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Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne. White is being European until it needs to also be Irish because of the Polish who can eventually be white if it means that Koreans cannot. For that situational dominance to reproduce itself, there must be a steady pole. That pole is blackness. And so the paradox of how we could elect Obama and Trump is not in how black Obama is or is not. It is, instead, in how white he is (or, is not). The Obama-Trump dialectic is not progress-backlash but do-si-do; one dance, the same steps, mirroring each other, and each existing only in tandem.
Like whiteness itself, Obama was because Trump is.
White voters allowed Barack Obama to become an idea and a president because he was a fundamental projection of the paradox that defines them as white. I almost forgot once. Old trees and new whites are a seduction. But my soul remembers my grandmother’s memories. It is imperative that one knows one’s whites.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, Ma,” I told her. “But this black man can win.”
Today, my mother has no fewer than nineteen portraits and commemorative magazine covers of Barack and Michelle Obama on her mantelpiece. She has exactly four pictures of me, for reference. She has only one of her husband, something that annoys him to no end. She hung up the phone with me any time Barack was giving a speech and she would, I am sure, trade me for Sasha and Malia in a heartbeat. But back in 2007, The Vivian could not believe that a black man with a funny name who so clearly did not know his whites stood a chance. She was finally convinced to believe that whites were different, had perhaps evolved like the far end of the paint store: ecru, pearl, eider, snow, star, toque. It was another Myers Park house party that did the trick. I dragged her there. She almost did not get out of the car. But when she did, she saw it too. It wasn’t Barack Obama knowing his whites that convinced me or my mother. It was that whites knew Obama.
In the forensic account of his final days as president, writers opined about Obama’s faith in white America as fundamentally good, humane, and, above all, capable of evolution. It is easy to believe that this mattered. We all like seeing ourselves through the eyes of those who hold us in esteem, perhaps especially so when we know that we have failed to earn it. We want to be redeemable. And a nation’s father figure is a good person to have believe in you. It is especially good when you suspect, on some level, that the father figure might have a good reason to doubt you.
The eternally future-looking American story is about a tomorrow that is disconnected from yesterday precisely because the story of the nation does not come off particularly well in that retelling. But I have come to believe that it did not matter that Obama had faith in white people. They needed only to have faith in him: in his willingness to reflect their ideal selves back at them, to change the world without changing them, to change blackness for them without being black to them.
Obama’s “hybridity” and “two-ness” and “biracial” identity may have mattered. It did not matter because of how it shaped Obama, but because of how it made white voters feel about themselves. In sociology, there are several theories about those who are born or socialized into two cultures at once. These people have been called liminal or marginal, for being suspended between two societies. The black world and white world that Ta-Nehisi described in his grand essay on Obama’s presidency “My President Was Black,” are often tossed about casually. It is important to understand them more precisely.8
There is a black norm only because there is a white norm, and vice versa. Some would argue that people like Obama exist in both spaces simultaneously and thus someone like Obama has special insight into both cultures. That insight supposedly breeds empathy. That kind of empathy may be why Obama could look at years of pictures of his wife and children drawn as apes and decades of white suppression of perceived black socioeconomic gains as racial, albeit not racist: “I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race.”9 That is catnip to millions of white voters.
The other interpretation of liminality, or double-consciousness, that Obama is said to represent is more complicated. Not only does one trapped between two sets of social norms understand each better, but he is often blinded to the ways in which they are in conflict. Duality can breed insight, but it can also breed delusion. Holding two sets of social selves, two ways of being and understanding the world at one time, may soften the edges so much that for the liminal, the edges no longer exist.
Obama, in his own writings and in the voluminous writings about him, seems to think that he could only ever have really “embraced” or “chosen” blackness. He seems to truly believe that he exercised some great act of charity and agency in adopting black cool. My first black president seems to think that he could raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations. He thinks that he can be his brother’s keeper without changing the policies, laws, and investments that keep his brothers in bad jobs, in poor neighborhoods, with bad educational options, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.
There’s no other way to explain Obama’s inability to imagine that this nation could elect Donald Trump. Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. Even after Donald Trump was elected, Obama told Coates that all is not lost. He is still hopeful about the soul of white America. He said nothing about the soul of black America. That is where my hope resides.
While many things change, my hope in the soul of black America remains constant. It is not an uncritical faith, but it is an invaluable heuristic for days such as ours. For instance, I was never confused about why this nation would elect Donald Trump. I was never deeply hurt when it did so. I cry and am angered by and passionate about what Trump’s election is doing to human beings and social institutions. But I am not disappointed. If you truly know your whites, disappointment rarely darkens your door. That is because knowing your whites is to know that white voters allowed Barack Obama to become an idea and a president because he was a charming projection of the paradox that defines them as white. The charm is neither necessary nor sufficient, but it helps.
