I’m in my office in Berkeley watching a live video feed from Cleveland. It’s October 2017 and the race-class narrative project is under way. This is one of the first focus groups we’ve sponsored. On my desktop screen, I watch three youngish men enter a small conference room: interviewer Jonathan Voss accompanied by two recruits, “white non-college male friends, age 35–50.” The space has the barren feel of a repurposed dentist’s office. There’s a translucent glass vase with white carnations on a white Formica table. The walls are gray above a waist-high perimeter band shaded toward Pepto-Bismol. Mini-blinds hide the windows. It’s a low-budget sensory deprivation tank. Maybe the effect is supposed to be soothing, a fitting place for undistracted conversations. But as the interview topic turns to race, I feel like I’m getting my teeth drilled.
We’ve invited Matt and Tom—not their real names—to answer a series of questions about race, class, and government. We need to understand where people are starting from before we get too far along crafting messages about coded racism in American politics. Rather than recruiting groups of strangers, the typical approach to focus groups, we initially invite pairs of friends. We hope that when they know each other, people will be more honest in discussing the sensitive subjects of class inequality and racism.
Matt and Tom have been friends for years, since they worked together on maintenance jobs. Tom left when he earned enough to support himself as a self-described “starving artist”; he shows up with a buzz cut and a long gray beard that drapes his black T-shirt. Matt, in a button-down blue oxford and wire-rimmed glasses, moved up from maintenance into management.
Getting them to talk about race turns out not to be a challenge. It’s what they say that sets me worrying.
“At least where we live, it is hard not to be prejudiced,” Tom says, “because bad things happen to you and it just happens to be a different race.” Tom moved out of the city for a while, and racism seemed to disappear. “I lived out where no one was racist at all because everyone was the same,” he explains. “I moved back to Cleveland, and you know you get jumped.”
Matt admits that seeing past stereotypes can be challenging. To illustrate, he offers a story that suggests he believes some stereotypes are true. He describes encountering a hypothetical “you” who is the quintessential welfare recipient, living large while the working man struggles: “You go down to the store and you’re filling your bag; your cart is overflowing and you whip out EBT. And I’m sitting there with five items wondering how I’m going to pay for it. Like, it’s hard, you know?”
They’re leery of speaking bluntly in racial terms, so they talk euphemistically about geography in a city racially divided by the Cuyahoga River. Still, every so often, the geographic façade crumbles. “Here it’s the east side and the west, and the east side is falling apart,” says Tom, the artist. “You don’t cross the river. It is unspoken,” Matt interjects. There’s a pause, then Tom explains the pitiable state of the east side—and who is to blame for that. “There are giant, beautiful houses, but they have just been trashed. It just happens to be those are Blacks or Hispanics.”
Years of mandatory busing to integrate the schools made things worse and amplified the racial tensions, they contend. “It destroyed the entire city,” says Matt. He’s the manager, so perhaps it’s no surprise he would add that the busing orders made matters worse because “Americans don’t like being told what to do.”
Racism against whites is the problem these men see. They back it up with personal stories. “I had one of the highest scores for the police entrance exam, but I was not a minority and I was male,” says Matt, talking about an earlier effort to move out of his maintenance job. “There’s nothing I could’ve changed on that and so I got bumped down like six hundred slots because of how I was born. Like it didn’t matter that I scored better than almost everybody. I wasn’t the right color and gender.”
Attuned to perceived racial limitations in their own lives, they resist seeing it in the lives of others. The conversation later turns to people of color and whether racism holds them back. Matt says no. “I think that it’s an excuse that you fail because you’re the wrong color, because I can think of hundreds of examples off the top of my head that will contradict you.” For Matt, centuries of history aren’t part of the equation. “But how many generations are we out of slavery? I had nothing to do with it.”
Tom responds that Blacks need to get over slavery. “Using that is just a horrible crutch to not trying, not working, not fixing yourself.”
It’s easy to presume from their words that Matt and Tom voted for Donald Trump. After Trump’s election rocked the nation, political researchers and journalists launched themselves with cameras, tape recorders, and binoculars into Trump’s America. Motivating most of them was the widely shared assumption that Democrats would have to win back Trump Country voters in the next election go-round. With the race-class project, we started from a different premise. We were less focused on wooing those who voted for Trump than on activating Democrats and independents.
