In the spring of 2023, in a cramped classroom in the Hudson Valley, I taught an undergraduate seminar on the courage to think about race in unconventional ways. It revolved around reading books by Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson and Albert Murray. These minds had shaped and refined my thinking about the idea of America, the fundamentally mongrel populations that inhabit it, as well as the yet-to-be-perfected flesh-and-blood nation of the future we might one day bring forth in unison.
Early in the semester, as I waxed exuberant about the unifying possibilities of the 2008 election, I was met by a conference table ringed with blank stares. For my clever and earnest students, I realized, the earth-shattering political achievements of the beleaguered but still unfolding present were nothing but the vaguest rumor of an abstract history.
“Professor,” a diligent young woman from Queens who described herself as Latina and applied a no-nonsense activist lens and corresponding vocabulary to most engagements with the world, voiced what all her classmates must have been thinking. “I was 4 years old in 2008. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Their experience of this country, and themselves, couldn’t have differed more from my own, or from many of the 19th- and 20th-century authors on our syllabus. I assigned these writers because they had so courageously laid the intellectual and moral framework that a figure like Barack Obama would one day harness.
I am old enough now to appreciate that there can be only one politician in your lifetime who can truly move you to dream. I feel lucky to have had that experience through Mr. Obama. My students that semester — white, Latino and Asian teens and 20-somethings whose political views had been forged in relation to the reactionary populism of Donald Trump and through a certain skepticism of the American idea itself — had yet to encounter such an inspirational figure. Race pessimism, even a kind of mass learned helplessness, was instead the weather that enveloped them.
When my friend Coleman Hughes guest-lectured on his case for colorblindness, several of them were visibly unnerved, suggesting that the idea itself was a form of anti-Blackness. Most maintained that one could no more “retire” from race, as Adrian Piper — another of the authors we wrestled with — aspired to do, than one could teleport up from the classroom.
To be “antiracist,” the modish catchall term within their peer group that had replaced colorblindness, meant, paradoxically to my mind, to insist on and ultimately help perpetuate the same limiting identities bequeathed by the authors of American racism.
About 20 years separated me from my students. President Trump, not Mr. Obama, has overseen their political awakening. As he meticulously effaced his immediate predecessor’s legacy, my students learned to see themselves primarily as members of “ascriptive groups,” categories to which they belong through the accident of birth, not choice.
I clocked in them a well-meaning but oppositional progressivism steeped in what they think of as “moral clarity” that steadily reduced all political, cultural and even intellectual concerns to broader questions of group-based social justice for which there was intended to be a collective point of view. In preparation for Mr. Hughes’s visit, we watched a video of his 2019 congressional testimony against reparations. Some expressed surprise that a Black person could sincerely oppose the policy on its merits.
The way that many of my students saw the world took on the dimensions of something more ambitious than mere trade-offs, incremental change or pragmatism: It is a national storytelling project that appeared to me to ensure division and, in its most dangerous forms, verged on a kind of ethnic determinism.
Most of my students would have been familiar with Hannah Arendt’s dictum that if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. In the Trump era, for those who did not support the once and future president and who indeed felt antagonized by his entire agenda, the choice to emphasize and even fetishize their racial (and other forms of) identity seemed like common sense.
As we now see clearly, the brief hiatus of racial transcendence of the early Obama years was overwhelmingly to the benefit of the single most cynical and provocative political leader in contemporary history. One of the many ironies of the rise, fall and subsequent redemption of President Trump is that in each of the three successive presidential elections he has participated in, he has steadily grown his own multiracial coalition, tallying some of the strongest numbers with nonwhite voters in Republican Party history.
Rather counterintuitively, Mr. Obama’s “post-racial” movement and the passing good will it engendered notwithstanding, it was Mr. Trump’s victory in 2024 that amounted to the least racially polarized presidential election in more than a generation. One essential lesson I draw from this is that there remains a significant and seemingly growing share of minorities who do not wish to be dealt with only insofar as we are minorities.