What is necessary for the paradox of whiteness to maintain the internal tension that defines it is for superiority to coexist with fragility.10 As the nation that bears most fully the stamp of whiteness’s authentic expression, the United States is full of such paradoxes: slaveholders building a republic from the embers of the Enlightenment; freedom of speech that must delineate acceptable speech if any speech is to be free; equal opportunity that necessitates inequality of outcomes.
These paradoxes were in full flower at a 2015 Trump rally. I decided to attend that rally because, really, how could I be surprised by any of it? I was living in the capital of Virginia, the former home of the Confederacy, in a building rumored to sit atop a mass grave for the enslaved, and no one seemed to believe Donald Trump could win. The narrative went: no nation that had progressed enough to elect Obama could turn around and elect the pleathery, oft orange-tinged reality TV show host who sometimes played a billionaire on shock radio. I talked to sensible people, smart people, deeply knowledgeable people. I talked to working-class people and middle-class people and whatever the people are who go to boarding schools. I talked to journalists and political organizers and fundraisers and activists and students and professors. Only two people in my daily sphere believed it was not only possible, but probable: Ms. Yvette and the Guy I Talk to Behind the Building on His Smoke Break (Guy, for short).
Ms. Yve
tte used to clean our office. Roughly 3 percent of the nation’s 1.6 million full-time faculty members are black. I am one of them. I can be the only one all day every day. Seeing Ms. Yvette is frequently my only chance to speak in my mother tongue when I am not home. It did not take much to get Ms. Yvette talking. It did not take much to get almost any black person at the time to talk about the election.
“Girl you see what’s his name?”
“Oh yeah, I saw it. Child, child, child. It’s a mess.”
“It is but it ain’t our mess!”
“Well, I hope it isn’t anyway.”
“You think he gonna win?”
We looked at each other and started laughing. Of course he would win. The idea that he could not was ridiculous. Ms. Yvette knew her whites.
Guy may work where I work. He may not. It isn’t very clear. Something about our routine daily activities is aligned. We pass each other at least twice a week during a semester. Sometimes he is wearing a uniform. He is almost always smoking. Sometimes it is even just a tobacco cigarette.
Guy is serious about calling me Professor.
“Professor Ma’am, you see your boy on TV?”
“How is he my boy?”
“He ain’t mine!”
“Mine either.”
“You think he gonna win?”
“Man, look. I believe anything is possible.”
“Yeah, you seen Katt Williams? That one about the tiger? That tiger bit your ass because he remembered he was a tiger.”11
Guy got it.
I would not have dreamed of going to the Trump rally alone. I also would not have dreamed of asking Ms. Yvette or Guy. I had to go with white people. There were two of them and one of me. We had strategy sessions beforehand. I would walk between them, minimizing chances for small talk with the Trump faithful. We would sit near an exit, again with me between them, close to the end of the row. My comfort level would dictate when we left, no questions asked.
I was not there to see Donald Trump. He was a known quantity. I was there to see the people who believed in Donald Trump as the leader of the free world. I scanned the parking lot at the convention center. I noticed how many nice cars there were. Big trucks, expensive trucks, but also luxury sedans and sports cars. I inventoried the bumper stickers: University of Virginia, George Mason University, Old Dominion University, churches, resort towns, and peeling mainstream party stickers from elections past.
You could not just enter the convention center. Virginia had seen its share of recent public disturbances. A good tenth of a mile before the entrance, you had to verbally declare to a uniformed guard whether you were there to attend the rally or to protest it. The two groups were separated, sent behind opposing barricades. I stood behind a group of four white women, late forties and early fifties. It was hot. They wore the short-shorts and visors of vacationers. They were also drunk like vacationers. One proclaimed loudly, as one would at a rock concert, that if she caught Donald Trump’s eye she was going to flash her “tits” because “gawd, he is so sexy.”
The audience inside was bored. These rallies are not electrifying. By the time you see them as slick media packages on TV or the internet, editing makes it look like a party. It is far more mundane than that. Babies wore onesies that said, “Lock the bitch [Hillary Clinton] up.” Mothers bought drink koozies with crass sayings about “balls” and “hags” on them for their accompanying teenage sons. From the swag to the speakers, the Trump rally rhetoric was violent. But the mood and the scene was almost as placid as that Myers Park street. People smiled and nodded at me, if a little confused about seeing me. They had manners. One man in a wheelchair hooted, “Crooked bitch” when the topic of the American Health Care Act was mentioned from the dais. Later, he mimed moving his manual wheelchair a bit so that I could move by him easily. Asian American immigrants, mostly first and second generation according to their signs, cheered when Trump disparaged immigrants. A handful of black (maybe African American, but I cannot be certain) people throughout the crowd sat back throughout the rally, tapping feet or patting knees at the parts they liked.
