It’s Gotten A Lot Harder To Act Like Whiteness Doesn’t Shape Our Politics

*Despite mainstream media’s prevalent version, Trumpism is about the politics of white identity. It can’t be middle-class discontent when 40 percent of the middle class are people of color and they vehemently reject Trumpism. And it can’t be middle class when Trumps followers are wealthier than Clinton or Sanders followers. This is about the politics of whiteness and mainstream media can’t bring itself to admit it. VL

By Gene Demby, Code Switch

I’ve been heads-down in some reading and interviews about the way we talk about, well, white people. Whiteness has always been a central dynamic of American cultural and political life, though we don’t tend to talk about it as such. But this election cycle is making it much harder to avoid discussions of white racial grievance and identity politics when, for instance, Donald Trump’s only viable pathway to the White House is to essentially win all of the white dudes.

And indeed, the roiling civil war between the Republican Party’s elites and a huge swath of its base has prompted an unusually candid public grappling with whiteness.

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Gene Demby is the lead blogger for NPR’s Code Switch team. Before coming to NPR, he served as the managing editor for Huffington Post’s BlackVoices following its launch. He later covered politics. Prior to that role he spent six years in various positions at The New York Times. While working for the Times in 2007, he started a blog about race, culture, politics and media calledPostBourgie, which won the 2009 Black Weblog Award for Best News/Politics Site.