Even though President Donald Trump lost this election, one thing is for certain: the President proved that America is not divided along the racialized lines that have been created by intellectual elites. After four years of being derided as a racist, President Trump proved that the ideals of the Republican party have broad support among individuals of all races. In fact, Trump performed better with minority voters than any Republican candidate since 1960.
Despite this stellar performance, progressives are still in denial and they continue to believe that anyone who supported Trump is supporting “racial castes.” Writing for The Lily, Annelise M. Bruner decried the slim margins by which Joe Biden won stating that, “White people have had to convince themselves of their innate superiority, of the goodness of their race, to justify their disenfranchisement of people of other races.” According to her logic, the millions of minorities who voted for President Trump are idiots who are supporting racism and the tens of millions of white people who voted for President Trump are attempting to entrench racism in the American system.
This refusal on the part of arrogant intellectuals to acknowledge the fact that those who voted for President Trump are mainly logical and good-hearted human beings is the result of their attachment to the ideology of identity politics. Identity politics is the belief that people will make political alliances based on race, sexual orientation, or some other distinct factor of their identity.
Proponents of identity politics believe that if a political party creates a perfectly tailored agenda for a certain racial group, that party will be able to gain all of the votes from said group. The absurdity of this was demonstrated by the Presidential election, but identity politics, like many other ideologies, blinds people to the truth. In the eyes of the writer mentioned above, and many of those who agree with her, the minorities who voted for Trump are not actual minorities. In response to the tremendous Cuban support that was garnered by President Trump, Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, tweeted that “Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.”
Apparently, if you are a minority who voted for President Trump, you are no longer a “real” minority. Instead, you are attempting to be accepted by the white majority. After reading the views of many of these Democratic party supporters it becomes clear that Joe Biden’s “then you ain’t black” comment, wasn’t just the ramblings of an old man. It was the manifestation of a new type of racism that asserts the belief that a person’s thinking is determined by their race.
In the eyes of many progressives, people are no longer defined by their unique individuality. Instead, they are defined by some arbitrary category which our intellectual elites think is so important that it overrides all other factors in a person’s life. Not only is this racist, it also promotes the idea that the supposed “black” viewpoint must override the “white” viewpoint in political struggles. It divides us along racial lines and promotes the false narrative that one must vote a certain way or be accused of racism.
The Democratic party should realize that it cannot be the party of blacks, whites, latinos, or any other group. It can only be the party of Americans. That is because every black person, white person, and latino person, is different. No one has the same set of values or concerns. Simplifying our society down into racialized groups whereby minorities are stereotyped into specific boxes is divisive, unintelligent, and racist.
