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.