The first post-racial president

Donald Trump?

“I’m an African American—of course I worry about racism,” Christopher Sheffield told the New York Times. “But guess what? I’ve been dealing with that my whole life.”

Sheffield was interviewed for a story about Joe Biden voters from 2020 who are defecting to Donald Trump in 2024. Sheffield said he doesn't like Trump's views on race, but other issues are more important to him. He especially worries that Biden might allow America to be drawn into a world war. “He looks weak. With North Korea, Putin, and all those boys ready to act, I think they will be a little bit more reluctant to challenge Trump than they would with Biden.”

Frederick Westbrook voted against Trump in 2020. “As a Black man in America, I felt he was doing unjust things,” Westbrook said. “He’s got a big mouth, he’s not a nice person.” But now the economy is a bigger deal to Westbrook than Trump's personality.“Everything is just about the economy. . . . I just think housing, food, my car, my insurance, every single piece of living has gone up.”

Sheffield and Westbrook might be right about Trump's ability to do better than Biden on foreign policy and the economy. They might be wrong. But the fact that they and other black voters are shifting from Biden to Trump says something potentially important about American politics. An average of recent polls places black support for Trump at 18 percent, higher than for any Republican candidate since 1960.

Of course this is still a minority. Most black voters will choose Biden again. Yet in a close contest the shift could be decisive. If it is, and if Trump wins, Democrats will be looking for any silver lining they can find. They probably won’t consider the erosion of their support among blacks to be a silver lining, but other Americans might take it as a hopeful sign, in a paradoxical way.

Until the 1870s, racism and its corollaries were no disqualification for the presidency. Two-thirds of the presidents through Ulysses Grant owned slaves at some time in their lives. Whether subsequent presidents were less racist in feeling is unclear, but most were less open about it. Woodrow Wilson was conspicuous as an exception. Democratic candidates for president relied on the votes of Southern conservatives, most of whom would be considered racist today. But they left the overt race-baiting to bolters like Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968. Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sought the racist vote by appeals to states’ rights rather than racism per se.

From the 1860s to the 1930s, the Republicans, as the party of Lincoln and emancipation, had a lock on the black vote. This changed in the 1930s as Franklin Roosevelt built a coalition that included urban workers, many of whom were black. The shift of blacks from Republicans to Democrats was consolidated by the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, sponsored by Democrat Lyndon Johnson.

The Democrats have counted on black loyalty since then. Black support peaked in 2008, when 95 percent of black voters chose Barack Obama, who was sometimes called America’s first post-racial president. Maybe he was, if that simply means the first nonwhite president.

This might not be the best measure. To be sure, some people voted against Obama because he was black. But many people, including white people, voted for Obama because he was black, if only to show they weren’t racists. Either way, race was a big issue in Obama’s election.

A better standard might be the first president to be elected without regard to race. And the acid test of this would be the election of a president in spite of his or her racist views. It hasn’t happened (in the modern era–we won’t include all those early slaveholders). It might not happen this year. But if Christopher Sheffield and Frederick Westbrook are representative of something larger, it just might.

The Democrats won’t be pleased. They’ve gotten used to taking the black vote for granted. Black leaders might not like it. Their leadership has often depended on their ability to deliver the black vote.

But the country will be better off if both parties have to compete for everyone’s votes on all issues. This is the antithesis of identity politics, which assumes that identity is and should be determinative. Strikingly, if not nefariously, this assumption has been applied more often to minorities than to the white majority. No one is surprised that white people choose candidates based on issues other than identity. But when black people do, it rates notice in the New York Times.

When people in the past have spoken of a post-racial politics, they often assumed this would await an end to racism. It would be a long wait. Racism, in the sense of people preferring one racial group, usually their own, to other groups will probably be with us forever. We are a tribal species. But racism is just one unattractive feature among many in our makeup. We don’t let stupidity dictate our politics. Or pettiness. Or vengefulness. We work around those. We can work around racism. Some people already do.