That’s what made listening to Matt and Tom so disheartening—they were not Trump voters. Tom said he preferred Bernie Sanders, but with him out, voted for Hillary Clinton. Matt went third party, voting for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
Matt and Tom were supposedly the good guys. And yet the more they talked the clearer it became that they lived in a racially segregated environment where geography and stereotypes conspired to keep them separate from and suspicious toward people of color. How in the world could we convince people like this to enthusiastically join a multiracial progressive movement?
But as I kept listening, I learned something startling from Matt and Tom, something I simply did not know before. I was predisposed to hear stereotypes from a couple of white guys in Ohio, and they didn’t disappoint. But as the conversation went on, they also expressed racial sentiments that were enlightened. They seemed both racially reactionary and racially progressive, jumping back and forth between conflicting ideas.
Listen as Matt and Tom talk about their lives and you’ll hear them say things that contradict their earlier statements in remarkable ways.
“My profile picture for years was my son and his Black baby doll.” Matt shrugs as he says this, his voice going soft. He seems to marvel at his child’s innocence, giving a half laugh and explaining, “He had no idea. He loved that baby.” Matt doesn’t say what compelled him to use that photo to craft his public persona on social media, but it seems like the ideal of seeing people untainted by stereotypes holds a deep appeal.
From behind his gray beard, Tom chimes in: “Like my kids have friends all over the world that they talk to. They have no idea how they are different than us.” In their children, they seem to see a more beautiful world free from racism.
Matt defines racism as “walls that need to be removed that shouldn’t have been constructed in the first place.”
“There’s a lot of racism out there,” Tom admits. “You go to get a job, they will pick the white guy. Even though they are not allowed to do that, it happens. Whereas, if you show up Black, you are already one point behind.” It’s better to be poor and white than poor and Black, he says. “Sadly, the white man has ruled the planet for thousands of years.”
When it comes to the role of government, the men sound downright progressive. They are willing to work and pay taxes to fund a government that helps strangers meet the basic necessities of life—including, implicitly, strangers of different colors.
“I don’t want anybody to starve in this country,” says Matt, “like, ever.”
“Everyone should eat,” Matt continues. “And if part of my tax money goes to that, fine. Are there people who could have gotten jobs? Probably. But there are a lot of kids who need—”
“Education,” Tom interjects.
“Education and food and shelter,” Matt restarts. “And like if the government can provide that because no one else can, then it needs to be funded.” That’s the same Matt who had complained about welfare recipients on a binge in the grocery store.
Further into the conversation, interviewer Jonathan Voss asks Tom and Matt to make a list of words they associate with “racism,” and then asks Tom what he included. “Trump,” Tom says, because “he likes to shout racist stuff a lot.” Matt lists “fear,” “isolation,” and “prejudice.”
Strikingly, Matt has also written down “profit,” “power,” and “control.” This was important, because we wanted to push the public to view manipulating racial resentment as a strategy. Overwhelmingly, the country thinks about racism in terms of individual malice, and also as whites versus nonwhites. The Right promotes this sort of thinking, telling whites they face mistreatment because the country is tilting toward people of color. The Left offers more nuanced definitions of the multiple forms taken by racism: interpersonal, unconscious, structural, cultural. But even so, all these different forms of racism are typically discussed in a white-over-nonwhite framework.
In the race-class narrative project, however, we suspected that defeating dog whistle politics required a new perspective on racism. The plan was to encourage people to see racism as a weapon of the rich—the sort of behavior undertaken in pursuit of profit, power, and control.
Because the truth is, racism’s bottom line has always been more about money than hate.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” That’s future president Lyndon Johnson in 1960, explaining to Bill Moyers, then his young assistant, the import of racial epithets they had seen scrawled on signs as they traveled by motorcade through Tennessee. Johnson understood the relationship between racism and rule by the rich: economic royalists exploit race to rile working people, while they rig the game for themselves. That’s precisely the con that dog whistle politicians have been running for decades. It also fits Trump to a fake-gold T. His fiery attacks on people of color, lies about the dangers of unsecured borders, and budget-busting tax cuts for billionaires are not separate offenses but notes blown from the same whistle.
Could understanding the weapon provide the basis for fashioning a shield? Could it do even more than that, and actually provide a means to build political support for reclaiming government for working families? These questions impelled our focus groups and message testing. We wanted to know if we could shift the basic “us versus them” dynamic that is driving politics. Dog whistling pits whites against nonwhites. What if we could show voters that racism is a class weapon? Then the root conflict would become the rich versus the rest of us, white, Black, and brown, native and newcomer.
