Toni Morrison: Fear Of Losing White Privilege Led To Trump’s Election

“The comfort of being ‘naturally better than’ is hard to give up.”

Toni Morrison has writ­ten a pow­er­ful essay in the after­math of Donald Trump’s elec­tion as pres­i­dent of the United States, and it gets right to the heart of why Trump won. In a piece titled “Mourning For Whiteness” from the November 21 print issue of the New Yorker (pub­lished online Monday), the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning nov­el­ist argues that Trump won due to the ter­ror of priv­i­leged white men in the face of a rapid­ly diver­si­fy­ing country.

“Under slave laws, the neces­si­ty for col­or rank­ings was obvi­ous, but in America today, post-civ­il-rights leg­is­la­tion, white people’s con­vic­tion of their nat­ur­al supe­ri­or­i­ty is being lost,” Morrison writes. “There are ‘peo­ple of col­or’ every­where, threat­en­ing to erase this long-under­stood def­i­n­i­tion of America. And what then? Another black President? A pre­dom­i­nant­ly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.”

As Morrison explains it, the sub­con­scious fear of los­ing the “com­fort of being nat­u­ral­ly bet­ter than,” the com­fort of not being fol­lowed in a depart­ment store for instance, was a huge moti­va­tor for many White Americans. Morrison argues that white Americans and par­tic­u­lar­ly white men are so afraid of the col­lapse of white priv­i­lege that they “flocked to a polit­i­cal plat­form that sup­ports and trans­lates vio­lence against the defense­less as strength.”

She con­cludes:

On Election Day, how eager­ly so many white vot­ers — both the poor­ly edu­cat­ed and the well edu­cat­ed — embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The can­di­date whose com­pa­ny has been sued by the Justice Department for not rent­ing apart­ments to black peo­ple. The can­di­date who ques­tioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to con­done the beat­ing of a Black Lives Matter pro­test­er at a cam­paign ral­ly. The can­di­date who kept black work­ers off the floors of his casi­nos. The can­di­date who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Morrison’s take on the elec­tion is one that has been echoed by many oth­er com­men­ta­tors, includ­ing Van Jones, who described it as a “white­lash against a chang­ing coun­try.” As the uptick in hate crimes across the coun­try and Trump’s appoint­ment of con­tro­ver­sial fig­ures like Steve Bannon to his cab­i­net con­tin­ues, it becomes clear­er and clear­er and clear­er that race most def­i­nite­ly played a role in this elec­tion.  http://​www​.huff​in​g​ton​post​.com/​e​n​t​r​y​/​t​o​n​i​-​m​o​r​r​i​s​o​n​-​f​e​a​r​-​o​f​-​l​o​s​i​n​g​-​w​h​i​t​e​-​p​r​i​v​i​l​e​g​e​-​l​e​d​-​t​o​-​t​r​u​m​p​s​-​e​l​e​c​t​i​o​n​_​u​s​_​5​8​3​3​0​e​e​2​e​4​b​0​5​8​c​e​7​a​a​c​0​964

Read the full essay at The New Yorker.