Much has been made of the losers who voted for Trump. I do not mean that disparagingly, but descriptively, as the Trump voter is generally typed as one who has lost something: economic opportunities, financial security, identity, gender supremacy. Not all losers do so gracefully. People ate up the idea of Trump voters as losers. It is empathetic and, perhaps more importantly given how white and elite is the media profession, confirmation bias. Others pointed out, rightfully so, that the Trump coalition is not a historical anomaly. Viewed through the lens of historical struggle, Trump’s election could be seen as white voters reclaiming this nation as theirs. All useful ways to understand a multifaceted phenomenon. One lens struggles to explain the empirical data showing that the typical Trump voter was, in fact, middle class and educated. The other is more helpful if we consider that historical progress and reclamations exist as one equation. But there is still something missing.
Political theorist Corey Robin understands the history of the conservative right in the United States as a search for a fight, because the act of being conservative necessitates an undesirable progress against which it can rebel. In a sort of manifestation politics, the “right” co-creates or at least abets social progress against which it can be juxtaposed. Staid conservatism is far from seeking stasis. It is provoking and reactive because without progress there is no reason to prefer the lack of progress. Similarly, what is a white republic for white citizens and in defense of white property if there is not a dark threat? To the extent that white racial identity matters at all to how white voters vote, white Obama voters and white Trump voters are not necessarily expressing different views of whiteness. They are expressing the same one, each necessary for the other and both required for white identity politics to exist at all.
In its fragility—ceding ground to Obama’s multicultural vision of a majority-minority America—whiteness expresses its superiority. The people at the Trump rally were not losers, neither were they especially remarkable. For all its violent rhetoric, the rally was quaint. The sameness of Myers Park’s lawns and rules about arriving early exerted whiteness as surely as a multicultural, mixed-class audience at the Trump rally projected their faith in whiteness as this nation’s most redeeming attribute. I however am not sure what social progress would actually look like given that its existence relies on the paradox of whiteness. But I do believe like Guy: a tiger bites to remind you that it is a tiger.
Black Is Over (Or, Special Black)
I’m looking for a mixed girl
Asian, Jamaican
I’m looking for a mixed girl
Puerto Rican, Haitian
I’m looking for a mixed girl
Cuban and White
I’m trying to get mixed up tonight like
Excuse me miss, what’s your name, where ya from, can I come
—T-Pain, “Mix’d Girl”
“Black people are over.” That is how it was said to me once. The occasion was a meeting of professors who were working together on a student project. It was a “people of color” cabal. If pressed to do so at a glance, one might have said that everyone in the room was black. In a discussion of methods and theories and other such things that comprise a significant part of my job, one of the women—we were all women—said assuredly that we have moved on, past black and white. Hence, “black people are over.” I did not feel over and I am most certainly black. But it was said so casually because of the kind of black that I am presumed to be in rooms such as these. There have been many such rooms and I end up in more of them, more frequently, the more I inch up the class ladder. The proclamation makes a mistake of assuming that black people, like me, were only ever a problem and not a people.
But, first, just what kind of black am I? It is actually a common question. A senior scholar of great standing in my profession once said to me, “I do not trust you. Too many white people like you.” Which, ouch. H
e also told me that being a dark black woman would prove a problem for me in academia. I am glad a man finally told me that, I tell you what. This was all said with great affection, by the way. I had passed a test for what kind of black I was. It is a political question—do I align myself with the interests of black people? I do. Only, the question can be more complicated depending on which black people are in question.
Do I align myself with black people across the diaspora? With black people on the political left or the political right? With black people who have a nonblack parent? With black people who prefer African American or nigga? The easy answer is that I am basic black. The harder answer is that it’s never as easy as it sounds. What has been offered to me or denied me in parts, at different times, are opportunities to agree that black people are over. I can never know what the people who offer me this are thinking, but it seems that the offer is conditioned on that darkness and womanness the great man scholar told me would be a professional problem.
This was not a problem I remember experiencing growing up. I knew that not all black people were like us. I spent time in New York with Dominicans and black Puerto Ricans who would fight if you called them black. One of my mother’s best friends was a Haitian chef named Henry George. He did wonderful, unholy things to fish. We traveled. I knew black people came from all over the world.