{"id":54925,"date":"2017-09-08T01:17:03","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T01:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54925"},"modified":"2017-09-08T01:45:30","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T01:45:30","slug":"the-first-white-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54925","title":{"rendered":"The First White President"},"content":{"rendered":"

The First White President<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/a>
\nOctober 2017<\/p>\n

Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nJesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly \/ Getty<\/small><\/p>\n

The foundation of Donald Trump\u2019s<\/a> presidency is the negation of Barack Obama\u2019s<\/a> legacy.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is insufficient to state<\/strong> the obvious of Donald Trump<\/a>: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump\u2019s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness\u2014that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump\u2019s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris<\/a>; presided at Princeton<\/a>; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House<\/a>. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America\u2019s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump\u2014a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.<\/p>\n

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism<\/a>, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five<\/a>; and railed against \u201clazy\u201d black employees. \u201cBlack guys counting my money! I hate it,\u201d Trump was once quoted as saying. \u201cThe only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes<\/a> every day.\u201d After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama<\/a> to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president\u2019s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League<\/a> school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father<\/em><\/a>, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The foundation of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,20],"tags":[21057,6000,6001],"class_list":["post-54925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-donald-trump","tag-ta-nehisi-coates","tag-the-atlantic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54925"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54927,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54925\/revisions\/54927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}