Individuals who heard former President Donald Trump declare that Vice President Kamala Harris beforehand recognized as “not Black” in a July 2024 interview might marvel why he repeatedly emphasised former President Barack Obama’s blackness throughout his first presidential marketing campaign.
As a scholar centered on race and gender points, I acknowledge that these seemingly inconsistent definitions of blackness should not inconsistent in any respect. They show a constant place on whiteness.
In each instances, Trump implies that the race of his opponent is all voters have to know to find out their characters. It’s an ideology that normalizes the dominance and privilege of white Individuals inside a racial hierarchy.
Making whiteness nice once more
Within the American creativeness, white persons are usually perceived as being extra authentically American than different racial teams.
Moreover, Trump and a few of his followers see a lot of America’s strides on civil rights as detrimental to white individuals. Trump has mentioned that “anti-white feeling” is a major downside in America. And Republican voters, who’re overwhelmingly white, are extra seemingly than the final inhabitants to view racism as a much bigger downside for white individuals.
Trump has mentioned he believes America was at its finest within the Forties and Nineteen Fifties. Nevertheless, Trump’s long-standing inflammatory rhetoric round race — together with his latest racist feedback degrading Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio — don’t merely glorify a time instantly earlier than the civil rights period. They recall an older period.
Calls to “Make America Great Again” hearken again to colonialism, when whiteness — notably white, male energy — was at its peak. The interval from 1500 to the Sixties was a time when white males may train management over individuals of colour by racially classifying their our bodies. They usually protected whiteness by passing legal guidelines that declared “one drop” of Black blood as sufficient to declare somebody Black.
Whiteness is property, because the authorized scholar Cheryl Hines has argued. It’s an asset for individuals who possess it. It affords advantages like white privilege and the thought of being white as ethical and superior.
One-drop statutes, such because the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, tried to scientifically outline who was Black based mostly on how a lot African ancestry an individual had. Handed in dozens of states within the twentieth century, these legal guidelines have been about sustaining white purity.
Extra particularly, one-drop statutes mirrored a concern that individuals who have been thought of white by way of their look however had Black ancestry may reproduce with different white individuals. This, in flip, would outcome within the supposed degeneration of the white race.
These legal guidelines tried to legally outline Blackness.
Energy and dominance
Harris and Obama, the kids of immigrants, each have mixed-race backgrounds. Harris is the kid of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mom. Obama is the son of a Black Kenyan father and a white American mom.
Nevertheless, Trump insists that Harris was “Indian all the way,” whereas Obama was a “Black president.” For me, this attitude reveals one other facet of Trump’s racial pondering: He seems to consider within the impenetrability and energy of whiteness.
Trump sees Harris as able to dancing forwards and backwards between being Indian and being Black. But he has by no means implied that Obama can dance between being Black and being white.
In a society that usually ties bodily traits to racial identification, many individuals may discover it tough to think about Obama as figuring out as white. That’s as a result of our society associates his pores and skin tone and hair texture with Blackness.
Nevertheless, I argue that the lack to view this hypothetical racial dance as doable for Harris and never for Obama is tied to white supremacist beliefs.
These beliefs defend whiteness as being imbued with dominance over different racial teams. This energy is mirrored within the skill to outline the race of others, no matter how they could determine themselves. And it’s mirrored within the need to additionally restrict who can depend as white.
Trump does each of these issues.
Donald Trump solutions questions on the Nationwide Affiliation of Black Journalists’ annual conference in Chicago on July 31, 2024.
Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP by way of Getty Photos
A foil to white identification
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump mentioned in July at a gathering of Black journalists.
He added: “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went – she became a Black person.”
By suggesting that Harris has strategically recognized as Black for political achieve, Trump implies that there’s a political benefit to being Black in America.
This notion aligns with the racist perception, fueled by white racial resentment, that Black Individuals are afforded privileges over whites and Asian Individuals.
The sociologist Arlie Hochschild has proven that many white Trump supporters consider circumstances in America have gotten worse for whites in latest many years. They consider most of the beneficial properties for individuals of colour — affirmative motion and different range insurance policies — have been on the expense of the rights of white individuals.
Concurrently, Trump’s feedback emphasize his personal whiteness through the use of Harris’ and Obama’s race as a foil to his white identification. Analysis on the development of race in America exhibits that whiteness is devoid of that means with out one thing to outline itself in opposition to.
For white individuals who really feel many issues have been taken away from them in an more and more multiracial America, Trump is their warrior. He campaigns to guard the white inhabitants and tradition of America.