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Has the internet simply allowed us to see the full extent of racism in society? Or does it exaggerate problems of racial inequality/discrimination that have been slowly improving over recent decades?

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The foundation of Donald Trump's presidency is the negation of Barack Obama's legacy.

Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump's predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness-that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump's forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America's founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump-a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

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His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against "lazy" black employees. "Black guys counting my money! I hate it," Trump was once quoted as saying. "The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president's college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true-his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican "rapists," only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump's rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as "cucks." The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy-the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one's profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent's email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of "the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history."

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards-and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump's contentious claim that "both sides" were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a "piece of ass." The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape ("When you're a star, they let you do it"), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy-to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump's counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. 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.

The scope of Trump's commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. We are now being told that support for Trump's "Muslim ban," his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham's America and Jeff Foxworthy's. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history's greatest monster and prime-time television's biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.

"We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them," the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker, speaking of the white working class. "The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck-that won't give you any problems in Manhattan."

"The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes," charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, "is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we're seeing now."

That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump's racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump's bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

Asserting that Trump's rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that "people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity" were "somewhat more likely to support Trump." But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were "less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time" than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: "The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support."

An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump's white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump's dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18-29 (+4), 30-44 (+17), 45-64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt's New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump's white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton's did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump's performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.

Part of Trump's dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump's share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney's in 2012. But unlike Romney, Trump secured this support by running against his party's leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump's approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.

The focus on one subsector of Trump voters-the white working class-is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump's presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony-even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president-is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country's political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.

This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States-and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage-the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th century, the country's master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class "expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery," according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. "They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or 'negers' or 'negurs.' "

Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her "master" was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a "master" and thus was a "sarvant" but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. "None but negers are sarvants," the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the "help" (or the "freemen," or the white workers) and the "servants" (the "negers," the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor-much as the honor accorded a "virtuous lady" was dependent on the derision directed at a "loose woman." And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the "whore," planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.

And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery intellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites' labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks' labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as "cannibals," feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were " 'slaves without masters;' the little fish, who were food for all the larger." Fitzhugh inveighed against a "professional man" who'd "amassed a fortune" by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The slaveholder "provided for them, with almost parental affection"-even when the loafing slave "feigned to be unfit for labor." Fitzhugh proved too explicit-going so far as to argue that white laborers might be better off if enslaved. ("If white slavery be morally wrong," he wrote, "the Bible cannot be true.") Nevertheless, the argument that America's original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists-"white slavery"-proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America's aristocratic class.

This is by design. Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:

I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community ... It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race-the descendants of Ham.

Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim of emerging capitalism. "I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery," the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued in a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. "This was before I saw that there was white slavery." Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he asserted that "the landless white" was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least enjoyed "surety of support in sickness and old age."

Invokers of "white slavery" held that there was nothing unique in the enslavement of blacks when measured against the enslavement of all workers. What evil there was in enslavement resulted from its status as a subsidiary of the broader exploitation better seen among the country's noble laboring whites. Once the larger problem of white exploitation was solved, the dependent problem of black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps would fade away. Abolitionists focused on slavery were dismissed as "substitutionists" who wished to trade one form of slavery for another. "If I am less troubled concerning the Slavery prevalent in Charleston or New-Orleans," wrote the reformer Horace Greeley, "it is because I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my first efforts."

Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the "white slavery" argument ridiculous. But its operating premises-white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else-lived on. This was a matter of rhetoric, not fact. The noble-white-labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself, break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, or bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America's original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price of even incremental gains for the white masses. It was this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would "raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt" and later endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.

The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the "working class" and the invalid and pathological interests of black Americans was not the province merely of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. The acclaimed scholar, liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for President Richard Nixon, approvingly quoted Nixon's formulation of the white working class: "A new voice" was beginning to make itself felt in the country. "It is a voice that has been silent too long," Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. "It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law."

It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago's Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was, working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863; terrorism could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every class of whites. Indeed, in the era of lynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common-white women. But to conceal the breadth of white racism, these racist outbursts were often disregarded or treated not as racism but as the unfortunate side effect of legitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.

When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana's seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious-that Duke had appealed to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating-and instead decided that something else was afoot. "There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn," a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. "These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them." By this logic, postwar America-with its booming economy and low unemployment-should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.

But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists that a large swath of Louisiana's white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation's capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of "negers." "A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis," David Roediger, the University of Kansas professor, has written.

That challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imagined white working class remains central to our politics and to our cultural understanding of those politics, not simply when it comes to addressing broad economic issues but also when it comes to addressing racism. At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that most Americans-regardless of race-are exploited by an unfettered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which benefits everyone. "These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts," Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006:

Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.

Obama allowed that "blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends"-but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion-raceless antiracism-marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton acknowledged the existence of systemic racism more explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to-black voters remembered too well the previous Clinton administration, as well as her previous campaign. While her husband's administration had touted the rising-tide theory of economic growth, it did so while slashing welfare and getting "tough on crime," a phrase that stood for specific policies but also served as rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton from having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, she evoked the old dichotomy between white workers and loafing blacks, claiming to be the representative of "hardworking Americans, white Americans." By the end of the 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, her advisers were hoping someone would uncover an apocryphal "whitey tape," in which an angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton's presidential-reelection campaign in the mid-1990s, Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed the "super-predator" theory of William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. This theory cast "inner-city" children of that era as "almost completely unmoralized" and the font of "a new generation of street criminals ... the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known." The "baddest generation" did not become super-predators. But by 2016, they were young adults, many of whom judged Hillary Clinton's newfound consciousness to be lacking.

It's worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this "forgotten" young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans-the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.

Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that. And though much has been written about the distance between elites and "Real America," the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.

Joe Biden, then the vice president, last year:

"They're all the people I grew up with ... And they're not racist. They're not sexist."

Bernie Sanders, senator and former candidate for president, last year:

"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."

Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, in February of this year:

My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they're profoundly wrong, but please don't dismiss them as hateful bigots.

These claims of origin and fidelity are not merely elite defenses of an aggrieved class but also a sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don't share kinship with white men. "You can't eat equality," asserts Joe Biden-a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of a breadwinner. Within a week of Sanders lambasting Democrats for not speaking to "the people" where he "came from," he was making an example of a woman who dreamed of representing the people where she came from. Confronted with a young woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sanders responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: "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." The upshot-attacking one specimen of identity politics after having invoked another-was unfortunate.

Other Sanders appearances proved even more alarming. On MSNBC, he attributed Trump's success, in part, to his willingness to "not be politically correct." Sanders admitted that Trump had "said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old, same old political rhetoric." Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer Trump surely would have approved of. "What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested," Sanders explained. "And that's what you say rather than what's really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very, very powerful people."

This definition of political correctness was shocking coming from a politician of the left. But it matched a broader defense of Trump voters. "Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks," Sanders said later. "I don't agree." This is not exculpatory. Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.

One can, to some extent, understand politicians' embracing a self-serving identity politics. Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths. But journalists have no such excuse. Again and again in the past year, Nicholas Kristof could be found pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his old comrades in the white working class as bigots-even when their bigotry was evidenced in his own reporting. A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wondering why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they depend on. But the problem, according to Kristof 's interviewees, isn't Trump's attack on benefits so much as an attack on their benefits. "There's a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places," one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed: "Obama phones," the products of a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a long-standing government program into a scheme through which the then-president gave away free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn't shift his analysis based on this comment and, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked between parentheses, continues on as though it were never said.

Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much perturb Kristof. That is because his defenses of the innate goodness of Trump voters and of the innate goodness of the white working class are in fact defenses of neither. On the contrary, the white working class functions rhetorically not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.

Mark Lilla's New York Times essay " The End of Identity Liberalism," published not long after last year's election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into "a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity," which distorted liberalism's message "and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing." Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he says, and must look to the "pre-identity liberalism" of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era-flying home to Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would you know that the "pre-identity" liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist "solid South." The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla's essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics-the possibility of the first black president-that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. "Identity politics ... is largely expressive, not persuasive," Lilla claims. "Which is why it never wins elections-but can lose them." That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla's powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics-except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.

White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer's New Yorker essay "The Unconnected" is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on the white working class, a population that "has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban 'underclass.' " Packer believes that these ills, and the Democratic Party's failure to respond to them, explain much of Trump's rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers' views on "elites," much less their views on racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship to Trump differ from other workers' and other whites'.

That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this "working class" supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that "Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people-not white ones, anyway," he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren't the party of white people-working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.

Packer's essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not available. But it should not be surprising that a Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white voters, given that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties since the civil-rights era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia-a state that remained Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to Packer, a shift "that couldn't be attributed just to the politics of race." This is likely true-the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable "just to the politics of race." The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism; the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women; the civil-rights movement can't be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement, one that is small comfort to the people-black, Muslim, immigrant-who live under racism's boot.

The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of those-one in five-openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well?

But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer's essay. There's no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof, Packer is gentle with his subjects. When a woman "exploded" and told Packer, "I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can't eat French fries or Coca-Cola-no way," he sees this as a rebellion against "the moral superiority of elites." In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when the government first began advising Americans on their diets. As recently as 2002, President George W. Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that similar advice now came from the country's first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country "more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember," a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian's home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.

The triumph of Trump's campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country's thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The implications-that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun's aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures-were just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion-the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America's hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.

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Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of "rising professionals and diversity." The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party "a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity." The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as "diversity." It's worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of "diversity"-resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches "no excuses" to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives "too big to jail." That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as "diversity" simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.

When Barack Obama came into office, in 2009, he believed that he could work with "sensible" conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP's primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a "one-term president." A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama, suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump's genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favored nominee of the other.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters," Trump bragged in January 2016. This statement should be met with only a modicum of skepticism. Trump has mocked the disabled, withstood multiple accusations of sexual violence (all of which he has denied), fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed those lies by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump-to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent's father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and then successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.

