Progress on Race?

The election of Donald Trump signifies many things, some of them obvious, some less so and a few cause for hope.

Certainly, it’s a rejection of the Biden Administration’s policies of loose money, high inflation and practically unlimited immigration. That’s what voters told exit pollsters and there’s no reason not to believe them.

It’s an embrace of the real, however disconcerting, over the fake and carefully-scripted. Voters preferred Trump’s natural style of talking, his off-the-cuff manner including his apparent indifference to how he phrases things, to the focus-group approach favored by so many, including his opponent. Kamala Harris’ handlers plainly didn’t trust her to utter an extemporaneous syllable.

And, as more than one poll revealed, it’s a rejection of woke values. Only the tiniest sliver of the electorate believe that the country is irretrievably racist, that women should compete against men in sports, that children should choose their sex, that everyone should choose “their pronouns,” that words are violence, that actual violence is just free expression, that a peaceful well-ordered society has few or no police, etc. Progressive Democrats invited us to ignore what we know and embrace a panoply of loony notions and, naturally, we declined.

Trump’s election also rejects the ubiquitous portrayal of men and masculinity as the root of all societal problems, somehow both a fearsome threat and childish incompetence at the same time. Tim Walz was supposed to be the antidote to all that “toxic masculinity,” but we refused to choke down the snake oil.

All that adds up to a victory by the many over the few in government, finance, education and the press who’ve been peddling those messages. As I said here, that is unambiguously a good thing, democracy in action, a broad-based corrective to the extremism of elites. Democracy worked.

Now consider an additional possibility that may be of even greater importance. What if race is finally losing its hold on black Americans. What if this year’s election – a watershed in many areas – turns out to be a landmark on the road to a colorblind America. What if black voters are stepping beyond race.

They had the opportunity to do what they usually do – vote for a Democrat. And yet, as never before in modern times, black voters chose a Republican - a white male Republican. Yes, the great majority of them voted Democrat, but what had previously been a 90:10 ratio became 80:20 and in a year in which they had the choice of a woman of color. That alone is a major change.

Will it continue? Very possibly.

After all, it was younger blacks who were more likely to vote Republican than previously. About three in 10 black males under the age of 44 did so, suggesting a trend that can continue. Simple attrition means that older black voters will be less and less of a factor as time goes on, while younger ones will remain. Donald Trump has remade the GOP into the party of everyday Americans and more black voters noticed than ever.

If that turns out to be a trend, its importance won’t be confined to electoral politics. It may presage the sidelining of race in black lives and consciousness. Identity politics, identity awareness, at least among black Americans, may finally be on its way out. All those blacks voted for Trump for reasons they have in common with non-black voters – immigration, inflation, crime and the woke sub-culture.

That powerful identification with race stems from hundreds of years of oppression and discrimination based on it. Oppression based on any particular trait always tends to give the trait outsized importance to those against whom it is directed. It becomes the defining characteristic of the group to its members, to those outside the group and even in the law that governs society generally. For those in the group, it provides a sense of safety, community, belonging. Language often develops in unique ways within the group that further buttresses in-group identification. And a particular group culture – art, music, dress, religious observances, etc. – likely blossoms. Group identity begins as survival and becomes being itself.

So, for hundreds of years, black Americans have strongly identified with their race in ways white Americans have not. That’s why, when clueless whites indignantly ask “why is everything about race for blacks?” blacks stare in unbelief. The gulf between white and black awareness of race is a matter of their differing experiences. A black acquaintance of mine once said to me “race is like a gas in a room,” meaning it permeates everything, is inescapable. That was utterly untrue for me, but, for him, and many black Americans, it is the reality of race.

Hear the outgoing Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison:

Invoking his status as a black man, he remarked: “That is my identity… it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.”

And yet, many are, many more than just four years ago. And many, like the veteran observer of race in the U.S., Shelby Steele, see that as a good sign.

[H]e said that if the link between skin color and political preference is severing—if more blacks are starting to vote based on something other than racial identity—“I think it’s progress because it’s breaking up this idea that race is in itself meaningful, that it has some truth to deliver in political contests.”

We spent centuries defining Americans by race. Starting in the 60s, we reversed course, but continued defining Americans by race, only in different ways. Are we now ready to accept Dr. King’s vision of a race-free society? Perhaps we are.

If the black Trump vote indicates a departure from race as the key factor for black Americans in politics, then we as a nation may also be taking a great step away from race, period. And those who cling to it, like Jaime Harrison, may discover they’ve painted themselves into a corner and find themselves immobile, gazing out at a nation passing them by.