The focus on one sector of Trump voters-the white working class-is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony, the bloody heirloom remains potent-even after a black president, and, in fact, strengthened by the fact of the black president-is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of the country's political life.
( Ta-Nehisi Coates )
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