But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where "necessary conditions" and an "existing background" were present. In America, that "existing background" was a persistent racism, and the "necessary condition" was a black president. The two related factors hobbled America's ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administration to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs-the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal-to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab 'em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, "If a black man can be president, then any white man-no matter how fallen-can be president." And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off "moderate" whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump's legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance-and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility-doing a much more effective job than Trump.

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was "singularly disastrous for modern civilization" or James Baldwin claims that whites "have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white," the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president-and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.
This essay is drawn from Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book, We Were Eight Years in Power.

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The foundation of Donald Trump's presidency is the negation of Barack Obama's legacy. It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact.

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Comic Relief and the 'White Saviour' debate

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Comic Relief and the 'White Saviour' debate

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Stacey Dooley has become embroiled in a row with a Labour MP after he accused her of being a "white saviour" because she posted pictures from Uganda, where she was raising money for Comic Relief.

The Strictly Come Dancing star hit back, asking David Lammy whether he would go to Africa to raise awareness instead of her.

Dooley is one of many celebrities, including Ed Sheeran, David Baddiel and Reggie Yates, who has made the trip to Africa for Comic Relief in recent years.

In one Instagram post, the BBC presenter is seen posing with a young Ugandan child, along with the caption "OB.SESSSSSSSSSSED" and a picture of a broken heart.

Lammy, MP for Tottenham tweeted: "The world does not need any more...

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Stacey Dooley in row with David Lammy over Comic Relief 'white saviour' photograph

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Stacey Dooley has become embroiled in a row with a Labour MP after he accused her of being a "white saviour" because she posted pictures from Uganda, where she was raising money for Comic Relief. The Strictly Come Dancing star hit back, asking David Lammy whether he would go to Africa to raise awareness instead of her.

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Law professor Kimberle Crenshaw speaks on intersectionality (race, gender, class) and identity.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality

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Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both.

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Jane Elliott's brown eyes blue eyes social experiment

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Jane Elliott's brown eyes blue eyes social experiment

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Racism can only be truly understood through experience.

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The Anti-Racism Experiment That Transformed an Oprah Show Audience | Where Are They Now | OWN

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Django Unchained from Christian's lecture

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Django Unchained from Christian's lecture

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DJANGO UNCHAINED- DICAPRIO GOES CRAZY(SPOILER ALLERT)

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Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown University, and author of "Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America," reveals what a lot of people get wrong about Martin Luther King Jr. Towards the end of King's life, he became more radical and eager to challenge the notion that America was a racially blind country. Following is a transcript of the video.

When you think about it, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been severely whitewashed. What I mean by that is that we have completely denied the legitimate radical elements of Martin Luther King Jr.'s image, identity, and ideas. We have frozen him in 1963, where he delivered one of the most remarkable speeches in American history, the "I Have a Dream" speech that captured the moral aspiration of King but many people have frozen him there, as if he believed that was an achievement, not an aspiration. As if we had already in America come to a point where we were no longer judging people by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Now many conservative white brothers and sisters and many radical right-wingers of all races have attempted to distort Martin Luther King Jr's memory, to whitewash him of the social context of his racial ideas. Furthermore, Martin Luther King Jr. was far more radical at the end of his life. Martin Luther King Jr. had more than one speech. Like a great singer, he had more than one album, one great hit. And so "I Have a Dream is a great hit, is a great song, is a great if you will, part of his legacy.

But he delivered other speeches. He said I saw my dream turn into a nightmare in another speech. He talked about the violence in American society and the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of black people. He talked about riots as the language of the unheard. He spoke to America the day before he was murdered and said, "America, all we ask is that you be true to what you said on paper." He also began to say that most Americans were unconscious racists. He began to challenge the notion that America was a racially blind, racially neutral country and he began to argue that many Americans would not come to grips with their own racist beliefs, ideas, and practices.

That's a much more radical Martin Luther King Jr. than we're used to talking about and listening to, and only when we recover that King, will we recover the full dimension of his radical, if you will, position in America letters and certainly in American leadership culture.EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published on May 30, 2017.

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A Georgetown professor explains how Martin Luther King Jr. 'has been severely whitewashed'

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Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown University, and author of "Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America," reveals what a lot of people get wrong about Martin Luther King Jr. Towards the end of King's life, he became more radical and eager to challenge the notion that America was a racially blind country.

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In 1701, Daniel DeFoe ridicules the notion of English racial purity

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Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

That het'rogeneous thing, an Englishman:

In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,

Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.

Whose gend'ring off-spring quickly learn'd to bow,

And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:

From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,

With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.

In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,

Infus'd betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.

While their rank daughters, to their parents just,

Receiv'd all nations with promiscuous lust.

This nauseous brood directly did contain

The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.

Which medly canton'd in a heptarchy,

A rhapsody of nations to supply,

Among themselves maintain'd eternal wars,

And still the ladies lov'd the conquerors.

The western Angles all the rest subdu'd;

A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:

Who by the tenure of the sword possest

One part of Britain, and subdu'd the rest

And as great things denominate the small,

The conqu'ring part gave title to the whole.

The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,

And with the English-Saxon all unite:

And these the mixture have so close pursu'd,

The very name and memory's subdu'd:

No Roman now, no Britain does remain;

Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:

The silent nations undistinguish'd fall,

And Englishman's the common name for all.

Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;

What e'er they were they're true-born English now.

The wonder which remains is at our pride,

To value that which all wise men deride.

For Englishmen to boast of generation,

Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.

A true-born Englishman's a contradiction,

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

A banter made to be a test of fools,

Which those that use it justly ridicules.

A metaphor invented to express

A man a-kin to all the universe.

For as the Scots, as learned men ha' said,

Throughout the world their wand'ring seed ha' spread;

So open-handed England, 'tis believ'd,

Has all the gleanings of the world receiv'd.

Some think of England 'twas our Saviour meant,

The Gospel should to all the world be sent:

Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach,

They to all nations might be said to preach.

'Tis well that virtue gives nobility,

How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?

Since scarce one family is left alive,

Which does not from some foreigner derive.

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from The True Born Englishman by Daniel Defoe | Poetry Foundation

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Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het'rogeneous thing, an Englishman: In eager rapes, and furious lust begot, Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot. Whose gend'ring off-spring quickly learn'd to bow, And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough: From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.

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Would 'privilege' be the same in the UK as in the US?

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Would 'privilege' be the same in the UK as in the US?

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Social Inequalities Explained in a $100 Race - Please Watch to the End. Thanks.

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Race is no longer the problem the issue it once was. We have more people from BME backgrounds than ever in professional employment, in education, in politics, as role models, actors, athletes, artists, writers. It is slow progress but it is happening.

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Celebrated poet Benjamin Zephaniah has questioned the value of Black History Month in schools.

Speaking to TES columnist Tom Bennett, the writer, campaigner and poet described the event as an "excuse" that allowed people to "dump" all of black history into just one month.

"I actually don't think schools should have a Black History Month," Zephaniah told Bennett. "[But] we need one now because black history is not an integral part of the history we get taught in schools. If we didn't have Black History Month, we wouldn't have any black history.

"People use BHM as an excuse to dump everything there and try and get everything done in a month. It's not possible. I think the history of black people is a massive thing that's bigger than African history, that's bigger than Caribbean history. You could never teach all of it, just like you could never teach all of the history of white people."

Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman previously denounced BHM for another reason. "You're going to relegate my history to a month?" he said. "I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history."

Zephaniah agreed. "Black history is almost sold as if it's something to help black kids, to give them self-esteem," he said. "I can see the point, but it's just as important for white people, because some people will have a very narrow view of what black history is...When we talk about slavery, we talk about the slaves being given freedom, as if we were born slaves and we didn't have a long history before slavery; we weren't human beings."
To read more from Tom Bennett's interview with Benjamin Zephaniah, subscribe and read TES on your tablet or phone, or download the TES Reader app for Android or iOS. Or pick it up at all good newsagents.

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Benjamin Zephaniah questions the value of Black History Month

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Celebrated poet Benjamin Zephaniah has questioned the value of Black History Month in schools. Speaking to TES columnist Tom Bennett, the writer, campaigner and poet described the event as an "excuse" that allowed people to "dump" all of black history into just one month.

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Look at one reviewer's response to Afua Hirsch's book 'Brit(ish): Race, Identity and Belonging' - what do this reviewer's comments say about racism in Britain?

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This is one of the nastiest & most bitter reviews of any book I’ve ever read. Unhappily for author it effectively confirms my point- the prejudice & hostility that still exists in this country towards ppl like me who dare to regard our voice as legitimate https://t.co/l6Is94OrGM

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This is one of the nastiest & most bitter reviews of any book I’ve ever read. Unhappily for author it effectively confirms my point- the prejudice & hostility that still exists in this country towards ppl like me who dare to regard our voice as legitimate https://t.co/l6Is94OrGM https://t.co/4pUrqWf9Ya

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This is one of the nastiest & most bitter reviews of any book I’ve ever read. Unhappily for author it effectively confirms my point- the prejudice & hostility that still exists in this country towards ppl like me who dare to regard our voice as legitimate https://t.co/l6Is94OrGM pic.twitter.com/4pUrqWf9Ya
— Afua Hirsch (@afuahirsch) January 27, 2018

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This is one of the nastiest & most bitter reviews of any book I’ve ever read. Unhappily for author it effectively confirms my point- the prejudice & hostility that still exists in this country towards ppl like me who dare to regard our voice as legitimate https://t.co/l6Is94OrGM https://t.co/4pUrqWf9Ya

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
This is one of the nastiest & most bitter reviews of any book I’ve ever read. Unhappily for author it effectively confirms my point- the prejudice & hostility that still exists in this country towards ppl like me who dare to regard our voice as legitimate https://t.co/l6Is94OrGM https://t.co/4pUrqWf9Ya

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
This is one of the nastiest & most bitter reviews of any book I’ve ever read. Unhappily for author it effectively confirms my point- the prejudice & hostility that still exists in this country towards ppl like me who dare to regard our voice as legitimate https://t.co/l6Is94OrGM

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Boris Johnson’s white privilege: imagine he was a black woman

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To the outside world, Boris Johnson has become a faithful representation of Britain's current foreign policy. Chaotic, implausible, blustering and incompetent, he is an honest reflection of the government's strategic vision of Britain's place in the world at this moment. At home he is an exemplar of an altogether different dysfunction.