We were not looking to build a “class before race” frame—the sort of narrative that argues that class is more fundamental or universal than race and should replace race in political organizing. This framing too often presents those seeking racial justice as dividing the Left, rather than being a key and indispensable component of any progressive majority.
Nor did we seek to promote a “race and class” approach. In practice, many progressives argue for economic and racial justice while treating them as separate things that should both be addressed: We need racial justice. We need economic justice. Let’s do both. This hasn’t worked especially well. The do-both advice often leaves people unclear about how racial division connects to class war, and in turn uncertain why they should spend their limited energy on issues not primary to them.
Instead, we sought to develop a “race-class” strategy, race-hyphen-class. Race and class in the United States blend together like welded steel, fused by distant history as well as current politics. We believed the Left could prevail by turning this fusion to progressive advantage. Our theory was that the Left must simultaneously fight for racial justice and for economic fairness because they are inseparably connected.
The race-class narrative project talked to ordinary Americans, people of color as well as whites like Matt and Tom, to help us develop that merged approach. Throughout these conversations, we listened and learned, trying out and then honing initial formulations. Here’s the message we asked Matt and Tom to react to. It’s still an early effort to describe strategic racism in politics, but it hit important elements:
Conservative politicians in this country go to great lengths to paint government services as handouts to Black and brown people. They have positioned government as a force that takes taxes from supposedly hardworking whites and gives them to supposedly lazy Black and brown people. This is how Republicans get whites of every income level to vote for them, even as their policies rig the economy for the very rich, hurting regular people regardless of their race or ethnicity.
I watch nervously as Voss asks the two men, “So, what do you think about this statement?”
“It’s a great statement,” Tom tells him. “My father-in-law, this is exactly … he spouts this stuff every day.”
Matt quickly agrees. “You have a group of people who that’s their card they want to play to remain in power. If they can create that sentiment, then they will get a group of people to follow them, no matter what craziness they end up doing,” he says. “I can tell you that more white people receive government assistance than any other people group but they won’t acknowledge that, I feel. As you said, they blame others.”
To give Matt and Tom as much room as possible to disagree, Voss intentionally communicates skepticism. He’s a partner in Celinda Lake’s polling firm, and like Lake, keeps his pulse on views outside the Washington, DC, beltway by regularly conducting focus groups in person. Until this point, Voss has been a blank slate, but now he goes edgy to convey disbelief and draw the men out.
“Do you feel that the right wing actively works to demonize government doing this intentionally?” His voice rises on the last word to suggest hesitancy. As Matt starts to answer, Voss interrupts to push the issue:
“I mean does this seem like bullshit to you or does this seem like actual—”
Matt cuts him off, insisting, “That’s what they do.”
Were Matt and Tom exceptions in their receptivity to our race-class story? Not at all. Based partly on their reactions, we ultimately crafted nine slightly different takes of the race-class narrative. Some iterations stressed patriotism or unions or putting children first, but all told the basic race-class story offered to Matt and Tom, with one key addition. Matt and Tom heard an early version that focused on criticizing the Right for intentionally dividing us. We found the negativity of this message hampered its acceptance, and that it became far more energizing when we added a positive call for people to join together.
After shaping these messages, we poll-tested them. We ran a national poll with 2,000 respondents, and also did polling in four states and with union households. The poll asked respondents whether they found various messages convincing, using a scale of zero to one hundred. In addition to the race-class messages, we also offered a typical dog whistle narrative promoting racial fear. How did the race-class messages perform? They trounced the racial fear story. The Right’s dog whistle narrative received an average convincing rating of 65. Every one of the nine race-class messages beat that, earning average convincing ratings ranging from a low of 68 to a high of 72.
We also tested a message designed to replicate the habitual Democratic response to dog whistle politics. Since the 1970s, the predominant response among liberals to dog whistling has been and remains to stay silent about it, out of concern that talking frankly about racism alienates white voters. Colorblind economics—ignoring race in favor of pocketbook issues—is standard liberal advice for how to beat the opposition. We tested a colorblind economic message, and it earned a mean convincing rating of 68. That meant that it tied the two worst-performing race-class messages, but was not as convincing as seven others. Our race-class messages largely outperformed the standard liberal message that superficially avoids race.
These results were especially encouraging given how new our messages were. Typically, people favor familiar arguments—stories that by their very repetition pervade their waking and sleeping minds. The dog whistle message very much has this characteristic. So too does today’s colorblind economic populism. Republicans and Democrats bombard the public with these respective messages relentlessly.
