America,
say hello to President Trump. And you can thank white folks for this
mess.
It
turns out that a whole mess of white people voted for Donald Trump,
but obviously many of them did not tell the pollsters they were
voting for the man. Nov. 8 was an exercise in white supremacy. Simply
put, this was white America’s last stand.
Looking
at the exit polls, white voters came out in full force for the
Donald. And we’re not simply talking about uneducated whites
but ALL white people, regardless of education or socioeconomic
status.
According
to exit
polls,
Trump won among white women, with 53 percent to Hillary’s
43 percent. And with 31 percent of white male voters to Trump’s
63 percent, Clinton did not match President
Barack Obama’s
results with this demographic against Mitt Romney (35 percent) in
2012.
–Donald
Trump wins the presidency and America loses–
Among
white voters without a college education, the President-elect
snatched an impressive yet not surprising 72 percent to Clinton’s
23 percent. He won with white, non-college women with 62 percent (vs.
34 percent for Clinton) and white college-educated men with 54
percent to Hillary’s 39 percent.
Add
to that less
than energized black, Latino and millennial voters
for Hillary — including smaller margins of victory among the
African-American and Hispanic vote than Obama over Romney — and
you had a recipe for disaster for the Democratic candidate.
Chalk
it up to the “Bradley
effect”
on steroids, referring to the black mayor of Los Angeles who ran for
governor of California in 1982. Although polls had him leading the
race up to election day, he ultimately lost because white voters were
too racist to admit to pollsters that they would not support the
African-American candidate. Similarly, this time around, in the 2016
national race for the White House, far more white folks cast their
ballot for Trump than thy cared to admit.
Meanwhile,
the numbers coming from the fallout of the election suggest that
whites flocked to Trump because of his open appeals to white
supremacy, xenophobia and racism, not in spite of it. His naked and
unabashed promotion of white nationalism — putting white people
first and people of color be damned — worked in a big way. The
support of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis and robocalls from hate
groups must not have hurt Trump — and may have helped him.
Trump’s
“law and order” stance towards blacks and Latino
communities besieged by police violence, his incitement to violence
against Black Lives Matter protesters at his campaign rallies, and
calls among his supporters to lynch
journalists,
Hillary
Clinton and President Obama himself,
were part of that white supremacist narrative. So, too, was the call
to build the wall to keep out Mexicans, and the ban on Muslims
entering the country. We can pretend this was not the case, that
whites were angry primarily over economic issues and Obamacare,
and that this was not a backlash against a black president and a
rising tide of multiculturalism.
–‘Blaxit’:
Trump’s election intensifies talks of a black exodus–
The
“Blue Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter”
crowd — who want more stop and frisk, more prison cells for
black
men,
more police violence and more dead black bodies riddled with cop
bullets lying by the side of the road — have emerged
victorious, in a repudiation of civil rights and racial justice for
the most vulnerable and disenfranchised. Those who want to end voting
rights for people of color, and believe we have too many rights in
general, have been heard.
Moreover,
“Make America Great Again” is by its very nature a
nightmare for black America, because America never was a great place
for us. Meanwhile, there are many whites who long for the day when
African-Americans were relegated to the cotton fields or the big
house — or hanging from a Poplar tree.
White
skin solidarity won the election for Donald Trump, allowing a
mediocre white man — a bully and misogynist, a carnival barker
and a circus side show act, operating in the gutter and peddling
trash — to become the most powerful individual in the nation
and the world. This is white America’s cruel gift to the rest
of us that will keep on giving for generations to come.
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