That he was made the nation's chief diplomat - a fact greeted with a mixture of mirth and disbelief by allies and foes alike - and remains in the job, clearly illustrates how the privileges of gender, race and class consciously accrued, fiercely protected and gratefully inherited, can promote incompetence, elevate arrogance and exclude alternatives. His trajectory illustrates the way that wealth, connections and cultural complicity conspire, in ways both clear and concealed, to ensure that to those who are already born with a great deal even more will be given.

If there are any doubts on that score just imagine, for a moment, that Johnson had been born black and female.

If Johnson were a black woman he would not have gone to Eton. Eton doesn't allow women. But even if it did, since black women are far more likely to be working class than most, they would be far less likely to go to Eton than most. And if Johnson had not gone to Eton but an inner-city state school, which is where most black women are educated, he would have been far, far less likely to go to the University of Oxford. Nearly one in three Oxford colleges failed to admit a single black British A-level student in 2015. For a black British woman to get a place in 1983, when Johnson started at Oxford, she would have had to have been extraordinary. (There are more former presidents of the Oxford Union, Johnson included, than there are minorities in cabinet.)

Black women are not generally indulged with second chances like that

And even if Johnson had been that extraordinary, when he got to Oxford he would not have been able to join the Bullingdon Club - the dining club notorious for its vandalism, where lifelong connections to sustain his political career were made - because it was male-only.

If Johnson were a black woman he would not have got an internship at the Times thanks to a family connection because, as a black woman, he'd almost certainly have no family connection at the Times (or any national newspaper) who could have made that happen in the late 80s.

And after Johnson was fired from that internship for making up quotes, he would not have been given a job with the Telegraph's leader-writing team. First of all, because black women are not generally indulged with second chances like that. Their successes are understood individually ("she's one of a kind") but their failures are misunderstood collectively ("they're just not up to it"). A transgression of that nature would be followed by much handwringing about affirmative action and "politically correct appointments".

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Boris Johnson in 1999. Photograph: David Hartley/Rex Features

But secondly because it's unlikely there's ever been a black woman on the Telegraph leader-writing team. Similarly he would not have been able to write a column for the Telegraph because there isn't a black political columnist, male or female, on the Telegraph newspaper and, to my knowledge, there never has been. (The Telegraph did not respond to inquiries.)

And if, as a black woman, Johnson did occupy such a space, he would not be able to use it to write about men the way he has written about women. In 1996, Johnson went to the Labour party conference to survey the "hot totty" on his "Tottymeter". Some years later, when quitting editorship of the Spectator, he advised his successor to "pat [the magazine's publisher] on the bottom and send her on her way" if she came up with any circulation-boosting suggestions.

Nor would a black woman have been able to write about white people the way Johnson has written about black people. In a Telegraph column in 2002, he claimed the Queen enjoyed being greeted on Commonwealth tours by "flag-waving piccaninnies" and "watermelon smiles". Only when he was running for London mayor, six years later, did he apologise. Black women do not get to denigrate men or white people in this way while advancing through the political ranks.

If Johnson were a black woman he would not have become popularly known as the boisterous panellist on the current affairs comedy quiz Have I Got News For You, because over the past 15 years you could count the number of black women who appeared on the show on one hand. (I know of Diane Abbott and Moira Stuart but beyond that the BBC, like the Telegraph on its leader writers, did not have available figures.)

If Johnson were a black woman, the complications in his personal life ( three affairs and one love child, and on his second marriage) would not be considered a personal matter, as they should be. (Johnson was dismissed as shadow arts spokesman in 2004 after revelations about one affair; but that was because he allegedly misled the Tory leader Michael Howard about it. Three years later he was back, as the Tory candidate for London mayor.) Female politicians at this level do not get to ride out infidelity. And given the stereotypes about black female sexuality, they would be automatically career-ending.

If Johnson were a black women, the mop-haired, bumbling oafish, roguish shtick he has curated over the years would not be an option. Black women do not get to make light of their gaffe-making, impulsive remarks or off-colour comments. They do not get to have bad days. Anything short of exemplary personal behaviour from a senior black woman would result in public retribution and humiliation. Johnson would not be simply be an object of ridicule but the target for violent and bigoted attacks. He would receive more online abuse than any other white MP, male or female.

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Boris Johnson recites a Kipling poem at a temple in Yangon last Semptember. Photograph: ITN

We have no control over who we are; as such Johnson does not have to apologise for who he is. But as a public figure he does have to answer for what he does.

He cannot help that he was born rich, white and male. But being a rich, white man has certainly helped him. He has been afforded every privilege that his race, sex and class could provide. He has been given chances to come back from failure, which others would not be granted. All of this would be important, but incidental, if he were any good at his job. But he's not.

If he were a black woman he would not be insulting the people of Myanmar with a Rudyard Kipling poem, the Italians over prosecco exports or the Irish over the border, because he'd never have got the job.

If Johnson were a black woman, he'd have to be totally beyond reproach or he'd long since be finished. And since he cannot be better, we should finish with him.

* Gary Younge is editor-at-large for the Guardian
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Boris Johnson's white privilege: imagine he was a black woman | Gary Younge

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To the outside world, Boris Johnson has become a faithful representation of Britain's current foreign policy. Chaotic, implausible, blustering and incompetent, he is an honest reflection of the government's strategic vision of Britain's place in the world at this moment. At home he is an exemplar of an altogether different dysfunction.

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I struggle with neoliberalism - as a problematic economic system we might want to change - and as an analytical term people increasingly use to describe that system.

I've been reading and writing about the concept for more than a decade. But the more I read, the more I think that neoliberalism is losing its analytical edge.

As a result of its growing popularity in academia, media and popular discussions, it's crucial to understand neoliberalism as a concept. We need to know its origins and its definition in order to understand our current political and economic mess, including the rise of nativism that played a part in Brexit and Donald Trump's election a year ago.

Neoliberalism is regularly used in popular debate around the world to define the last 40 years. It's used to refer to an economic system in which the "free" market is extended to every part of our public and personal worlds. The transformation of the state from a provider of public welfare to a promoter of markets and competition helps to enable this shift.

Neoliberalism is generally associated with policies like cutting trade tariffs and barriers. Its influence has liberalized the international movement of capital, and limited the power of trade unions. It's broken up state-owned enterprises, sold off public assets and generally opened up our lives to dominance by market thinking.

As a term, neoliberalism is increasingly used across popular media, including The New York Times, (of London) and The Daily Mail. It's also used within international institutions like the World Economic Forum, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Monetary Fund.

Neoliberalism a Trump antidote?

Neoliberalism is criticized for giving markets too much power over our lives. Yet in light of the rise of Donald Trump and other nativist, anti-trade populists, there is a growing chorus of people extolling the virtues of neoliberalism.

What's most evident from this growing popular debate about neoliberalism - whether from left-leaning critics or right-leaning advocates - is that there are many different views of neoliberalism; not just what it means politically, but just as critically, what it means analytically.

This raises an important question: How do we use a term like "neoliberalism" when so many people have such different understandings of what it means?

I wrestled with this question when writing my book, A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism, in which I examine the intellectual history of neoliberalism. I do so in order to examine the different conceptions of the term and to expose the contradictions underlying our daily use of it.

The term "neoliberalism" has a fascinating intellectual history. It appears as long ago as 1884 in an article by R.A. Armstrong for The Modern Review in which he defined liberals who promoted state intervention in the economy as "neo-liberal" - almost the exact opposite meaning from its popular and academic use today.

Another early appearance is in an 1898 article for The Economic Journal by Charles Gide in which he used the term to refer to an Italian economist, Maffeo Pantaleoni, who argued that we need to promote a "hedonistic world ... in which free competition will reign absolutely" - somewhat closer to our current conception.

Adopted by liberal thinkers

As the 20th century dawned and the world moved through one World War and onto the next, the term was appropriated by a range of liberal thinkers who felt sidelined by the ascendance of state planning and socialism.

The conventional narrative is that "neo-liberalism" was first proposed as a term to describe a rebooted liberalism in the 1930s after the so-called Walter Lippman Colloquium held in Paris in 1938.

However, its history is not as clear cut as this narrative might imply. According to Arnaud Brennetot, for example, the term was subsequently mainly used to refer to French and other liberals associated with a publishing house called La Libraire de Medicis at least until the early 1950s. By then, the term was increasingly used to refer to German Ordoliberalism, which was a "neoliberal" school based on the idea that markets need a strong state in order to protect competition - ideas that are a major forerunner of the European Union's framework conditions.

Famously, Milton Friedman even referred to himself as a "neoliberal" in a 1951 article for the Norwegian magazine , although he subsequently dropped the term.

By the 1970s, Brennetot and others argued that neoliberalism was a term primarily associated with a shifting emphasis in Latin America away from import-substitution policies towards open economies, influenced by Chicago School thinkers like Friedman.

It was around this time that neoliberalism increasingly took on negative overtones, especially after the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende's government in Chile in 1973. As the 1980s dawned, along with the generally accepted birth of the modern neoliberal era, the term "neoliberalism" became indelibly linked to the Chicago School of Economics (as well as Law and Business).

Neoliberalism has several 'schools'

When we use the term today, it's generally with this Chicago inflection, rather than its other previous and alternative histories and associations.

But it's important to remember that there were and are at least seven schools of neoliberalism. Some of the older schools, like the First Chicago School (of Frank Knight, Henry Simons, Jacob Viner), disappeared or were subsumed in later schools - in this case, the Second Chicago School (of Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, George Stigler).

Other old schools, like the Italian or Bocconi School (of Maffeo Pantaleoni, Luigi Einaudi) faded into academia before being resurrected as the legitimization for current austerity policies. Other more marginal schools, like the Virginia School (of James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock) - itself influenced by the Italian school - have existed under the radar until recent critiques by historians like Nancy MacLean.

As these various schools of neoliberal thought have evolved and mutated over time, so too have our understandings of them and their influence on us. It's therefore tricky to identify neoliberalism with any one particular school of thought without missing out on a whole lot of the story.

