The Guise of Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States by Robert Fatton Jr

Author:Robert Fatton Jr [Fatton, Robert Jr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781978821316
Goodreads: 54784143
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2021-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Thus, a convergence of real grievances and an undercurrent of racism, combined with a sense that the Obama years changed little in their depressed conditions,36 explain why significant segments of the white working class embraced Trump’s right-wing populism. The fact that for eight years Obama and his black family called the White House their house meant that crude appeals to race resonated with parts of the white population’s quest to delegitimize both the election and the power of the first black president. But that in itself should not mask the hard reality that under Obama’s rule little changed in the deep structures of inequality characterizing neoliberal capitalist America. Obama symbolized simultaneously the triumphant moment and the crushing defeat of diversity. Thus, at the end of his term in office and after he had appointed one of the most “diverse” administrations in U.S. history, which included an African American attorney general and an African American as cabinet secretary of Homeland Security, the first black president had failed to redress any of the deep and structural inequalities besieging America. In fact, neither black America nor poor America was really better off when Barack Obama ceded the reins of power to Donald Trump. Diversity had shown its obdurate class limitations, but it remains an increasingly powerful element of American exceptionalism.

Diversity, however, sings its melody with an upper-class accent. Lower classes, whether they are black or white, are increasingly perceived by both liberals and conservatives as dysfunctional, lazy, amoral, and addicted to alcohol and drugs. Hillary Clinton views them as “deplorables” when they are Caucasians, and “super-predators” when they are African Americans. In the era of Donald Trump, the conservative columnist Kevin Williamson’s depiction of the white working class is not that different from that of the so-called liberal “resistance,” and it echoes the common ruling class’s conceptions of the black “underclass”:

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America.… The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.37

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