Knowing the power of this “familiarity bias” from her communications experience, when Anat Shenker-Osorio and I first talked about testing race-class messages, she warned that the best we could hope for was that our innovative messages did not lose too badly. Their novelty, she cautioned, put them in a hole. But the very first time people heard the insurgent race-class messages, they found every version more convincing than the opposition’s racial fear message and also found most more convincing than the colorblind economic populism approach. In the realm of message testing, this was a remarkably promising first showing.
What contributed to these messages coming across as convincing? After all, they were addressing topics typically considered taboo in American politics, including racism and class warfare.
Importantly, the race-class messages seemed to succeed not despite but because they broached these difficult conversations. From the very outset of the focus group conversations, it became immediately clear that most participants were keenly troubled by society’s racial divisions and also by spreading economic hardship for most and vast wealth for a few. Participants wanted to talk about these things. But they felt betrayed in various ways by the existing approaches, and didn’t know how to productively name what they deeply sensed. The race-class narratives seemed to provide the storyline they were already groping toward.
“Racism” in particular proved an emotionally volatile concept. Listen as Celinda Lake talks with a white woman probably in her late thirties, in a focus group the race-class project held in Denver. Lake asks, “How do you feel about racism?” There is a long pause as the woman, in jeans and Converse sneakers, thinks about the question. Then as she speaks, her comments stretch out with more pauses, as if she’s carefully picking her way through thorns:
“I don’t notice it like in my little world so much.… I don’t … I don’t get too involved in it because I don’t want to … it freaks me out.”
“So why does it freak you out,” Lake gently inquires.
“It’s overwhelming … It’s a lot of energy … It’s a lot of strong emotions. And it’s a lot of heated stuff. And it just kind of overwhelms me.” She stumbles phrase by phrase, pondering her explanations.
Then the dam seems to break and her words rush out as she describes how people “get worked up” and “in your face” when race is the subject. “It’s like ‘I can get bigger than you and I’m gonna get more intense and I’m gonna scare the crap out of you.’ And nothing really beneficial happens.”
This woman experienced conversations about racism as intense and scary, even physically threatening, and so she avoided them. Perhaps she recalled a particular and especially aggressive encounter. It’s possible, though, that she was exhibiting what the sociologist and educator Robin DiAngelo terms “white fragility.” Over her years as a racial justice trainer, DiAngelo has come to expect a range of strong defensive responses from whites when exposed to disorienting conversations about race. Among these reactions, whites frequently report feeling physically unsafe. “Whites often confuse comfort with safety and state that we don’t feel safe when what we really mean is that we don’t feel comfortable,” DiAngelo observes.1
For some readers, that sort of discomfort may kick in with this book, or when contemplating whether to actively seek to build cross-racial solidarity. It might seem safer to stick with colorblindness—the norm of pretending, sometimes even to oneself, not to notice racial group membership or racial dynamics. But experience teaches that avoiding problems by sweeping them under the rug works poorly with issues any larger than grains of sand. It cannot possibly work with the boulders of racial division.
Still, to be fair, among many of those insisting that the Left must frontally address race and racism, there is a lot of anger. Recall my students, steeped in the history of white supremacy and battling to make their justice claims heard. Their outrage is warranted. But it also makes conversations about racism more fraught. Those new to conversations about racism have to push through their discomfort. Those demanding attention to racism have to be thoughtful about when and how to call people in or out.
One potential trap involves the meanings of the words “racism” and “racist.” These terms carry tremendous social and political power because they communicate moral condemnation. But precisely because “racism” and “racist” carry so much power, they have been dumbed down to refer to only the narrowest range of conduct. The Right has especially promoted an impoverished conception of racism that is now accepted by broad swaths of the country. The result is that for many people, including many on the Left, “racism” does not extend past treating another person badly for reasons connected to their skin color, while “racist” exclusively identifies a bigoted culprit.
Like Tom, huge numbers of Americans already think that “racist” describes Donald Trump. When polled the week before the 2016 election, 52 percent of registered voters agreed that word applied to him.2 That was before Trump pursued his Muslim ban and before his “shithole countries” comment, his stripping of children from their parents at the border, and his description of immigrants as “animals” who “infest” our country.
But what does “racist” mean to most of those who apply it to Trump? If “racist” is limited to meaning only personal antipathy, many in the middle and on the Left may be mistaking as personal bigotry what at root is political strategy. Perversely, this may help Trump and politicians like him. In ways that will be explained, Trump has perfected the art of provoking liberal accusations of bigotry that offend and in turn build support from his base.