Three contradictions

That's a major reason why I identify three core contradictions in our current understandings of neoliberalism in my new book.

First, too little has been done analytically to address the contradiction between the supposed extension of "free" markets under neoliberalism and the growth in market power and dominance of corporate entities and monopolies like Google and Microsoft.

Second, there has been too much emphasis on the idea that our lives, identities and subjectivities under neoliberalism are framed by "entrepreneurial" beliefs, attitudes and thinking.

In contrast, my view is that our lives, societies, and economies are dominated by diverse forms of rentiership - for example home ownership, intellectual property monopolies and market control. According to British academic Guy Standing, rentiership can be defined as the extraction of income from the "ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce."

Finally, there has been little interest in trying to understand the important role of contract and contract law - as opposed to "markets" - in the organization of neoliberal capitalism.

All these areas need addressing in order to better understand our future, but neoliberalism has perhaps run its course in providing us with the necessary analytical tools to do this work. It's time to find new ways to think about our world.

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I struggle with neoliberalism - as a problematic economic system we might want to change - and as an analytical term people increasingly use to describe that system. I've been reading and writing about the concept for more than a decade. But the more I read, the more I think that neoliberalism is losing its analytical edge.

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What can we learn about the way race is discussed/interpreted by looking the different responses to this movie?

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The Maison des Esclaves stands on the rocky shore of Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, like a great red tomb. During the years of its operation, the building served as a rendezvous point for slavers trafficking in a seemingly inexhaustible resource: Africans, whose very bodies became the wealth of white men. A portal known as the "Door of No Return," leading to the slave ships, offered the forlorn captives a last glimpse of home, before they were sown to the wind and sold in the West. For nearly four centuries, this traffic continued, seeding the populations of the Caribbean, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Central and North America, and draining societies of their prime populations while fomenting civil conflict among them in order to more effectively cull their people. On the high seas, the vessels jettisoned bodies in such terrible numbers that the poet Amiri Baraka once wrote, "At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there's a railroad made of human bones."

I visited Gorée Island in 2003, with a group of black academics, just days after George W. Bush had come to the island and offered platitudes about the cruelties of human history but stopped short of apologizing for the United States' role in the transatlantic slave trade. Residents of the island greeted us in the markets like long-lost kin. We repeatedly heard some version of "Welcome home, my black brothers and sisters!" But, later, over dinner, a Senegalese guide casually informed us that we were neither their siblings nor even distant kin to Africa, implying that the greetings in the market had been merely a clever sales tactic directed at gullible black Americans who travel to the continent in search of roots, as if they were abused foster kids futilely seeking their birth parents. "You are Americans. That is all," she said. This exchange took place fifteen years ago, but I can still recall the way her words hung in the air, like a guilty verdict. The policy of "No Return," she suggested, applied to distant descendants, too.

There is a fundamental dissonance in the term "African-American," two feuding ancestries conjoined by a hyphen. That dissonance-a hyphen standing in for the brutal history that intervened between Africa and America-is the subject of " Black Panther," Ryan Coogler's brilliant first installment of the story of Marvel Comics' landmark black character. "I have a lot of pain inside me," Coogler told an audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, on Wednesday night. "We were taught that we lost the things that made us African. We lost our culture, and now we have to make do with scraps." Black America is constituted overwhelmingly by the descendants of people who were not only brought to the country against their will but were later inducted into an ambivalent form of citizenship without their input. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to all those born here, supposedly resolved the question of the status of ex-slaves, though those four million individuals were not consulted in its ratification. The unspoken yield of this history is the possibility that the words "African" and "American" should not be joined by a hyphen but separated by an ellipsis.

Our sensibilities are accustomed to Marvel films offering clear lines of heroism and villainy, but "Black Panther" dispatches with its putative villain, Ulysses Klaue, a white South Africa-based arms dealer, halfway through the film. Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa, the Black Panther and the King of Wakanda, confronts Erik Killmonger, a black American mercenary, played by Michael B. Jordan, as a rival, but the two characters are essentially duelling responses to five centuries of African exploitation at the hands of the West. The villain, to the extent that the term applies, is history itself.

Wakanda is a technologically advanced kingdom in Central Africa that was never colonized by any Western power. T'Challa, the noble leader of an unvanquished people, upholds the isolationism that has always kept the kingdom safe; Killmonger, driven by the horrors that befell those who were stolen from the continent, envisions a world revolution, led by Wakanda, to upend the status quo. When Killmonger arrives there, after the death of King T'Chaka (the father of T'Challa), he sets in motion a reckoning not only with his rival but with broader questions of legitimacy, lineage, and connection. Black Panther, as Ryan Coogler pointed out in Brooklyn, has been an inherently political character since his inception, during the Black Power era of the nineteen-sixties. He is a refutation of the image of the lazy and false African, promulgated in the white world and subscribed to even by many in the black one. Coogler told Marvel up front that his version of the story would remain true to those political elements. It is shot through with the sense of longing and romance common to the way that people of a diaspora envision their distant homeland.

Like the comics on which they are based, the Marvel movies, in general, have not shied away from political concerns. " Captain America: The Winter Soldier," released in 2014, grapples with ideas of preëmptive warfare, drones, and the surveillance state, as elements of the war on terror. The first " Iron Man " film, from 2008, addressed war profiteering and arms contractors at a time when the United States was still heavily involved in Iraq.

Yet nothing in Marvel's collection of films is or could be political in the same way as "Black Panther," because, in those other stories, we were at least clear about where the lines of fantasy departed from reality. "Captain America" is a fantastic riff on the nation's idealism, filtered through the lens of the Second World War, a historic event whose particulars, however horrific and grandly inhumane, are not in dispute. "Black Panther," however, exists in an invented nation in Africa, a continent that has been grappling with invented versions of itself ever since white men first declared it the "dark continent" and set about plundering its people and its resources. This fantasy of Africa as a place bereft of history was politically useful, justifying imperialism. It found expression in the highest echelons of Western thought, and took on the contours of truth. In 1753, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, "I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and all other species of men . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any complexion other than white." Two centuries later, the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, "Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa."

Africa-or, rather, "Africa"-is a creation of a white world and the literary, academic, cinematic, and political mechanisms that it used to give mythology the credibility of truth. No such nation as Wakanda exists on the map of the continent, but that is entirely beside the point. Wakanda is no more or less imaginary than the Africa conjured by Hume or Trevor-Roper, or the one canonized in such Hollywood offerings as "Tarzan." It is a redemptive counter-mythology. Most filmmakers start by asking their audiences to suspend their disbelief. But, with Africa, Coogler begins with a subject about which the world had suspended its disbelief four centuries before he was born. The film is a nearly seamless dramatic chronicle of the threat created when Killmonger travels to the African nation he descends from. Yet some of the most compelling points in the story are those where the stitching is most apparent. Killmonger is a native of Oakland, California, where the Black Panther Party was born. (In an early scene, a poster of Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Party, hangs on a wall, next to a Public Enemy poster.) In an impeccably choreographed fight sequence, T'Challa and General Okoye, the leader of Wakanda's all-female militia (brilliantly played by Danai Gurira), alongside Nakia, a wily Wakandan spy (played by Lupita Nyong'o), confront a Boko Haram-like team of kidnappers. At the same time, it is all but impossible not to notice that Coogler has cast a black American, a Zimbabwean-American, and a Kenyan as a commando team in a film about African redemption. The cast also includes Winston Duke, who is West Indian; Daniel Kaluuya, a black Brit; and Florence Kasumba, a Ugandan-born German woman. The implicit statement in both the film's themes and its casting is that there is a connection, however vexed, tenuous, and complicated, among the continent's scattered descendants. Coogler said as much in Brooklyn, when he talked about a trip that he took to South Africa, as research for the film: after discovering cultural elements that reminded him of black communities in the United States, he concluded, "There's no way they could wipe out what we were for thousands of years. We're African."

There is a great deal more that differentiates "Black Panther" from other efforts in the superhero genre. The film is not about world domination by an alien invasion or a mad cabal of villains but about the implications of a version of Western domination that has been with us so long that it has become as ambient as the air. When Shuri, Wakanda's chief of technology and the irreverent younger sister of T'Challa, is startled by a white C.I.A. agent, she says, "Don't scare me like that, colonizer!" When I saw the movie, the audience howled at the inversion, "colonizer" deployed as an epithet rather than a badge of cultural superiority. In addition, Marvel has been criticized for failing to center a film on any of its female characters, but it is the female characters in "Black Panther" whose ideas and determinations dictate the terms on which the rivalry between the male protagonists plays out. T'Challa engages with his female counterparts as equals; Killmonger kills two women and assaults a third. Their political positions may be equally compelling; their ideas about gender are not.

Coogler's commentary on the literal tribalism of the African diaspora, his devotion to a glorious vision of Africa, and, most provocatively, his visceral telling of the pain of existing as an orphan of history-as seen in the story of Killmonger, whose separation from Africa is not simply historical but also paternal-is striking but not unique. The narrative of Africa as a tragic tabula rasa in world history exists in dialogue with another version, equally imaginary, but idealized, and authored by descendants of those Africans who passed through the Maison des Esclaves and the other structures like it. In 1896, after Ethiopian forces defeated an invading Italian army in the Battle of Adwa, black people across the globe celebrated the country as the last preserve on the continent free from the yoke of colonialism, and a sign of hope for the black world-the Wakanda of its day. In the nineteen-thirties, after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Depression-era black Americans and West Indians scraped together pennies to send to a country they had never visited to fund the resistance. In the late nineteenth century, the West Indian educator and diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden envisioned and promoted a kind of black Zionism, in which people of African descent in the West would return to work on behalf of African redemption. What Blyden, and what Marcus Garvey-a Jamaican who, in the nineteen-twenties, organized a global pan-Africanist effort to end European colonialism-and what the organizer Audley Moore and the scholar John Henrik Clarke, and what the entire lineage of that pan-African tradition insisted on was a kind of democracy of the imagination. If the subordination of Africa had begun in the minds of white people, its reclamation, they reasoned, would begin in the minds of black ones.

