Donald Trump and the Myth of Whiteness
5th December 2024
Discussing Donald Trump’s election victory with a panel of TV pundits, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude explained it with reference to race. “There’s this sense,” he said, “that whiteness is under threat.” He went on to elaborate, if not elucidate, what he meant by this. “All these demographic shifts,” he said, “all these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.” They are “confusing the hell out of” white people, and these white people, confused by children’s faces on Cheerios boxes, and threatened by this confusion, reacted against this “sense” of threat by voting for Trump. Glaude gave no evidence of white people confused by children’s faces, or of the feelings of threat these young faces were supposedly causing.
You’d think this professor would feel an even greater need to ground his claim in real evidence this election year, given that Trump did better with black and Latino and other non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. But apparently not. When another panelist suggested that inflation better explained why Trump was elected, Professor Glaude was both derisive and adamant. The idea that Trump won because of inflation — historically a cause of trouble for incumbent parties — was nuts. The scientifically obvious answer was whiteness, threatened as it is these days by racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.
Glaude’s claim seemed both obviously wrong and symptomatic of the extreme insularity of progressive elites, who talk in abstractions like “whiteness” as they consult each other, even as those abstractions look like delusions to the less sophisticated people who merely consult things in the real world. He aired his apparent delusion for these regular people, who mocked and scorned him on social media.