- The focus on one subsector 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’s presidency 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 the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.
When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The reason white working class voters have been such a topic of discussion is that they were a change. Democrats and Republicans have learned that certain demographics will always go their way, and so are content to ignore them. Clinton took one group for granted, they turned on her, and she lost. Everyone else voted the way they always do. The reason working class black voters aren't part of the conversation is because they did what was expected. If they'd gone for Trump, we'd now be reading article after article asking why. Meanwhile, the Democrats have taken their votes for granted, but this is apparently something black voters are willing to accept, so why should the Democrats pay them any mind? The squeaky wheel gets the grease. If black voters want the Democrats to pay attention, stop with the blind support. Vote third party. Ultimately, I wonder what his point is. Sitting there yelling at white people for being racist may be cathartic, but all he's going to do is annoy people who might otherwise have been persuaded. Say he's right, and whiteness is how I got where I am. Now what? What would he have me do? What would he have any of us do?
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/12/black-voter-turnout-fell-in-2016-even-as-a-record-number-of-americans-cast-ballots/ I may come back later to respond to your last paragraph. Where in this piece do you read Coates "yelling at white people"?The reason working class black voters aren't part of the conversation is because they did what was expected.
If black voters want the Democrats to pay attention, stop with the blind support. Vote third party.
I'm not sure not voting is enough (particularly when the result is a Trump presidency). As for him yelling at white people, that was like half of the piece. He spends much of it talking about how Trump voters could only have voted for him because they're racist, and how the rest of us talk about white working class voters because we're racist.