I understand this story intuitively and personally. In my twenties, I consumed volumes of African history and histories of the slave trade, seeking out answers to the same questions that Coogler asked in South Africa, a fugitive from the idea that I descend from a place with no discernible past. I dropped my given middle name and replaced it with an African one, in an effort to make transparent that sense of connection. On Gorée Island, I patiently listened to the guide's argument, before pointing out to her that we were conducting our conversation in English, in a building constructed by the French, in a country that had been a colony of France, and that the issue was not whether black Americans retained any connection to Africa but whether history had left anyone on the continent still in a position to pass judgment on that question. Superheroes are seldom tasked with this kind of existential lifting, but that work is inescapable in the questions surrounding Wakanda and the politics of even imagining such a place. Marvel has made a great many entertaining movies in the past decade, but Ryan Coogler has made a profound one.

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"Black Panther" and the Invention of "Africa"

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The Maison des Esclaves stands on the rocky shore of Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, like a great red tomb. During the years of its operation, the building served as a rendezvous point for slavers trafficking in a seemingly inexhaustible resource: Africans, whose very bodies became the wealth of white men.

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Why white people shouldn't use the N-word

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Why white people shouldn't use the N-word

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It's a question that comes up again and again in discussions of race: Why can't white people use the n-word, even as many black people use it, particularly in rap songs and other media?

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer at the Atlantic and author of We Were Eight Years in Power, has perhaps the best explanation I have ever heard on the topic, given during an event last month at Evanston Township High School in Illinois.

Coates first pointed out that it is normal in our culture for some people or groups to use certain words that others can't. For example, his wife calls him "honey"; it would not be acceptable, he said, for strange women to do the same. Similarly, his dad was known by his family back home as Billy - but it would be awkward for Coates to try to use that nickname for his father.

"That's because the relationship between myself and my dad is not the same as the relationship between my dad and his mother and his sisters who he grew up with," Coates said. "We understand that."

The same concept applies to different groups and their words. "My wife, with her girl friend, will use the word 'bitch,'" Coates said. "I do not join in. You know what I'm saying? I don't do that. I don't do that. And perhaps more importantly, I don't have a desire to do it."

Coates pointed to another example - of a white friend who used to have a cabin in upstate New York that he called "the white trash cabin." "I would never refer to that cabin" in that way, Coates said. "I would never tell him, 'I'm coming to your white trash cabin.'"

Coates added, "The question one must ask is why so many white people have difficulty extending things that are basic laws of how human beings interact to black people."

He gave a potential answer: "When you're white in this country, you're taught that everything belongs to you. You think you have a right to everything. ... You're conditioned this way. It's not because your hair is a texture or your skin is light. It's the fact that the laws and the culture tell you this. You have a right to go where you want to go, do what you want to do, be however - and people just got to accommodate themselves to you."

"So here comes this word that you feel like you invented," Coates said. "And now somebody will tell you how to use the word that you invented. 'Why can't I use it? Everyone else gets to use it. You know what? That's racism that I don't get to use it. You know, that's racist against me. You know, I have to inconvenience myself and hear this song and I can't sing along. How come I can't sing along?'"

Coates concluded that white people should use this sense as a lesson: "The experience of being a hip-hop fan and not being able to use the word 'ni**er' is actually very, very insightful. It will give you just a little peek into the world of what it means to be black. Because to be black is to walk through the world and watch people doing things that you cannot do, that you can't join in and do. So I think there's actually a lot to be learned from refraining."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates has an incredibly clear explanation for why white people shouldn't use the n-word

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He said that white people could learn something from not being able to use the word.

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Iowa

On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa Democrats selected Barack Obama over a white woman and a white man in the state's first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative. If voters in this overwhelmingly white, rural state could cast their ballots for a black man as president, then perhaps it was possible for the entire nation to do what had never been done; perhaps America had turned far enough away from its racist past that skin color was no longer a barrier to the highest office of the land. In the months that followed, as Obama racked up primary victories, not just in the expected cities but also in largely white Rust Belt towns and farming communities, it seemed evidence for many Americans that the nation had finally become "post-racial."

Of course, that post-racial dream did not last long, and nothing epitomizes the naïveté of that belief more than the election last week of Donald J. Trump. As I watched my home state of Iowa join the red flood that overtook the electoral map last Tuesday, I asked myself the same questions that so many others did: What happened? Why had states that reliably backed Obama - states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - flipped Republican?

I was struck by how quickly white pundits sought to tamp down assertions that race had anything to do with it. It was, it seemed to me, almost a relief to many white Americans that Trump's victory encompassed so many of the heavily white places that voted for a black man just years before. It was an absolution that let them reassure themselves that Donald Trump's raucous campaign hadn't revealed an ugly racist rift after all, that in the end, the discontent that propelled the reality-TV star into the White House was one of class and economic anxiety, not racism.

But this analysis reveals less about the electorate than it does about the consistent inability of many white Americans to think about and understand the complex and often contradictory workings of race in this country, and to discuss and elucidate race in a sophisticated, nuanced way.

While we tend to talk about racism in absolute terms - you're either racist or you're not - racism and racial anxiety have always existed on a spectrum. For historians who have studied race in the United States, the change from blue to red in heavily white areas is not surprising. In fact, it was entirely predictable. "There are times when working-class whites, whether rural or urban, will join an interracial alliance to get the short-term gains they want," Robin Kelley, a history professor at U.C.L.A., told me. "They don't ever do it without kicking and screaming."

Iowa

Donald J. Trump

Hillary Clinton

650,790 Votes

42.2%

798,923 Votes

51.8%

To understand how all these heavily white Iowa counties went for Obama, we must look back to 2008. After eight years of Republican rule, with the economy in a tailspin, white people were suffering through the sort of disastrous unemployment rates that usually only black Americans face. It has been called the worst recession since the Great Depression. Obama's message of hope, that Americans of all stripes were in this thing together, along with his promises to go after the banks and Wall Street types that had caused the disaster, struck a chord across political parties. And his savvy ground operation took this message to rural and suburban communities that Democrats had often written off as unwinnable.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the first black man to run for president (and second black American, behind Shirley Chisholm), made similar inroads with rural white farmers during his 1984 and 1988 campaigns. This was simply because he reached out to them promising to push policies that would specifically help them, like ending foreclosures on family farms and forgiving their debt. He did not get a majority of this vote, but he got a surprisingly significant portion.

Decades later, large numbers of rural and suburban white voters were willing to cast their lot with Obama and his multiracial coalition - not necessarily out of some sense of racial enlightenment or egalitarianism but because at the time, they saw it as being in their own best interest. Class and economic anxieties did not erase racial ones; they just in that moment transcended them.

Much has changed in the country since the desperate days of 2008, and while Obama carried more than half of Iowa's 99 counties that year, last week Clinton only carried six. I talked to several white Iowans, many of them lifelong Democrats, who had voted for Obama at least once. They said they believed in unions and social programs to help the needy. They believed in the concept of racial equality, in the sense that all people should have the same opportunities. But in recent years, they had come to feel at odds with their party; it no longer reflected their own cultural norms. Where once they were the backbone of the party, now they were outsiders.

Gretchen Douglas is a corrections officer from Marshalltown. The 53-year-old had been a Democrat her entire adult life and describes herself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative. She's a supporter of unions and gay rights and abortion rights and said she doesn't want to breathe dirty air. She proudly talked of her daughter's success as a chemist, mentioning that not long ago the only options for women were teaching and nursing. She holds a degree in accounting and can tell you exactly the share of the national debt she and her husband carry.

Even as the recession caused Iowa to shed hundreds of state jobs, Douglas managed to hold onto hers. But in 2012, for the first time in her life, she registered as a Republican, and last week she voted for Trump. Douglas told me she had switched parties because she felt Obama had been irresponsible with spending, causing the national debt to soar. She said Democrats were spending too much on social programs for people who did not need them.

"I don't want to throw Granny out in the snow, and I think the least of our brothers should be taken care of," she said. "But I think that those who can work should." Douglas said there was a time in her life where she was struggling, and so she applied for welfare for herself and her young children but was denied. She didn't think that was fair, but she worked hard and turned her life around. But these days, she said, "I kind of think for some social programs there is no stigma."

Douglas never mentioned race, but polls including a recent one of Trump supporters have shown that white Americans' support for entitlement programs declines if they think black people are benefiting. And the longer Douglas talked, the more she revealed other reasons she had voted for Trump.

When Obama was elected, she hoped he would "bridge race relations, to help people in the middle of Iowa" see that black people "are decent hardworking people who want the same things that we want." She said people in rural Iowa often don't know many black people and unfairly stereotype them. But Obama really turned her off when after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son. She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions. And then came the death of Michael Brown, shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo.

"I'm not saying that the struggles of black Americans aren't real," Douglas told me, "but I feel like the Michael Brown incident was violence against the police officer."

The Black Lives Matter movement bothered her. Even as an Ivy League-educated, glamorous black couple lived in the White House, masses of black people were blocking highways and staging die-ins in malls, claiming that black people had it so hard. When she voiced her discomfort with that movement, she said, or pointed out that she disagreed with Obama's policies, some of her more liberal friends on Facebook would call her racist. So, she shut her mouth - and simmered.

Trump clearly sensed the fragility of the coalition that Obama put together - that the president's support in heavily white areas was built not on racial egalitarianism but on a feeling of self-interest. Many white Americans were no longer feeling that belonging to this coalition benefited them. A recent study by sociologists from Harvard and Tufts found that white Americans believed that they experienced more discrimination than black Americans. Trump spoke openly to those Americans, articulating what many Iowans felt but could never say. It was liberating.

"Trump was crass, and he was abrupt," Douglas said. "But I felt like he was going to take care of the things that mattered for me, and honestly I was very worried about our country."

