The post-election parsing has begun in earnest, no matter that we are still several weeks from Biden taking the oath of office. People have noticed that the country did not go whole-hog down the path laid out by the Left, the Justice Democrats, the socialist-wannabes, and the wokerati, that the Democrats (for now, at least) did not, as predicted, take over the Senate, and actually lost about nine seats in the House, despite their greatest asset, the Untethered Orange Id himself, providing them ample electoral ammunition.
In particular, it has not gone unnoticed that latinos voted for Trump in substantial numbers, that the Cuban community in Florida roundly rejected the Dems’ socialistic message, and that the purportedly borderline-swing state of Texas remained comfortably red. None of this sat well with Ida Bae Wells, a self-proclaimed “slanderous & nasty-minded mulattress,” who writes for the New York Times Magazine and is a part of the 1619 Project:
One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.
Up until now, the narrative has been that those who aren’t white-European are “People of Color” (PoC), that PoC are oppressed, and that systemic racism affects them in all aspects of society and life. As is often the case, however, people let truths slip past their guard from time to time. Seems that, for at least one progressive, that PoC is about ideology, not about ethnic origins, or even actual “color.”
Truth be told, we knew that already. Blacks, latinos, and other racial/ethnic minorities who don’t conform to leftist or progressive political ideology are considered traitors and heretics, and are at the receiving end of terrible scorn and name-calling. Ditto for women. We also have examples of white people self-identifying as PoC, with little more than deflection and uncomfortable squirming by the wokerati after they’ve been outed, because their politics were of the ‘correct’ sort.
New distinctions get mainstreamed when it serves political ideology. When George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin captured national attention, some major media outlets informed us that Zimmerman, whose mother was born in Peru and therefore, per the canons of identity politics, would be considered hispanic, was actually “white hispanic.” Why would they do this? To preserve the narrative that racism and bigotry are the exclusive province of white people, and tamp down the reality that anyone of any race or ethnicity can be a racist or bigot. Since that failed to gain traction, they’ve moved on to a wholesale redefinition of racism that ensures only white people will be dubbed so, but that’s a matter for another day.
Trump lost the election, but not by the landslide that the Left predicted (or fantasized about), and he drew substantially more votes from PoC than previous Republican candidates. The excuse all over the left-leaning media is that, apart from the heretics and apostates who actively threw in with a President they’d been told for years was a racist and a bigot, those voters fell for lies and disinformation. No introspection, no consideration that, just perhaps, those voters didn’t buy what Biden and the Democratic Party were selling, that Trump’s brand of nativism had an appeal that drew in more than just ignorant, angry white bigots, or that many communities of color hold values (e.g. religiosity, family, and work ethic/entrepreneurship) that the Democratic Party has abandoned in favor of the “social justice” narrative that’s peddled mostly by ‘privileged’ whites.
I don’t endorse Trumpism, except where it happens to intersect with libertarian values, but it’s obvious that it has appealed to tens of millions of voters, not all of them white. If the Democrats choose to ignore this reality, dismiss the disconnect between many PoC and the Left’s current narrative, and simply continue to assume that the minority communities are “theirs” but for a handful of race-traitors, they’re going to be in for yet another disappointment next election.
No one likes to be taken for granted, especially by people who look down on anyone who dares have an independent thought.
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