No doubt, Columbia would offer him a king’s ransom and every other academic perk imaginable. But, for me, to find the first black President—a former community organizer who has ventured more daringly outside the Oval Office (with a stop at a prison, a speech at a mosque, an impending visit to Cuba) than any other modern President—teaching at Columbia (or any school like it) would be a disappointment. To put it bluntly, rich white kids at rich white schools don’t need him. But there are places, and students, that do. I’d like to suggest three.
..Obama could teach at a historically black college/university, or H.B.C.U., as the common parlance has it. Some of the most illustrious names of the past American century, from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Thurgood Marshall to Toni Morrison, were educated at these schools.
.. Yet another place that could make great use of Obama’s talent and prestige would be any one of the nation’s eleven hundred community colleges.
.. The third place Obama could teach is perhaps the most improbable, but the one I hope he most strongly considers. I think Obama should teach, for one year, for even just part of the time, in an inner-city K-12 public school. A single course in U.S. government for high-school seniors would suit him well.
.. In 2013, less than two per cent of public-school teachers were black men, which tells us that the overwhelming majority of kids, both black and white, have little direct exposure to professional black men in their daily lives. This has had a disastrous effect on the development of black students, and especially black boys, contributing to their staggering levels of behavioral issues, suspensions, and, ultimately, dropouts.
.. A recent study by the Department of Education found that black boys receive more than two-thirds of all public-school suspensions. Another study showed that black students are less likely to be recommended for gifted programs when they are taught by non-black teachers.
Donald Trump, Chicago, and the Lessons of 1968
But it’s also clear that this is only Trump’s public slogan. The implicit one, increasingly difficult to avoid as the campaign winds closer to the nomination, is a masterstroke of racial populism: White Lives Matter.
.. The Chicago Democratic Convention protests were directed at a political establishment that was responsible for Vietnam, and more broadly for a sense that skewed national priorities had victimized ordinary citizens. Trump’s supporters are not animated by any literal war, but they are fully invested in a rhetorical one, and all the indignation, victimhood, and chaos-brokering of 1968 finds its reactionary equivalent in the current Republican front-runner.
Early dismissals of Trump (including mine) were rooted in a presumption that the public would see through the billionaire’s cartoonish braggadocio and ostentatious displays of wealth.
.. Polls conducted during the Obama era have consistently shown that large pluralities of whites believe that they, not blacks, Latinos, or Asian-Americans, are the primary victims of racism in contemporary America.
.. Trump is, in a very real sense, presiding over a White Lives Matter movement.
.. The low-tax, anti-government rhetoric that defines modern Republicanism has its roots in the simmering white resentments that emerged in the late nineteen-sixties, animated by the belief that the federal government had become a tool for redistribution of white wealth into the hands of undeserving black and brown communities. Donald Trump represents the full expression of that belief.
.. Earlier this week, a Trump supporter punched a black protester in the face. (Police for some reason then scrambled to seize and handcuff the protester, not the punch-thrower, though the punch-thrower was later charged with assault.)
How David Duke’s (Very Live) Ghost Haunts Donald Trump
On a moonlit night 39 years ago outside of San Diego, three sedans sped along back roads to pass on claims of illegal alien sightings to federal border agents. In the lead vehicle was David Duke, the mediagenic grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and attached to his sedan was a white hand-painted sign: “Klan Border Watch.” Trailing Duke were three dozen reporters, photographers and TV cameramen who captured a carefully manufactured scene that resonated with those who feared, then as now, hordes of immigrants illegally crossing into the United States.
.. I don’t think Trump equivocated over Duke by chance. As Duke’s biographer, I find many echoes of Duke in what Trump says and does, and in their similar appeal to disaffected white voters.
.. I find many echoes of Duke in what Trump says and does, and in their similar appeal to disaffected white voters.
.. his Klan past obscured his true obsession—combatting Jews who he believes are bent on using blacks and brown-skinned immigrants to undermine the white race.
.. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that I have gotten in Louisiana,” Duke told his listeners. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that [Pat] Buchanan got. He’s getting the same votes as George Wallace.”
.. “Although nominally a Republican, Duke did not win by assembling the pieces of a traditional Republican coalition,”
.. When Duke was stopped for speeding while he raced around the state, not once did a state trooper give him a ticket. “Let me tell you something,” his campaign aide later told me, “those troopers were all for David.”
.. But his guiding light is actually the profound conviction that Jews are using their control or ownership of big media outlets (think of the New York Times and the Newhouse family) to force whites to live, study and work with blacks, who he believes are genetically inferior. When all those folks rub elbows, miscegenation inevitably results, he believes. The white gene pool is weakened.
.. It’s about what he calls “the demographic threat to America,” and he’s convinced Jews are behind it. “When he’s taking on the immigration, the open borders,” Duke said on the radio, “he’s really taking on the Jewish establishment and he’s taking on the neocons who control the Republican Party.”
.. “The reason we have this incredible destruction of both Europe and America,” he said on the radio, “is because we have an alien race, an alien people who have taken over our countries, taken over our media, taken over our banking, and only Donald Trump of any Republican has spoken up against Wall Street and the Jewish banks like Goldman Sachs.”
.. created his own faction of the Klan after graduating from Louisiana State University because he saw the Klan as a way to generate news coverage to get out his white-rights message.
.. While he ran for the state Senate, I reported that for years he had celebrated Hitler’s birthday (complete with a cake) and had said repeatedly that the Holocaust was a hoax trumped up by Jews to win sympathy. I reported that he sold Mein Kampf and neo-Nazi books out of his legislative office. I even reported that he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and hadn’t paid all of his taxes.
His supporters didn’t care. They accused me and the Times-Picayune of being part of the liberal political establishment.
.. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.”
Donald Trump has disavowed Duke. But in important ways he still acts and sounds like him.
Donald Trump, the Winning Wild Card
For a while the base of the G.O.P. has been far closer to where Trump is on the issues than their leadership. The base of the G.O.P. has never really been true “free-traders,” they’ve always been “fair traders,” the leadership of the party wants to embrace some form of amnesty for illegals, the base of the party does not.
.. Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.
.. “You could make a case that the politics of rage has gone from George Wallace, morphed into Nixon and the southern states strategy, then Gingrich and his merry band, into Fox News/Limbaugh/Tea Party Republicans,” Larry O’Brien III (a son of Lawrence Francis “Larry” O’Brien, who was John F. Kennedy’s chief political strategist) wrote me, adding
It’s not quite linear, but is Trump a sea change, a big leap, or merely the next iteration?
.. Trump is simply reflecting what poor voters already know: that they have been sold a bill of goods. They respond to his naked hatred of people of color and women because that is the language and the argument they have known their whole lives, but they also like his apparent attacks on the people who betrayed them.
.. The big question,” Baker writes,
is whether such a politics will be a dead end that tries to set the clock back by being a white people’s populism — treating African Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic/racial groups as the enemy. Or whether it will be a forward thinking approach that formulates an economic policy designed to reverse the enormous upward redistribution that has been engineered by the leadership of both political parties over the last three and half decades.