There has never been a moment in America in which black people's gains have not been perceived by some white Americans as their loss. And history is littered with examples of how economic and racial anxieties can create a wedge with which to destroy interracial political and economic alliances. White supremacists overthrew the biracial fusion party in North Carolina in the late 1800s and, with the support of the white population in the state that had once supported the sharing of power, worked to disenfranchise black North Carolinians and usher in seven decades of Jim Crow. In more modern times, George Wallace was roundly trounced when he ran for governor of Alabama against a racist opponent. Wallace, who had promised "to treat a man fair, regardless of his color," vowed to never be "out-niggered" again. The next election he rode a segregationist platform right into the governor's mansion. Similarly, Richard Nixon ran for president the first time as a moderate and lost, but he later found his opening courting white opposition to civil rights with his Southern strategy. It is not incidental that John McCain and Mitt Romney mostly declined to stir up racial tensions in their campaigns against Obama and lost.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the magazine. She won a 2016 Peabody Award for her series on school segregation for "This American Life."
When Trump inveighed against Mexican rapists and talked of barring Muslims from the country, the baldness of his rhetoric spoke to something deeply seated in the Iowans I talked to. Erin Wright, who worked for the state before quitting to finish a nursing degree, voted for Obama in 2008, and doesn't remember if she voted at all in 2012; she cast her ballot for Trump last week. Like Douglas, she wasn't struggling financially but was attracted to Trump's promise to seal our southern borders and to bar Muslims from entering the country.

"There's a lot of illegal people here, who do take work," she said. "If they want to become a citizen, that is super, they should become a citizen. But all the influx of people who come in, they get benefits, they get jobs, and they take them from people who can't find anything else who have lived here their whole lives."

What's missing from the American conversation on race is the fact that people don't have to hate black people or Muslims or Latinos to be uncomfortable with them, to be suspicious of them, to fear their ascension as an upheaval of the natural order of things. A smart demagogue plays to those fears under the guise of economic anxieties. Things not as good as you hoped? These folks are the reason. Kelley, the historian, said white Americans have ignored race when it serves them and defaulted to it when it suits them. "We think of interest as an objective thing that floats above, but it is subjective," he said. "Race always plays a role. It never disappears."

The miracle Obama worked in 2008 and 2012 was to stitch together, at least in part, the racial lines that have always fractured this country. What we saw last week was those lines being torn apart again.

Every July, we load up the minivan in the driveway of our house in Portland, Me., and drive to the North Woods for a week. We pack games, snacks, a cooler full of soda and beer, a stray fishing rod. It's a tradition, this drive up the pine-curtained country roads of our state, this week in the moody wilderness. Set loose from our little foodie enclave by the sea, we ogle the barns and junkyards, tag sales and signs advertising Maine's prowess in the department of making whoopee pies, two discs of chocolate cake with cream in between. (In case you're wondering, Maine does hold the world record for the biggest whoopee pie ever made, one weighing over 1,000 pounds.) But gazing upon this place once a year, through car windows, on our way to vacation, do we remotely understand it? Here is a rebel flag hung on a door. Here is a bumper sticker supporting gay marriage.

Palma Frable has two daughters, and she raised them to be independent, to think for themselves. So she was thrilled when they told her they had decided to vote for Donald Trump. Abigail is 18, and she went with her older sister, Lauren, 22, to register to vote.

Iowa

On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa Democrats selected Barack Obama over a white woman and a white man in the state's first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative. If voters in this overwhelmingly white, rural state could cast their ballots for a black man as president, then perhaps it was possible for the entire nation to do what had never been done; perhaps America had turned far enough away from its racist past that skin color was no longer a barrier to the highest office of the land. In the months that followed, as Obama racked up primary victories, not just in the expected cities but also in largely white Rust Belt towns and farming communities, it seemed evidence for many Americans that the nation had finally become "post-racial."

Of course, that post-racial dream did not last long, and nothing epitomizes the naïveté of that belief more than the election last week of Donald J. Trump. As I watched my home state of Iowa join the red flood that overtook the electoral map last Tuesday, I asked myself the same questions that so many others did: What happened? Why had states that reliably backed Obama - states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - flipped Republican?

I was struck by how quickly white pundits sought to tamp down assertions that race had anything to do with it. It was, it seemed to me, almost a relief to many white Americans that Trump's victory encompassed so many of the heavily white places that voted for a black man just years before. It was an absolution that let them reassure themselves that Donald Trump's raucous campaign hadn't revealed an ugly racist rift after all, that in the end, the discontent that propelled the reality-TV star into the White House was one of class and economic anxiety, not racism.

But this analysis reveals less about the electorate than it does about the consistent inability of many white Americans to think about and understand the complex and often contradictory workings of race in this country, and to discuss and elucidate race in a sophisticated, nuanced way.

While we tend to talk about racism in absolute terms - you're either racist or you're not - racism and racial anxiety have always existed on a spectrum. For historians who have studied race in the United States, the change from blue to red in heavily white areas is not surprising. In fact, it was entirely predictable. "There are times when working-class whites, whether rural or urban, will join an interracial alliance to get the short-term gains they want," Robin Kelley, a history professor at U.C.L.A., told me. "They don't ever do it without kicking and screaming."

Iowa

Donald J. Trump

Hillary Clinton

650,790 Votes

42.2%

798,923 Votes

51.8%

To understand how all these heavily white Iowa counties went for Obama, we must look back to 2008. After eight years of Republican rule, with the economy in a tailspin, white people were suffering through the sort of disastrous unemployment rates that usually only black Americans face. It has been called the worst recession since the Great Depression. Obama's message of hope, that Americans of all stripes were in this thing together, along with his promises to go after the banks and Wall Street types that had caused the disaster, struck a chord across political parties. And his savvy ground operation took this message to rural and suburban communities that Democrats had often written off as unwinnable.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the first black man to run for president (and second black American, behind Shirley Chisholm), made similar inroads with rural white farmers during his 1984 and 1988 campaigns. This was simply because he reached out to them promising to push policies that would specifically help them, like ending foreclosures on family farms and forgiving their debt. He did not get a majority of this vote, but he got a surprisingly significant portion.

Decades later, large numbers of rural and suburban white voters were willing to cast their lot with Obama and his multiracial coalition - not necessarily out of some sense of racial enlightenment or egalitarianism but because at the time, they saw it as being in their own best interest. Class and economic anxieties did not erase racial ones; they just in that moment transcended them.

Much has changed in the country since the desperate days of 2008, and while Obama carried more than half of Iowa's 99 counties that year, last week Clinton only carried six. I talked to several white Iowans, many of them lifelong Democrats, who had voted for Obama at least once. They said they believed in unions and social programs to help the needy. They believed in the concept of racial equality, in the sense that all people should have the same opportunities. But in recent years, they had come to feel at odds with their party; it no longer reflected their own cultural norms. Where once they were the backbone of the party, now they were outsiders.

Gretchen Douglas is a corrections officer from Marshalltown. The 53-year-old had been a Democrat her entire adult life and describes herself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative. She's a supporter of unions and gay rights and abortion rights and said she doesn't want to breathe dirty air. She proudly talked of her daughter's success as a chemist, mentioning that not long ago the only options for women were teaching and nursing. She holds a degree in accounting and can tell you exactly the share of the national debt she and her husband carry.

Even as the recession caused Iowa to shed hundreds of state jobs, Douglas managed to hold onto hers. But in 2012, for the first time in her life, she registered as a Republican, and last week she voted for Trump. Douglas told me she had switched parties because she felt Obama had been irresponsible with spending, causing the national debt to soar. She said Democrats were spending too much on social programs for people who did not need them.

"I don't want to throw Granny out in the snow, and I think the least of our brothers should be taken care of," she said. "But I think that those who can work should." Douglas said there was a time in her life where she was struggling, and so she applied for welfare for herself and her young children but was denied. She didn't think that was fair, but she worked hard and turned her life around. But these days, she said, "I kind of think for some social programs there is no stigma."

Douglas never mentioned race, but polls including a recent one of Trump supporters have shown that white Americans' support for entitlement programs declines if they think black people are benefiting. And the longer Douglas talked, the more she revealed other reasons she had voted for Trump.

When Obama was elected, she hoped he would "bridge race relations, to help people in the middle of Iowa" see that black people "are decent hardworking people who want the same things that we want." She said people in rural Iowa often don't know many black people and unfairly stereotype them. But Obama really turned her off when after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son. She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions. And then came the death of Michael Brown, shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo.

"I'm not saying that the struggles of black Americans aren't real," Douglas told me, "but I feel like the Michael Brown incident was violence against the police officer."

The Black Lives Matter movement bothered her. Even as an Ivy League-educated, glamorous black couple lived in the White House, masses of black people were blocking highways and staging die-ins in malls, claiming that black people had it so hard. When she voiced her discomfort with that movement, she said, or pointed out that she disagreed with Obama's policies, some of her more liberal friends on Facebook would call her racist. So, she shut her mouth - and simmered.

Trump clearly sensed the fragility of the coalition that Obama put together - that the president's support in heavily white areas was built not on racial egalitarianism but on a feeling of self-interest. Many white Americans were no longer feeling that belonging to this coalition benefited them. A recent study by sociologists from Harvard and Tufts found that white Americans believed that they experienced more discrimination than black Americans. Trump spoke openly to those Americans, articulating what many Iowans felt but could never say. It was liberating.

"Trump was crass, and he was abrupt," Douglas said. "But I felt like he was going to take care of the things that mattered for me, and honestly I was very worried about our country."

There has never been a moment in America in which black people's gains have not been perceived by some white Americans as their loss. And history is littered with examples of how economic and racial anxieties can create a wedge with which to destroy interracial political and economic alliances. White supremacists overthrew the biracial fusion party in North Carolina in the late 1800s and, with the support of the white population in the state that had once supported the sharing of power, worked to disenfranchise black North Carolinians and usher in seven decades of Jim Crow. In more modern times, George Wallace was roundly trounced when he ran for governor of Alabama against a racist opponent. Wallace, who had promised "to treat a man fair, regardless of his color," vowed to never be "out-niggered" again. The next election he rode a segregationist platform right into the governor's mansion. Similarly, Richard Nixon ran for president the first time as a moderate and lost, but he later found his opening courting white opposition to civil rights with his Southern strategy. It is not incidental that John McCain and Mitt Romney mostly declined to stir up racial tensions in their campaigns against Obama and lost.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the magazine. She won a 2016 Peabody Award for her series on school segregation for "This American Life."
When Trump inveighed against Mexican rapists and talked of barring Muslims from the country, the baldness of his rhetoric spoke to something deeply seated in the Iowans I talked to. Erin Wright, who worked for the state before quitting to finish a nursing degree, voted for Obama in 2008, and doesn't remember if she voted at all in 2012; she cast her ballot for Trump last week. Like Douglas, she wasn't struggling financially but was attracted to Trump's promise to seal our southern borders and to bar Muslims from entering the country.

