Black Trump Supporters Are Actually White, According to WaPo Op-Ed

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A Washington Post op-ed has raised some eyebrows by arguing that President Donald Trump’s nonwhite supporters are, in a sense, actually white.

The argument: The writer of the Friday opinion article, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán, acknowledges that not all of Trump’s supporters are white in the conventional sense.

  • Beltrán notes that two of the most diehard pro-Trump activists and several of the protesters who allegedly stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to contest the president’s’ election loss are black or Latino.
  • She also points out the “unsettling” reality that a quarter to a third of Latino voters supported Trump in the 2020 election, according to exit polls.

These facts, Beltrán concedes, complicate the stereotype of Trump’s political base as “a homogenous white mob.”

  • But she has a solution for the apparent paradox: an idea she came up with called “multiracial whiteness.”
  • According to Beltrán, multiracial whiteness is not about racial identity, but rather “a political color” that unites both the president’s white and nonwhite supporters:

In the politics of multiracial whiteness, anyone can join the MAGA movement and engage in the wild freedom of unbridled rage and conspiracy theories.

Multiracial whiteness offers citizens of every background the freedom to call Muslims terrorists, demand that undocumented immigrants be rounded up and deported, deride BLM as a movement of thugs and criminals, and accuse Democrats of being blood-drinking pedophiles.

Here, the politics of exclusion, violence and demonization are available to all. If you want to speak Spanish and celebrate a quinceañera in your family, go ahead. If you want to be a Proud Boy, be a Proud Boy. Trump doesn’t care. As long as you love him, he’ll love you.

What exactly makes this brand of politics — which is by definition racially inclusive — white in a bad way?

  • According to Beltrán, the answer is historical racism — specifically, “America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness.”

The reaction: Many Twitter commentators on the right, along with a few on the left, have countered that Beltrán is the racist.

Tom Elliot, the conservative founding editor of Grabien Media, also accused her of desperately trying to justify the narrative that the MAGA movement is a form of white supremacy.

Jesse Singal, a liberal journalist who is critical of progressive identity politics, called Beltrán’s op-ed “the natural endpoint of ‘Everything I don’t like it Whiteness.'”

Parody account Titania McGrath declared, “As a white person of colour, I am extremely worried about the rise of black whiteness.”

An easy fix: One upside to Beltrán’s thinking, though, is that unlike practitioners of the ascendant ideology of critical race theory, she leaves room for white redemption

  • White people can opt out of “multiracial whiteness” simply by voting for Democrats, as many did in Georgia’s recent Senate runoffs.

“This is the hopeful side of the shifting and diverging politics of whiteness,” Beltrán concludes the op-ed.

  • “In the post-Trump era, the challenge will be to prevail over the extremism of Trump’s White majority while trying to prevent the politics of whiteness from becoming an increasingly multiracial affair.”
By We'll Do It Live