Just days into his tenure as mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani faced a backlash over social media posts that one of his housing officials made a few years ago describing homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” and calling for political action to “impoverish” the white middle class.
Those who have worked with the official say she has been an effective housing advocate, and her past intemperate statements may reflect a person she no longer is.
While these remarks are on the extreme end of progressive racialism, it is worth recognizing that the way Democrats invoke race in politics is making it difficult to face off with an increasingly white nationalist G.O.P.
Republican members of Congress have called for mass expulsion of Muslims. The administration has barred almost all refugees except white South Africans. The president refers to entire ethnic groups as “garbage,” and the Department of Homeland Security’s X account calls for “100 million deportations” — in a nation of about 340 million people — to end what it called our besiegement “by the third world.”
Yet in the face of such divisive white identity politics, many Democrats hang on to a racial progressivism that will prevent the party from assembling a broad enough coalition to expand on its recent electoral successes and address America’s historic and contemporary injustices.
Since whites have benefited from hundreds of years of preferential treatment, the progressive argument goes, government and institutions need to even the score a bit by infusing race into policy and political organizing.
If too few Black and Latino students are going to college, we should allow colleges and universities to give extra weight to their applications; if elite public high schools have the same issue, we should reduce or abolish testing requirements, and minority contracting requirements can steer work to contractors from underrepresented groups.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the liberal state of Vermont prioritized vaccine eligibility for Black and other minority residents before white residents, following the lead of billionaire philanthropists like Melinda Gates who urged such a move.
The Democratic Party has made race central to its messaging and organizing for decades. When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he promised to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court; in 2024, his successor Kamala Harris assembled a policy plank aimed specifically at Black men.
The Democratic Party’s racial politics can get important results. I live not far from the world’s busiest airport; the Atlanta mayor who expanded it mandated that a hefty share of contracts during the construction went to women- and minority-owned firms. This helped the city build a powerful Black middle class from the ashes of Jim Crow.
But in the face of the G.O.P.’s white identity movement, progressive racial politics is becoming a liability.
Many white people simply do not see a place for themselves in a Democratic Party that often feels organized not for the benefit of Americans as a whole but for a coalition of identity groups instead. Polls have consistently shown that large numbers of white people even believe they are discriminated against in America.
Former Georgia State Representative LaDawn Jones, a Black liberal Democrat, noticed this problem in a 2017 blog post she wrote after reviewing the schedule for a Democratic National Committee meeting in Atlanta. She found that there were caucuses for pretty much every group except for one.
“Excuse me D.N.C., where does a middle-aged white male who lives in an urban community get a chance to discuss his concerns for the country and work on a strategy to address those issues?” she asked.
A smug liberal could laugh off her question. But if the party is intent on elevating race as a salient category, no one should be surprised that white people feel alienated from a Democratic Party that explicitly organizes around the interests of certain groups.
Research by the Yale University political scientists Joshua Kalla and Micah English has shown that framing progressive policies including increasing the minimum wage or Medicare for all around how much they benefit minorities or achieve racial justice makes it less likely that people will support those programs.
Democrats should instead think about selling candidates and policies as they would a consumer product. Would you buy something if its commercial told you how good it was for everyone except you?
Many marquee Democratic policies like raising the minimum wage, some form of guaranteed health care for all Americans, and universal child care and paid family leave are already popular with the public and would broadly benefit working and middle-class people as a whole. Emphasizing the racial angles of these policies — which percentage of which racial grouping will get what — is just asking for political division where none should exist.
Across both messaging and policy, the party must de-emphasize divisive immutable characteristics like race and emphasize inclusive identities that more Americans (including white Americans) can relate to.
History shows that when Democrats do so, they can win.
In 2017 Danica Roem became the first transgender person elected to the Virginia legislature. The centerpiece of her campaign was not her transgender identity but instead a campaign pledge to fix a local highway that everybody hated. Gender was a nonissue in the race, but by focusing on an identity that all Virginians could relate to (angry driver sitting in gridlock), she unseated a notorious bigot.
And last November, Alicia Johnson became the first Black woman elected to a statewide executive office in Georgia when she won a seat on the Public Service Commission in a landslide victory. Ms. Johnson’s campaign was simple. The ads that dotted my reliably red county (that surprisingly went blue for Ms. Johnson) read: “Electricity bill too high? Vote for change.”
Many Democrats continue to resist a colorblind approach to politics by arguing that race-conscious policies are necessary to right past wrongs. But if your political approach is so radioactive that you can’t achieve power in the first place, you can’t help anyone, let alone underprivileged minorities.
But there is a broader principle to be defended here as well. In the immediate aftermath of Jim Crow, race was a mostly accurate measure for disadvantage, especially among Black people. In today’s America, this is no longer the case.
As the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a civil rights activist for whom I worked in 2024, has noted in his recent book on the topic, there are tens of millions more poor white people than Black people in the United States today, yet our national image of poverty is stubbornly focused on Black and brown people.
Moving away from race-conscious politics and developing a more holistic program that will address poverty and disadvantage from the streets of Baltimore to the mountains of Blairsville will not only help deflate the white identity movement that empowers the Stephen Millers of the world, but it will also ensure that Democrats can build a political agenda that everyone can relate to.
Zaid Jilani, a journalist based in Georgia, writes the newsletter The American Saga.
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