"There's a lot of illegal people here, who do take work," she said. "If they want to become a citizen, that is super, they should become a citizen. But all the influx of people who come in, they get benefits, they get jobs, and they take them from people who can't find anything else who have lived here their whole lives."

What's missing from the American conversation on race is the fact that people don't have to hate black people or Muslims or Latinos to be uncomfortable with them, to be suspicious of them, to fear their ascension as an upheaval of the natural order of things. A smart demagogue plays to those fears under the guise of economic anxieties. Things not as good as you hoped? These folks are the reason. Kelley, the historian, said white Americans have ignored race when it serves them and defaulted to it when it suits them. "We think of interest as an objective thing that floats above, but it is subjective," he said. "Race always plays a role. It never disappears."

The miracle Obama worked in 2008 and 2012 was to stitch together, at least in part, the racial lines that have always fractured this country. What we saw last week was those lines being torn apart again.

Every July, we load up the minivan in the driveway of our house in Portland, Me., and drive to the North Woods for a week. We pack games, snacks, a cooler full of soda and beer, a stray fishing rod. It's a tradition, this drive up the pine-curtained country roads of our state, this week in the moody wilderness. Set loose from our little foodie enclave by the sea, we ogle the barns and junkyards, tag sales and signs advertising Maine's prowess in the department of making whoopee pies, two discs of chocolate cake with cream in between. (In case you're wondering, Maine does hold the world record for the biggest whoopee pie ever made, one weighing over 1,000 pounds.) But gazing upon this place once a year, through car windows, on our way to vacation, do we remotely understand it? Here is a rebel flag hung on a door. Here is a bumper sticker supporting gay marriage.

Palma Frable has two daughters, and she raised them to be independent, to think for themselves. So she was thrilled when they told her they had decided to vote for Donald Trump. Abigail is 18, and she went with her older sister, Lauren, 22, to register to vote.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa Democrats selected Barack Obama over a white woman and a white man in the state's first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative.

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Huck Finn banned in schools for use of the n-word

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Huck Finn banned in schools for use of the n-word

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However, the texts are both widely considered to be anti-racist texts, using historically accurate language and characters to highlight and address the issue.

Mr Cary told local paper the Bemidji Pioneer: "We felt that we could still teach the same standards and expectations through other novels that didn't require students to feel humiliated or marginalised by the use of racial slurs".

The decision had come in response to complaints about the books' offensive language over the years, rather than a specific complaint by a student, Mr Cary said.

The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People has supported the decision, saying it was long over due.

Stephan Witherspoon, the president of the local branch, said the books were "just hurtful", adding that they use "hurtful language that has oppressed the people for over 200 years".

However, free speech organisations have criticised the move, with the National Coalition Against Censorship, saying it was "deeply disturbed" by the decision.

"Rather than ignore difficult speech, educators should create spaces for open dialogue that teaches students to confront the vestiges of racism and the oppression of people of colour," a spokesperson for the organisation said.

Bernie Burnham, president of the Duluth Federation of Teachers, said the district's English teachers were concerned that they were not consulted before the decision was made.

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Harper Lee and Mark Twain banned by Minnesota schools over racial slurs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
However, the texts are both widely considered to be anti-racist texts, using historically accurate language and characters to highlight and address the issue. Mr Cary told local paper the Bemidji Pioneer: "We felt that we could still teach the same standards and expectations through other novels that didn't require students to feel humiliated or marginalised by the use of racial slurs".

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'People have a cliched way of looking at race'

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'People have a cliched way of looking at race'

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When the writer of the acclaimed bestseller Lullaby met the author of Brit(ish), a timely book on race and identity, they found a lot of common ground...

wo highly serious and influential women are sitting in a pub in Dulwich, south-east London, looking at one another - almost gawping, in fact - and giggling. "We could be sisters!" laughs Leïla Slimani, the French writer and adviser to the Macron government, whose terrifying new novel Lullaby is giving readers sleepless nights and booksellers rather rosy till receipts. Journalist and former barrister Afua Hirsch nods her head vigorously in agreement. "I know, right? It's not very often that I do something with someone who actually looks like me!"

It's true that there's a resemblance - they are the same age, 36, and of roughly similar build, both light-skinned women of colour with fine, delicate features, both with a mass of coppery-brown curls. And they are both chicly dressed, catching their breath in the middle of hectic days of duties and appointments, and eager to talk to one another, which they will do first with me, and then in front of an audience for Dulwich Books. But their humorous greeting of one another is rooted in more than a mere coincidence of looks. We are here to talk, among other things, about identity: about the contortions that societies force on those they regard as "other", on the continuous demands that marginalised and oppressed groups face to justify who they are, where they are and what they're doing.

We spend so much time just explaining the fact that we exist

Leila Slimani

The publication of Hirsch's book, Brit(ish), provided a great example: one review called her a "high priestess" of the religion of anti-racism and accused her of encouraging "victim status among minorities"; on the Sky TV debate show, , on which she is a regular, Hirsch was told by her colleagues that society had moved on from the worst excesses of racial prejudice, and that if good intentions lay behind people's behaviour, they could not be described as racist.

All of which seems to both miss Hirsch's point and make it for her. Talking about Slimani's novel - which centres on a professional Parisian couple who believe they've discovered the perfect nanny - she expresses the surprise, and then pleasure, she felt as she realised that race and identity were not overtly discussed. "I found that really liberating," she says. "Because this is the problem with us: we spend so much time just explaining the fact that we exist. It's like Toni Morrison said: the real problem of racism is distraction. While everyone else is inventing and exploring, you're just having to justify the fact that you exist."

Slimani, who was born in Morocco and moved to France with her family - her father a minister of finance and her mother a doctor - when she was 17, understands Hirsch's reaction. "I want to say that I can be Moroccan and speak about someone without speaking about his nationality," she explains. "Because, you know, I have the feeling that when you come from Morocco, when you come from Afghanistan, when you come from Africa, Occidental people always wait for you to write a novel about identity. No: I just want to write a novel like a French writer or like an American writer, about a couple, about love, about sex, about children."

In fact, there is an inversion underpinning Lullaby: the children's mother is Moroccan, and their nanny an older white woman with painful personal problems. While they live in a good neighbourhood (even though they've had to sub-divide the rooms to make it work), the nanny treks to and from a dispiriting flat in the outskirts. "It's very ironic that I choose to say that [the mother's] from north Africa but do nothing with it," Slimani says. Why did she make that choice? "I think that we have a very cliched way of looking at race," she replies. "Of course, if you are from Morocco or from Algeria, you're going to be poor, you're going to be a nanny, and you're going to live in the suburbs of Paris. If you are a boss, and you employ a nanny, you are a white woman, very successful. But it's not true, it's not the reality."

The reality, she continues, is that there are plenty of north Africans living in the centre of Paris, many of them lawyers, journalists, actors. And many white working-class people do what are regarded as "immigrants' jobs" and are consequently despised by those around them.

The intersection of class and race is one of the abiding preoccupations of Afua Hirsch's book, in which she describes the fundamental differences between her background - she grew up comfortably middle-class in Wimbledon in south-west London, attended private school and went to Oxford - and that of her partner, Sam, whom she met when they were in their early 20s and eyeing a career in the law. Both have Ghanaian heritage: his parents were both first-generation immigrants; Hirsch's mother is Ghanaian, while her father is white, with a Jewish, German and Yorkshire family background.

'We became complacent under Obama's post-racial narrative'

Afua Hirsch

Hirsch opens Brit(ish) with a scene in which Sam, from a tough part of Tottenham that he always describes as "the hood", clerking at a solicitor's office to save money for his studies, meets her friends for the first time when he comes to collect her from one of their houses. The scene that greets him - young people sitting around talking earnestly while eating vegan nibbles and sipping herbal tea - does not immediately charm him.

"You lot went to Oxford," Hirsch reports him as saying in the book, "you are supposed to be the crème de la crème. You are supposed to be blitzing this life. And there you were, sitting there, so tentative like. So unsure of yourselves. Trust me, if a man like me had the opportunities you all had, there would be no stopping me. We'd be up in this country making some serious money. We'd be running things. Instead of sitting around all quiet."

Now, she explains why it was important for her to write about him. "Because he's so far off the spectrum: dark-skinned, black man, muscular, audibly working-class accent - he's got no hope of being seen as a 'good immigrant', so he doesn't crave acceptance. From an early age, he's acknowledged that he's never going to be seen as the right kind, and that's liberated him. He genuinely doesn't care what people think about him. He's heightened my recognition of how much I try to be accepted."

The efforts she has made - and still makes - in the service of "acceptance" are painful to hear: keeping her hands visible in shops from an ingrained memory of being looked at suspiciously as a teenager; not playing loud music late at night, even though her white, middle-class neighbours do; adopting a cheery, heightened version of received pronunciation when she comes through passport control, always half-aware that "there is something conditional about your right of entry". (Slimani jumps in here, voicing her own nervousness every time she goes through an airport bag-check.)

"I seek white acceptance," says Hirsch, bluntly. "And I think that is a huge problem for us: in many subtle ways, people of colour in this country are given the idea that success is achieving white acceptance. And so it's something that people aspire to - to be recognised by mainstream institutions, to behave." She tells the horrifying story of a black, male friend, an extremely senior lawyer, who took his wife, who is also black, to a work dinner. He was chastised by his boss, who told him he'd been asked to bring his wife, not his sister. As Hirsch points out, beneath the assumption the expectation was that he would likely have married a white woman to demonstrate his integration. (Shocked, I asked what happened next. Did her friend deck his boss? I hoped so. Which rather neatly illustrates how much I'd missed the point, too.)

