The White Left’s Blind Spot on Race

Tressie McMillan Cotton weighs on the Graham Platner Nazi tattoo debate with some well deserved frustration over how the left and Democrats more broadly (and let’s be honest, this is a problem across the political spectrum) see the working class as inherently white guys instead of what the working class actually is, which is the most diverse part of the nation. So by tying authenticity to white working class men talking about economics, it becomes real easy for too many people to handwave away a Nazi tattoo (and really FFS, there’s lots of people with dumb tattoos, but not a lot of people with Nazi tattoos).

These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.

It is an old argument. History will tell you that negotiating with racism or fascism or authoritarianism never ends well.

It is also a cop-out that can sound like political pragmatism: The idea that we simply must learn to overlook bad behavior as mere human foibles. Who among us, it is implied, has not said or done or etched a hateful symbol of exclusion and oppression into our minds or bodies? If Democrats are to win back the “working class” that they have lost to Trump, they have to look beyond silly things like Nazi iconography or a little casual racism or a soupçon of sexism and anything else that the “woke” left of the party cares about.

I find it hard to imagine that we would be having this conversation at all were Platner anything other than a fit middle-aged white guy who dresses like a stock photo of a “real man.” Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong. The rest of us just need to be strong-armed into the forgiving and forgetting portion of the program.

That is how you get to the place I found myself this week, reading apologia for a hateful symbol pretending to be sound, hard-nosed political analysis.

….

Once, at a meeting with tenant organizers in the center of white American poverty in Appalachia, a young white guy showed up to a meeting with his Stars and Bars tattoo on display. The poor white rural women and working-class Black women who run those meetings took this guy to task. They told him (colorfully) to get himself together. And the next week they all protested their landlord together.

Their coalition-building wasn’t the kind of kumbaya that Platner apologists are talking about, where a room full of people were expected to swallow their outrage to preserve one man’s feelings. There was accountability. There was education. And there was meaningful action. There was not a college degree or a political donor among them, and yet, somehow, actual poor people figured out how to handle racist iconography without scapegoating minorities or making excuses for a white man’s mistakes.

Here’s the thing. The Democratic Party has a problem. The party’s leaders think they have a problem with Trump voters. Some polling says white men without college degrees don’t like them, don’t trust them and won’t vote for them, so they think the only logical way forward is to pander. Their polling addiction ignores more complex political instruments telling them that the working class isn’t just white men and that centrism isn’t enough to bring white voters back into the fold.

It is going to take hard politics. The kind that shows up in communities between elections and solves problems that don’t sound glamorous on television talk shows. It looks like facing down the Klan in a trailer park, not complaining about racism while doing far too little to avert it. It means believing that racism is not a natural condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people’s political power. And — most critically — it looks like not wanting, even for a second, to be confused with the people who would do that. You don’t wear a red hat as a joke. You don’t fly the ironic flag of historical hate to get a rise out of people. You don’t wear the cool tattoo for over a decade that maybe, kind of, possibly, probably looks like something horrible and hateful.

This is pretty well correct on all points. It’s not just your usual suspects here either, as Michelle Goldberg joins the Platner Rehabilitation Tour. It seems to me that guys with Nazi cosplaying histories is probably a good reason to move on. And look, this also relates to the John Fetterman story. For years, people through the Pennsylvania left told everyone they could never to trust Fetterman, that he was a charlatan and a self-promoter with no core values. But as a white man who could present certain values, he became the beloved darling of the online left during his Senate primary (and to be fair Conor Lamb also had rather obvious Joe Manchin traits, though unlike Fetterman, he’s not a lunatic) and then became the worst Democrat in the Senate shortly after his election. The stroke has something to do with this, sure, but then again, people talked about this in PA for years. I’ve had to learn again and again over the years to believe folks on the ground when they tell you that someone who seems good is full of shit and a bad person (John Edwards is another example of this, when my NC friends said back in 2008 that he was an absolute shell of a man with no personal character and don’t believe his attempts at economically populist language). No one has a Nazi tattoo for 20 years without knowing what it is.

Yes, we need to be forgiving of folks in the online age. Yes, young people screw up and say stupid things. But this feels a big step beyond that. I don’t want Janet Mills to be the Democratic nominee for the Senate, but I struggle to see how Platner can survive this and I am not sure he should.