Oatmeal's Read of the Week

[oats]

even though I said I'd try to avoid overtly political pieces, the article I chose this week is a worthy exception:

"The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...coates/537909/

Took me 3 days to read it, as it's long and broken up into 3 parts. But this is a powerful piece of analysis, tackling head-on the whiteness of Trump's rise to power. It doesn't linger on the racism of Trump for long, more like it gets it out of the way at the beginning and goes on to explain the how and the why, but it spends a lot of time taking aim at liberals who try to explain away the heavy white support of Trump as something else:

"Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president."