Slimani adds another variation to the narrative; the preconceived ideas brought to encounters with immigrants, or those thought to be immigrants. Despite her bourgeois (her word) upbringing, she is frequently congratulated on overcoming it to achieve what she has; often, when people discover that she was born and grew up in Morocco, they ask her if it was hard, if she wore a veil, if there were camels. Did her parents bring her up strictly, or was she allowed to go out? It seems, she says, as though the people asking the questions can only believe that anyone comes to France in search of freedom from poverty or oppression; not that where you lived and what you did might be simple matters of individual choice and circumstances.

In France we have the sort of moment of optimism with Macron, but for my country, for Morocco, I'm very worried

For Hirsch, all these things converge in one simple truth: "The message I'm trying to get across is there's not a healthy space to explore our history and why we are the society we are." It manifests itself in a host of ways, including the constant repetition of what both she and Slimani call "the question" - in other words, the inquiry "Where are you from?" that faces so many people of colour in the west, and which comes with a (not always) silent follow-up, "No, where are you really from?" Or, perhaps, "Originally?"

"I play the idiot," says Slimani, who merely replies "Paris". Hirsch notes that nobody is ever interested in hearing about her Jewish ancestry. But the problem begins even with the language we have at our disposal: "We talk in really crude ways about immigrant communities, 'the' black community, which is not one monolithic blob. We have the fastest growing mixed-race population in Europe - they're not a community, they're dispersed, like me, in places like Wimbledon or rural Scotland, even. And we don't have a good language for talking about people's heritage, you know. I get called half-caste, I've been called coloured in the last month, and often very well-meaning people are very nervous. They'll say things like [her voice drops to a stage whisper] 'as a black woman', as if it's this huge taboo to say the word."

She is, she adds, perfectly prepared to bring her perspective to bear in work situations - a newsroom, for example. "But at the same time, I don't want to feed into the idea that I am the black voice. If there's an issue of race, you have to come to me: I'm the black police."

She attributes the linguistic gap she's detected - now being filled with what she calls "infuriating corporate-speak" such as "BAME" and "diversity" - to the fact that this country has never had a civil rights movement, "a moment of national reckoning where we grappled with the end of empire, and the disappearance of imperial words like negro and coloured; we haven't evolved a new language".

But Hirsch also believes that beyond language lies an even deeper problem of identity: "A lot of British people," she argues, "don't fully accept that you can look like me and be British. That's the issue." That even third- and fourth-generation immigrants are asked questions about their ancestors, for which they might have no answer, speaks to her of "the failure of Britishness to be an identity that we all accept encompasses someone like me".

For Slimani, the issue of language and identity recently took on a new meaning - and provided her with an opportunity to effect change. In November of last year, Emmanuel Macron appointed her Francophone affairs minister, her task to represent what a spokesperson called "the open face of Francophonie to a multicultural world". "It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people," she tells me. "Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world."

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President Macron meets with Leïla Slimani at the Elysee palace before her appointment as new representative for la francophonie. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

It's hard to think of a country more overtly obsessed with the care of its language than France, so Slimani's job seems highly significant. Hirsch likens its place in French public life to that of the royal family in Britain, as evidenced by the coverage of Prince Harry's engagement to Meghan Markle. "It's that sense of opening up the most precious part of your national identity and accepting that white English people do not own it exclusively," she says, noting that many of the initial reports were couched in coy, oblique phrases that described Markle as "not your average society blonde".

Hirsch sensed that something was being hinted at, and, because she had no idea who Markle was, Googled her. The penny dropped immediately: "Oh - she's black, that's what they're trying to say." In case anyone was worried, she adds, the Daily Mail soon came up with a succession chart to reassure the public that she would never actually become Queen. I point out that lines of succession, royal protocol and the like will mean nothing to a younger generation, who will simply see Markle as a style icon, someone relaxed, intelligent, go-ahead, likeable. Yes, says Hirsch: "It's the first time I have ever been remotely interested in the royal family."

And now, the million-dollar question. Do they think that substantial change is on its way? Are we approaching anything like a paradigm shift?

Slimani: "In France we have the sort of moment of optimism with Macron, with things changing, we have the feeling that maybe something is possible... But for my country, for Morocco, for Algeria, for Tunisia, I'm very worried for the future - because I have the feeling that things are not evolving at all for women, or for young people, and it's very depressing."

What does she think accounts for the situation? "It's stagnation. And it's very difficult to see a country where 50% of the population is under 30 and nothing moves, there are no jobs and no future and no ideal to fight for. There is just nothing; nothing is happening. And that makes me very sad."

What about Hirsch? Does she sense a shift? In among all the terrible news that we seem to see every day, is there a glimpse of bright blue sky?

"I do think that we became quite complacent," she replies. "I do think that, for example President Obama, whom I personally loved, allowed people to just accept this narrative that America is post-racial now, everything's fine, all that historical inequality... and actually, Trump has radicalised people to take a long hard look, for example, at the fact that there are a significant number of Americans who will support someone more if he describes Africa as a bunch of shithole countries. And that is a social reality for millions of people in America. And in a way I welcome that because I knew it was there anyway but I used to have to defend the idea that it existed, whereas now it's out. You can see it. You can analyse it. I prefer that."

* Lullaby by Leila Slimani is published by Faber (£12.99). To buy a copy for £9.74, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846

* Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch is published Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To buy it for £12.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Topics

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Leïla Slimani and Afua Hirsch: 'People have a cliched way of looking at race'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When the writer of the acclaimed bestseller Lullaby met the author of Brit(ish), a timely book on race and identity, they found a lot of common ground... wo highly serious and influential women are sitting in a pub in Dulwich, south-east London, looking at one another - almost gawping, in fact - and giggling.

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Students walk out after Professor uses the 'N' word in class

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Students walk out after Professor uses the 'N' word in class

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Several studentswalked out of an anthropology course at Princeton University on Tuesday after a professor repeatedly used a racial slur in his class about hate speech.

The professor, Lawrence Rosen, is an award-winning legal anthropologist who has taught at Princeton University for 40 years. He received emeritus status last year.

Rosen's course, titled "Cultural Freedoms: Hate Speech, Blasphemy and Pornography," explores the legal and cultural limits of free speech. This week, he led a discussion on verbal symbols and what types of speech should be protected. The heated debate that followed was first reported on by The Daily Princetonian.

Destiny Salter, a 19-year-old Princeton student who identifies as black, told HuffPost that about 10 minutes into the class, Rosen gave this example: "Which is more provocative: A white man walks up to a black man and punches him in the nose, or a white man walks up to a black man and calls him a n****r?"″

He repeated the example once more, leaving students "shocked and visibly uncomfortable," Salter said.

A few minutes later, students began to point out their discomfort with a white professor using the word in its entirety.

When one student asked if Rosen planned to keep repeating the word in future classes, the professor reportedly responded that he would if he deemed it necessary for the discussion.

Rosen then said, "I purposely did that, because I wanted everyone to feel the power of that word," Salter told HuffPost.

"As if black people haven't been feeling the full power of the N-word for the past 400 years," she said.

At that point, Salter said she and another student decided to walk out of the class.

When other students expressed that the word troubled them, Rosen reportedly continued to defend his use of the slur and refused to apologize.

"The professor didn't seem to consider the fact that obviously repeatedly saying the N-word, while it makes everyone uncomfortable, would affect the black people in the class on a far deeper level," Salter said.

In the end, at least three students walked out of the class as a result of the disagreement, she estimated.

Salter said that she has "absolutely no problem" discussing the politics of the slur ― she expected that to be part of the course when she signed up for it. However, she thinks discussing the ramifications of hate speech and slurs does not give one the right to use them. The ends do not justify the means, she said.

She was also alarmed that the professor appeared to be happy about the fact that he had elicited such a strong negative reaction from the class, and that he steadfastly refused to apologize.

The incident left her "furious and disgusted," Salter said.

"He very easily could have stated the same question and just said 'the N-word' rather than saying the actual word. That would have sparked discussion, which is what he supposedly wanted," she said. "Saying the actual word simply offended the class and derailed the entire conversation."

HuffPost sent Rosen a request for comment, but has not heard back.

The professor didn't seem to consider the fact that obviously repeatedly saying the N-word, while it makes everyone uncomfortable, would affect the black people in the class on a far deeper level. - Princeton student Destiny Salter

In a statement, Princeton's acting university spokesman Michael Hotchkiss told HuffPost that the conversations and disagreements that took place in the seminar are "part of the vigorous engagement and robust debate that are central to what we do." The university is in the process of setting up a meeting with the students, he said.

"We will continue to look for ways to encourage discussions about free speech and inclusivity with the students in Professor Rosen's class and the campus community more broadly," Hotchkiss wrote.

In a letter posted to the school newspaper, the chair of Princeton's anthropology department, Carolyn Rouse, defended Rosen's decision to use the racial slur. The purpose of the course, Rouse said, was to give students the ability to clearly state why hate speech should or should not be protected, using an argument other than "because it made me feel bad."

She pointed out that Rosen had also mentioned anti-American or anti-Semitic examples in the class. Rosen has reportedly been using the word "n****r" as an example "year after year." This is the first year he's gotten such a critical response from the class, she said.

Rouse said she believes the students' reactions were probably reflective of heightened racial tensions in America.

"This is diagnostic of the level of overt anti-black racism in the country today," she wrote. "Anti-American and anti-Semitic examples did not upset the students, but an example of racism did. This did not happen when Obama was president, when the example seemed less real and seemed to have less power."

Rouse added that she felt "bad" for the students who left the class without trusting the "process."

"Rosen was fighting battles for women, Native Americans, and African-Americans before these students were born," Rouse said. "He grew up a Jew in anti-Semitic America, and recognizes how law has afforded him rights he would not otherwise have."

Salter said she feels that students have certainly become more sensitive to offensive words because of the rise of the far right and the election of President Donald Trump.

After her experiences on Tuesday, she said she's decided to drop the class.

"I did not come to this school to hear my professor spout the N-word in class. Period."

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Princeton students walk out of class after professor uses racial slur

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Several studentswalked out of an anthropology course at Princeton University on Tuesday after a professor repeatedly used a racial slur in his class about hate speech. The professor, Lawrence Rosen, is an award-winning legal anthropologist who has taught at Princeton University for 40 years. He received emeritus status last year.