A disingenuous stereotype about white supremacy is that its proponents are ignorant and possess few experiences. This trope places the racism in the context of class, claiming that it is a product of poverty. However, as Ta-Nehisi Coates outlined in a must-read article defining the Trump presidency titled “The First White President,” the reality is that the president’s 2016 white support crossed all economic, educational, and class lines:
“An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to NASCAR dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.”
In examining the Trump supporters who attacked the US Capitol last week, Adam Serwer argued in an article published yesterday that the people who were present demonstrated that the pan-economic support that Coates described in the 2016 election continues to exist. Indeed, he affirms, the Trump supporters were not motivated by fears for economic prospects, but instead by what they perceived as a violation of their birthright to power in the US:
“The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.”
It is with the pervasive white supremacy described both by Coates and Serwer in mind that I found the story of Derek Black’s evolution to be valuable. Born into a family situation that could best be described as royalty in the respectable side of the movement, Black’s college experiences drew him away from his years of white nationalism and helped to transform him into a person who now regularly speaks in public about how to confront the same ideas that he once espoused.
Eli Saslow turned Black’s story into the book Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. It was published in 2018 and every day the story seems more urgent. Here is Saslow and Black being interviewed by Trevor Noah in 2018:
Eli Saslow turned Black’s story into the book Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. It was published in 2018 and every day the story seems more urgent. Here is Saslow and Black being interviewed by Trevor Noah in 2018:
Here is a deeper conversation that includes Black and some of the people who challenged and supported his transformation in college:
