His characterization of the 'rendition' is pretty fair and accurate:

“We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker, speaking of the white working class. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.

The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.”


Firstly, Coates does well to represent that viewpoint fairly. His first attempts to disprove this view (henceforth referred to as 'the rendition') by identifying Trump's massive white coalition. 'It wasn't just poor whites that voted Trump'. But there's a huge error in his statistical analysis. He points to Trump's rich white votes as evidence the rendition is wrong. But rich white people ALWAYS have voted Republican. What we need to look at is the disparity between Obama's two election results and Hillary Clinton's. And contrasting those two makes it pretty clear that Obama received considerably more votes from poor whites than Clinton did. Rich white people didn't vote for Obama just like they didn't vote for Clinton. The CHANGE was that Obama got alot more poor white votes than Clinton did and that certainly DOES lend credence to the 'rendition' provided by Murray and Bourdain. (It should be noted that another huge disparity was voter turnout amongst racial minorities and that made a significant impact as well)

Coates repeatedly refers to Trump's white coalition as a 'transfiguration' or more accurately (as he states) 'a return to form'. But again....the voting patterns really didn't change much from Obama's elections and Trumps. Minorities voted less....and a chunk of poor white voters switched from democrat to republican. Virtually everything else stayed more or less the same. And understanding that makes a large portion of Coate's text seem ridiculous (and extremely selective in data analysis). And that's not even to mention the question EVERY single clear-thinking person would ask (and Coates skates around over and over again)....which is 'why did Obama do better with white voters than Hillary?'. And....to be blunt....how did a black man win a presidential election in a society founded on (and currently based on) white supremacy in the first place? If Trump's voters were motivated by their inherited white supremacy....why weren't they motivated by white supremacy during Obama's years?

Coates then sets his sights on the internal debate within the left that's been going on for years. Its essentially a battle over WHICH elements of one's identity they should embrace and which ones they should set aside. He correctly identifies the faction of the left that claims we should set aside 'identity politics' because they distract us from the TRUE oppression outlined by Marxist philosophy. In other words....race is used as a dividing tactic so that the proletariat doesn't unite. 'Emphasize your identity in terms of class instead of race so that working class people can unite and take power back from the evil rich people' type of thing. Coates argues that black people should do the inverse. They should minimize their class identity (shared with white people) and emphasize their racial identity in it's place. And he references proletariat advocates from hundreds of years ago to make this point. I don't see how those historical references are relevant but they certainly ARE convenient.

Fact is...one would have a rather difficult time finding current Marxists saying explicitly racist things. Coates seems to think that the Marxist leftists of today are 'hiding' their racism and we can prove that by quoting Marxists (rather selectively) from a hundred years ago. I argue that if modern day Marxist protesters are REALLY racist...we should be able to prove it by quoting THEM. Not by quoting Scottish Marxists from the 1800s. (as a side note....anyone that knows anything about MLK would know that he was definitely NOT on board with Coate's abandoning non-black Marxist leftists. He really shouldn't reference MLK unless he's willing to identify MLK's allegiance to proletariat causes beyond racial identities and argue against it)

When referring to Bernie Sanders....Coates writes 'The upshot—attacking one specimen of identity politics after having invoked another—was unfortunate.' But this is EXACTLY what he is doing. He is very clearly invoking black identity while attacking working class identity. I would argue that the leftist position he's attacking....characterized by 'we should forget about race identity because it's distracting us from the REAL oppression of proletariat-bourgeois dynamics'....is ALSO guilty of the same thing. And I remember confronting this at university campus in the 90's.....I would say 'well aren't you just saying engage in THIS identity politic (being working class) and ignore THIS one (race). Coates is simply doing the inverse. Ignore your class identity and focus on the race. My SO takes considerable issue with this contention. Does a poor black American have more in common with Will Smith than his poor white neighbor? There's alot to talk about there but moving on.....

Perhaps the most ridiculous claim that Coates makes is that identity politics gave us Barack Obama for 8 years. He makes this claim because it was identity politics that motivated record turnout in the black vote. It's just such an absurd claim. If the entire country was motivated by racial identity politics an Obama presidency would be IMPOSSIBLE. White people who vote for Obama were not motivated by race identity politics. If they were...they would have voted for the white guys. THE ONLY WAY A MINORITY (by race, sexual preference or any other form) CAN GAIN POWER IN A DEMOCRACY IS IF THE PEOPLE ARE NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT motivated by identity politics. It's completely ridiculous for him to assert that Obama's success was a result of identity politics when, in fact, his success was a result of the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of identity politics. White people voted for Obama because of the ISSUES and his ideas.

Identity politics, when taken to their logical extreme, are absolutely disastrous for minorities. It would result in the 'tyranny of the majority'. Coates writes 'All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.' Fucking ridiculous. When a straight person marches for gay marraige...they are NOT engaging in identity politics. They are fighting for gay marraige because it's the ethical position....not because they identify as 'straight'. And only ONE example disproves Coate's claim because he is so absolute about it. Also....we certainly DO rightfully identify when white people engage in identity politics. The alt-right is white and engaging in identity politics.

I can't wait to get Coate's book though.