As far as messaging is concerned, because “racism” is explosive and subject to multiple meanings, depending on the audience, it may be good advice to drop the word. The term itself is not necessary. The race-class project found it more effective to focus instead on the actual form and function of the racial dynamics being challenged—for example, by pointing not at “racist” politicians, but at politicians who “deliberately distract us with fear mongering, especially along racial, ethnic, and religious lines.”
As discussed in this book, “racism” takes many shapes. Of particular importance, racism often operates unconsciously as a set of attitudes and beliefs absorbed by osmosis, even by people firmly opposed to racism. Also, racism can be strategic: a calculated effort to exploit racial divisions for one’s own ends. Both of these very different sorts of racism fuel the success of dog whistle politics.
Racism also easily works alongside other social dynamics, such as patriarchy, fear of crime, or job insecurity. To identify a likely racial component in political speech, voting decisions, or public policies is not to claim that race explains everything, only that it may contribute an important element.
How about “class”? In the race-class narrative project, we tested terms like “the wealthy few” and “powerful elites.” They did not resonate as well as “wealthy special interests who rig the rules” and “the greedy few.” What’s the difference?
Terms like the wealthy few or powerful elites describe a class of people, a whole group. Many felt it was unfair to single out groups of people for blame. This felt a lot like simply a reverse of what the Right does. The pushback from many often took this form: They say blame people of color, you say blame the rich. A pox on both of you and your blame games. Beyond this, it’s likely people especially resisted blaming the rich because being wealthy is a widely shared aspiration. When it comes to class consciousness, it seems many Americans believe they belong to the not-yet-rich class. Simply invoking the upper class as a threat proved unhelpful.
In contrast, respondents were far more comfortable faulting people for ill motives. To describe a villain required identifying threatening actors plus explaining why they acted as they did. “Wealthy special interests who rig the rules” implies a profit motive; the “greedy few” identifies actors by their selfish intentions. The fact that the merchants of division gain by dividing Americans resonates forcefully because it connects division to a common and easily understood human drive.
On a different level than messaging, in thinking about what’s happening in society, motives both matter and don’t matter. “There’s class warfare, all right,” said Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor and one of America’s leading philanthropists. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”3 When Buffett said this in 2006, he could only anticipate what the investigative journalist Jane Mayer would uncover in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
In the preface to the 2017 paperback edition, Mayer updated her reporting on the political ambitions of the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who control a huge petro-chemical and industrial conglomerate. Their goal is to limit the potential tax burden on the very wealthy by opposing government efforts to help working people, and also to rewrite market and environmental regulations so that their industries can rake in barrels of money. Despite Trump’s posturing as a populist, he appointed numerous political officers with deep ties to the Koch machine, not least his vice president, Mike Pence. “Amazingly, in 2016 the Kochs’ private network of political groups had a bigger payroll than the Republican National Committee,” Mayer wrote. “The tentacles of the ‘Kochtopus,’ as their sprawling political machine was known, were already encircling the Trump administration before it had even officially taken power.” The Kochtopus, Mayer pointed out, is “sponsored by just four hundred or so of the richest people in the country.”4
But the threat of great wealth to society goes beyond the selfish motives of identifiable culprits. Greed is not the central problem, nor, likewise, will the main solution come from the good intentions of progressive philanthropists. As the country’s founders long ago recognized, democracy exists in tension with great riches. Democracy sets the conditions for competitive markets and entrepreneurial freedom, but is threatened by concentrated wealth and its tendency to capture government for its own benefit. Justice Louis Brandeis, one of the great jurists of the New Deal era, warned, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Or so those on the Left tend to think, while those on the Right typically disagree. I use the terms “Left” and “Right” to talk about competing constellations of ideas around race, class, and government. By their very nature, political labels can refer to many different ideas. The race-class narrative project especially focused on race, class, and government because those are the core elements of the Right’s story, and in turn the Left must reweave these elements into a progressive counterstory. I also use “progressive” and “reactionary” as loose synonyms for Left and Right.
