"At the heart of American politics there is racism,” writes George Packer. “But it’s not alone—there’s also greed, and broken communities, and partisan hatred, and ignorance.”
As someone who is not from the United States but has nonetheless been a spectator of American politics, I have to agree. Disgracefully, many anti-values have taken over American politics. The result is the hostile political ambient America witnesses on a daily basis. Ultimately, it is not one particular problem but the complex interaction of many that produces the ethically decaying political atmosphere in the US. One of the most concerning aspects of this scene relates to a nuance within the dynamics of political debate: the practice of belittling certain causes while overly emphasizing others when it comes to the understanding of the current political prospect.
The problem with such a practice lies on the fact that in the process of augmenting the importance of one cause and deeming others as less important – in several cases without even intending to do so– the resultant effect is negative. Stressing one issue as problematic while relegating others to a second plane entails creating, for the overlooked causes, the very same lack of recognition that they are striving to tackle through overt emphasis.
This occurs on a daily basis, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The First White President” is almost a paradigmatic case that sheds significant light onto this problem. The awe-inspiring article shows Ta-Nehisi Coates at his best. The resilience and resolve that his prose evokes build up the case for the racial issues that Donald Trump’s administration has thus far displayed. In fact, Coates seeks not only to address racism against the African American population, but also to stress how “white tribalism” dismisses other important issues that affect other minorities –xenophobia, gender inequality, and so on. But, when Coates claims “white tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers” and charges against Packer, he begins to go in the wrong direction. Packer’s further response to Coates proves this as it weakens the latter’s case.
Coates dissects fragments of one of Packers’ essays to avail himself in the construction of the idea of the endemic nature of white identity within political debate and its subsequent “sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don’t share a kinship with white men.” Before turning against Packer, he uses Bernie Sanders to brilliantly point out at the ideological schizophrenia that many prominent figures showcase whenever they conveniently dismiss identity politics but invoke them when it comes to using them in favor of their interests.
“I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.” –Bernie Sanders
“It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough … One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.” –Bernie Sanders
However, when Coates turns to Packer, he does so through the wrong lens. Bernie Sanders did have a double standard, but the truth is Packer doesn’t –not even if the essay Coates is criticizing was about the white working class. This renders one of Coates’ case main arguments a paradox because while attempting to create awareness on racial issues, he downplays other problems that were seen far more frequently within the context of consideration: Trump’s election.
Coates’ paradox emerges from fundamental mistakes like placing xenophobia under the umbrella of racism; from the misreading of the importance of misogyny and sexism on Clinton's defeat; and the double-thinking present in the idea “all politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.” –an idea similar to the Orwellian idea “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Is it not true that the United States is a nation with an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous population and that therefore every collectivity ought to be equally recognized? It would be stupid to ignore the historical precedent of the unimaginable suffering that pluralities faced because of white privilege. However, at a time in which America has the calling to leave behind any social and political dynamics that downplay the interests of any other collectivity and resemble in any way those that achieved that same result in the past with painful success, an idea like Coates’ is out of order.
"When you construct an entire teleology on one cause—even a cause as powerful and abiding as white racism—you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates the thesis. So Coates minimizes sexism—Trump’s disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) (...) Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even mention the estimated eight and a half million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump—even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban-rural divide is a sham."
This article’s purpose is not to suggest why Coates is wrong and Packer isn’t but to underscore that when it comes to the discussion of issues that involve anyone’s rights, no debate precedes another in relevance. It might very well be that under specific contexts some issues have a greater incidence than others, but not under any circumstance will that mean a problem's repercussion is more important than others. The discussion on racism is paramount but so are those on gender inequality, xenophobia, economic inequality and so on. The significance of any debate and its role in shaping today’s world will never excuse downplaying or overlooking others. In fact, recognizing the multiple causes behind today’s political panorama is our duty for it not only offers an in-depth understanding of America’s socio-political challenges but also serves to streamline the political rhetoric so that the tackling of such issues becomes all the more efficient.