Every time the Trump administration fails to get something done legislatively, they revert back to the one successful talking point that got them to the White House: lashing out at minorities and people of color. It’s a strategy that we will no doubt see in repetition for the next four years (or however long we are saddled with this loathsome bunch), precisely because it proves so effective. Donald Trump has turned racial resentment, white fragility, and anger into a powerful political platform that mobilizes his base and keeps them delusional about his progress. As long as he continues to promise to harm the very people they blame for their inability to access good jobs, decent wages, and their slice of the pie that is the American Dream, they will proudly stand by their man.
Like on Christmas morning, every day brings his supporters presents: travel bans against Muslims, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Hispanic communities and brutal, family-gutting deportations, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, an Election Integrity Commission stacked with notorious vote suppressors, announcements of a ban on transgender personnel in the military, approval of police brutality against “thugs,” a denial of citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces and a renewed war on drugs that, if it is anything like the last one, will single out African-Americans and Latinos although they are not the primary drug users in this country.
The most recent example of this is the Justice Department’s announcement that it will investigate colleges and universities and their affirmative action policies that allegedly discriminate against white students. Of course, this isn’t really a problem. Even in an increasingly diverse America, white people still make up the majority of the population and obtain bachelor’s degrees at significantly higher rates than blacks or Latinos. But facts don’t matter here: white Trump voters believe that white people face more discrimination than anyone else in the country.
So this latest move from the administration simply feeds into their “woe is me” and lack of prosperity narratives that position undeserving people of color as taking up spots in universities that rightfully belong to them. And according to Christine Emba, they couldn’t be more wrong: it’s rich people who are keeping them out of schools, not people of color.
What is essential to understand is that it’s not a vast crowd of black or brown people keeping white Americans out of the colleges of their choice, especially not the working-class white Americans among whom Trump finds his base of support. In fact, income tips the scale much more than race: At 38 top colleges in the United States, more students come from the top 1 percent of income earners than from the bottom 60 percent. Really leveling the admissions playing field, assuming the Trump administration actually cares about doing so, would involve much broader efforts to redistribute wealth and power. [...]
And right up to the application-writing doorstep, the beneficiaries of the biggest extra edge in admissions are more often than not the children of alumni. At Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford universities, the acceptance rate for legacy applicants is between two and three times higher than the general admissions rate.
But sadly, these voters refuse to see the forest through the trees. People of color are a convenient scapegoat—especially when their president is telling them that immigrants are stealing jobs and collecting welfare, blacks and Latinos are illegally voting, and crime is out of control and getting worse by the day. None of this is remotely true. But it’s a story that sells and diverts attention away from the pervasive economic inequality in this country that keeps Trump and his friends supremely wealthy. As long as their base keeps looking at rich, older white men and thinking “That could be me someday,” the less time they will spend doing critical reflection on why the rich stay that way and things don’t get better for poor white people, despite endless promises to the contrary.
Trump and friends also won’t tell their base that even though affirmative action is seen as something that routinely helps blacks and people of color, it actually helps men—a lot.
Although you will never hear this from Mr. Sessions, men are the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action in college admissions: Their combination of test scores, grades and achievements is simply no match for that of women, whose academic profiles are much stronger. Yet to provide some semblance of gender balance on campuses, admissions directors have to dig down deep into the applicant pool to cobble together enough males to form an incoming class.
Most people in America do not transcend the economic class they were born into. If you were born poor, you are likely to stay that way. That must be a hard and bitter pill for some white people to swallow—especially if you have a sense of entitlement and were promised that hard work and individual grit would determine your success in life. But white supremacy has always been a successful tool to get people to align against their own economic and social interests and Donald Trump is a master manipulator.
His policies won’t be based in fact and his base won’t care as long as they think they are getting something from it. Sadly, they won’t in the end. But they are determined to go down with the ship—and take the rest of us with them.