Aligning With Trump’s Toxic Whiteness Will Never Keep You Safe

Maybe you read some of those postelection articles, mostly by Black authors, attempting to reckon with the uptick in support for Donald Trump from some non-white communities. The word “betrayal,” in a few cases, was deployed with intention. Others sat with the reaffirmed sentiment that Black folks have no true allies. And still others condemned the hollowness of terms like “people of color” and “BIPOC” for falsely suggesting non-white solidarity where there is mostly just adjacency.

Those reactions, contrary to what both centrist and right-wing commentators suggested, weren’t about Black resentment over mere political divergence. They arose, instead, from the weariness of a collective historical memory that prompts Black folks to read between the lines of the newest chapters in a very old story. For generations, Black Americans have watched new arrivals enter America’s racial hierarchy and, when given the chance, move to gain status and power by aligning themselves with whiteness—however toxic, tenuous, or self-harming. It’s a means of getting a leg up that has always involved stepping on Black folks along the way.

That was how it worked for waves of Europeans. Italians, Greeks, Irish, and Slavic arrivals from the 19th century to the early 20th found themselves classified as not-quite-fully white by eugenicists proclaiming Nordics superior to “Alpines and Mediterraneans.” Assimilation, then, as scholar David Roediger writes in Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, meant “whitening as well as Americanizing.” Those immigrant groups learned real fast that Americanness was tantamount to whiteness, and that whiteness was incomplete without anti-Blackness. Becoming fully assimilated wasn’t just a cultural project—it was a racial one, too.

As far back as 1853, Frederick Douglass observed, “The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro.” Nearly a century later, in 1945, Black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton documented Black Chicagoans complaining that “foreigners learn how to cuss, count and say ‘nigger’ as soon as they get here.” Another half century later, Toni Morrison noted how the adoption of anti-Blackness by immigrants served as a necessary demonstration of loyalty to the American project.

“A hostile posture toward resident Blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open,” Morrison wrote, adding that this was the “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born Black population. Only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimilation complete.”

By the time of that writing, most US immigration was from non-European nations. But while the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act—a direct outcome of the civil rights movement and Black activism—scrapped the explicitly racist national origins quota system, it didn’t, and couldn’t, end the racial order that runs through American life. So, although America’s immigrant arrivals became visibly browner, and thus racially marked in different ways from their predecessors, the country’s hierarchy was not erased. It was simply rendered more complex. The new racial triangulation continued to position whiteness as aspirational and Blackness as a cautionary tale.

There are those who have worked hard to comply, and perhaps even reinforce the structure, in the hopes of being let in. Vivek Ramaswamy, the first-generation Indian-American 2024 Republican presidential candidate, campaigned so hard on anti-Blackness and almost nothing else that, following one of his most transparently anti-Black stunts, the Congressional Black Caucus released a statement calling him out for “shamelessly carry[ing] the water of white supremacy for his own political gain.”

There are still hard feelings in the wake of 2023’s SFFA vs. Harvard, which eliminated race-conscious college admissions supposedly on behalf of Asian students, and helped fuel the racist anti-DEI rollback of a generation’s worth of hard-won civil rights victories. (Having written many times on this topic, I cannot help but note that most Asian Americans support affirmative action in college admissions.)

And so, reports of double-digit leaps in support for Trump among Latino men, as well as less pronounced but still notable increases among Asian voters, did not cause the fault lines between Black Americans and other non-white communities—those cultural, social, and political fissures have always been there. The election night’s exit polls merely threw those fissures into the starkest relief.

But the walls of whiteness—which so easily subsumed ​southern and eastern Europeans (America’s “temporary Negroes,” as sociologist John Dollard so tellingly called them in 1937)—have become more rigid toward non-European arrivals. This president, a garden-variety racist working for far more ideologically committed white nationalists, has made clear that the old devil’s bargain no longer works.

It has long been true that, in a country that requires whiteness to achieve full Americanness, non-European immigrants remain racialized as “perpetual foreigners at worst, or probationary Americans at best,” as Erika Lee writes. At a time when a not insignificant segment of white America is consumed by fears of imagined looming demographic erasure, that bargain hasn’t just resulted in diminished returns—it’s altogether dangerous.

Most glaring are the rampant kidnappings and deportations of non-criminal brown (and Black) citizens and veterans, and an ICE operating budget bigger than most world militaries. There is the “new” travel ban, targeting Middle Eastern, South American, and, of course, African countries, which expands the “old” travel ban from Trump’s first term.

The recent presidential order criminalizing homelessness describes the condition as “vagrancy,” language quite literally copied from the 19th-century Black Codes. The surreal and over-the-top bigotry of Alligator Alcatraz, rooted in old-timey racist lore; importing white South Africans while denying entry to Black and brown asylum-seekers; even an executive order reasserting 19th-century racial determinism pseudoscience. And of course, the rollback of too many Black civil rights to enumerate here.

What was once conditional inclusion is now a tolerance so fragile it “can turn on a dime,” as Karan Mahajan writes, and be rapidly revoked. Non-Black groups might be treated as convenient wedges in the right wing’s anti-Black agenda, but any misstep causes the veneer to slip away, revealing the disposability of so much, and so many, to white power structures. Ramaswamy offered mild criticisms of white Americans in December, and MAGA went so full-bore racist—with attacks that haven’t let up—he had to quit DOGE, exit the national stage, and restart things in his home state of Ohio. Elon Musk, an actual immigrant, leveled the same criticisms, but retains his MAGA-technofascist fandom.

Black Americans, of course, been knew. Perhaps because of their long history in this country—and near-epigenetic understanding of whiteness, the result of centuries of intimate exposure to its whims and contradictions—Black folks understand the limits of whiteness’s porousness, the folly of banking on its protection, and the rapidity with which it is prone to lash out while feigning victimhood.

That clarity comes from both lived and generationally inherited experience, steeped in the vicious backlashes that have followed every stride forward. Reconstruction followed by the bloody retaliation of Redemption. Civil rights gains met with the punishment of mass incarceration. And the Obama presidency leading to Trump’s executive assault on equity and racial justice.

There has been a long-standing disinformation campaign, passed from white Americans to new immigrant groups, that has painted Black failure as a consequence of Black pathology—and not the relentless undoing of every Black gain. There is a history of Black leaders, made in the mold of Booker T. Washington, who have earnestly believed that if Black folks just worked hard enough, white folks would have no choice but to fully recognize their citizenship and humanity.

But as each violent wave has proved, they overestimated white America’s capacity for moral persuasion and the durability of institutionalized racism. Even Washington’s secretive funding of more direct activism behind the scenes, despite having never disavowed his accommodationist views publicly, suggests he ultimately realized that no amount of dignity, deference, or diligence could undo white supremacy.

This president has shown what Black Americans have long known, and what others just may just be starting to understand—which is that aligning with toxic whiteness will never keep you safe. (Recent polls suggest that this message is landing more broadly—witness the cratering support for Trump among Asians and Latinos, including some of the most prominent pro-Trump preelection voices.)

Unfortunately, from here it seems like the realization may have come too late, judging from the state of things. If the Trump era offers a single bit of bitter clarity, it is that the line between solidarity and servility has never been more visible. And in the rubble of American self-mythologizing, Black political memory always remains standing—refusing to forget what, and who, this country is and has always been.

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