Southern red states for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primary.
None of this behavior is compatible with a multiracial democracy. If this radical and imperfect experiment in government, now the most diverse and longest-lasting democracy on the planet, is to survive going forward, everyone, on all sides of the political spectrum, must appreciate the political power that black and brown people have gained, and seek to address their needs and desires for their country and their futures in a constructive manner. It is not just a question of political tactics; it is simply the right thing to do if one believes in cultivating a vibrant democracy.