Yet through my students’ lack of familiarity with the recent journey this country has undertaken, I began to grasp how difficult it is today even to recall the ascent of Barack Hussein Obama to the U.S. presidency. Nor the way it seemed to herald not only the end of the cinematically violent and tumultuous Bush era but also the dawn of a whole new so-called post-racial, genuinely progressive epoch of multiethnic social harmony.
Why does this matter now? The loss, already noticeable during Mr. Obama’s second term, of a grand and generous shared vision of American society has been catastrophic, though not incalculable. Consider that three days after Mr. Obama’s election, on Nov. 7, 2008, Gallup published research revealing high levels of optimism and patriotism in the wake of his decisive victory over John McCain. In response to one polling question, over half of all McCain voters described the election as one of the most important advances for Black Americans in a century.
In the hours after Mr. Obama’s victory, 67 percent of Americans agreed that “a solution to relations between Blacks and whites will eventually be worked out.” According to Gallup, this was the highest value the organization had ever measured on the question. Perhaps most revealing, on Nov. 5, 2008, seven out of 10 Americans maintained that race relations would improve as a result of Mr. Obama’s election compared with just one out of 10 who professed the opposite. A mere 3 percent of respondents foresaw that race relations would get “a lot worse.”
By the time former Vice President Joe Biden was ensconced in his Delaware basement campaigning for president in the spring of 2020 — when he could so blithely conclude a video interview with a famous Black radio host by saying, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black” (emphasis mine) — that 3 percent of ultra-negative respondents resembled political clairvoyants.
That was just three days before George Floyd was brutally killed on camera. The spectacle of his death would thrust discussion of race to the same level of ubiquity and concern as the pandemic that was still unfolding.
Mr. Biden had simply, and inelegantly, stated out loud the tacit assumption of our Balkanized identity politics, or “antiracism,” that had replaced the unifying ethos of the early Obama era and calcified into something else — a conventional wisdom that obfuscated far more than it could hope to illuminate in such a complicated and dynamic society.
Trump 2.0 has both capitalized on and exacerbated the manifold failings of a pre-existing culture and politics derailed by identity, incoherently wooing disaffected Black and Latino Americans even as he elevates whites en masse to the status of victims and demotes racial and sexual minorities to the role of oppressors (invaders, usurpers, recipients of unfair advantages).
Growing resistance to the Trump administration’s inhumane treatment of both legal and undocumented immigrants has shown that there will be many new and galvanizing opportunities to organize around a saner, more pluralistic liberal vision than the one Mr. Trump offers. But we need tangible goals again — from the preservation of free and fair elections to the defense of access to health care and the safeguarding of due process, to the reduction of income inequality. (If he’s shrewd, Zohran Mamdani, the surprise breakout star of New York City’s mayoral contest, will distance himself from some of the cruder identitarian positions he’s taken in the past and move in this direction.)
This new vision would do well to be more modest in its objectives than the all-or-nothing progressive hubris that paved the way for Mr. Trump’s re-emergence after his defeat in 2020. “Antiracism,” “social justice” — these are worthy abstract values, but there are also others that demand our attention and that we have alarmingly neglected: truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice. These deserve our utmost interest in a democracy now slouching daily toward authoritarianism.
My students’ inability to recognize the country I’d assumed was our mutual inheritance is proof that we cannot return to the innocence of the Obama era now even if that is what we want. The self-righteous assumptions of the progressive left and the xenophobic fearmongering of the reactionary right have changed us.
In Mr. Trump’s self-defeating game of all against all, full of confusing alliances but wholly devoid of anything like a pluralism of mutual uplift, what I can say with absolute certainty is that no one wins when we simply lose together in a more equitable fashion.
A great tragedy of contemporary American life is that this crucial lesson does not seem to be intuitive. Instead, it must be learned in the school of direct and painful experience. The fastest way to grasp the inherent flaws of a politics rooted in racial and ethnic categorization is to have it weaponized by one’s political enemies.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Grip Race and Identity Has on My Students appeared first on New York Times.