In contrast, I avoid the term “conservative.” Today’s Right has largely abandoned conservatism, understood as a commitment to protecting important social institutions, to a stable economy that works for the vast majority of the polity, and to a respect for tradition that nevertheless accepts that progress in human societies depends on evolutions in cultural and political norms. Promoting the interest of a new economic oligarchy in the face of enormous inequality is not conservatism. Neither is nostalgia for an imagined past of culturally sanctified hierarchy. Both of these can quickly lead to violence and the destruction of stabilizing social norms and institutions—the sorts of dynamics typically condemned by conservatism. Like the conservative commentator David Frum, I too would welcome “a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible.” Though they often seek to wrap themselves in the “conservative” mantle, this is not today’s Right.5
Obviously, “Left” and “Right” can be too sweeping. Within the Right and, even more, the Left, are huge ranges of policy ideas, divergent priorities, and competing strategies. Right and Left do not exist as monoliths; they are not celluloid giants, Godzilla versus King Kong, battling each other while unified in their own thinking and completely coordinated in their actions. Left versus Right is more akin to clashing weather fronts that pack tremendous power yet are composed of millions of air particles and rain drops swirling in cross-cutting currents.
Equally important, many Americans are neither Left nor Right. Americans as a whole are only loosely committed to these contending belief systems about race, class, and government. About one out of five voters embrace Left views, and they are opposed by a similar number subscribing to the Right’s story.
That leaves Matt and Tom in the majority, among the three in five people in the large convergence zone between weather systems. These are the people who must be brought along in big numbers to shift the country’s direction. As individuals, Matt and Tom are unlikely heroes. But as stand-ins for the vast middle, they reflect the way many voters toggle quickly between contradictory notions, sometimes drawing on one way of seeing the world and then bouncing to conflicting ideas about society.
Encompassing so many Americans, this persuadable group roughly tracks the demographics of the country as a whole. It’s especially critical to recognize that the persuadable middle is not simply code for “white voters.” The dominant Democratic mindset immediately after the 2016 election was to win back “the working class,” which implicitly coded as white. But most people of color fall into the variable middle, and altogether minorities account for one-third of this pivotal majority.
In discussing the race-class research, “people of color” serves as shorthand for the two largest nonwhite groups in the United States, African Americans and Latinxs.* Though there are attitudinal differences between the two groups, there’s still a fair amount of overlap in their views. Beyond these two groups, a separate race-class narrative project survey in September 2018 found that there was also enough commonality to justify including Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Hawaiians under the “people of color” umbrella.6
This book routinely refers to racial groups as if they’re real—because they are. They’re real not as biological entities, of course. There’s no fixed sameness among “whites” or any other group, nor any characteristics found on only one side of some natural color line. But as large social groups, there are important differences associated with race, variations that connect to life experiences, opportunities, attitudes, and worldviews. Because the Right has exploited racial division as its principal political weapon for five decades and counting, any practical conversation about American politics must name and discuss racial groups.
The crux for progress on both racial and economic justice is countering the Right’s racial messages. The dark magic of dog whistling lies in convincing people that, to keep their family safe, they must elect politicians who will ban Muslims, build a wall against Mexicans, and double down on imprisoning African Americans—when in reality they are electing politicians indebted to, and often members of, a new oligarchy.
This is when most on the Left despair. They recognize that those in the broad middle accept reactionary views that dispose them to racial fears and resentments. How, then, to convince this large group that those beliefs are racist and wrong? The task seems akin to tearing down a mountain of racism with the small wooden spoons of public service announcements or anti-racist presentations.
But the challenge is not insurmountable. It’s true that those in the middle—most whites and most people of color, too—filter the world through stereotypes and racist ideas. It’s also true, though, that they simultaneously hold progressive racial ideals. The job ahead is not to start from scratch in educating the broad middle about racism, but to speak to the anti-racist convictions they already embrace. The dots are there. The task is to connect them. This is no walk in the park, but neither is it taking a spoon to Everest. Our research suggests that the Left can build a cross-racial movement for racial and economic justice by convincing the broad middle that voting their racial ideals rather than their racist phobias will help them take care of their families.
* Many young people, especially activists and those in higher education, prefer “Latinx” to synonyms like “Latino” or “Hispanic.” The “x” signals that no gender is indicated by the term, in contrast to “Latino,” which is gendered male. In addition, the “x” carries a nonwhite racial resonance, in contrast to “Hispanic,” which is often used by persons who see themselves as white. “X” also echoes the prevalence of that letter in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, giving “Latinx” a pre-contact flavor. The “x” also gestures toward the name of the Black radical Malcolm X, a reminder that many in the Latinx community are Black. The poet and journalist Ed Morales offers a full discussion in his 2018 book, Latinx.