Thread by @tzimmer_history

“Parents,” “working class,” “Christians” - in the American political discourse, whenever such categories are used without any qualifier, they basically just mean “white.” Because “white” is still widely seen as normal, as the norm: as what really counts and defines the nation.

https://twitter.com/jannwolfe/status/1475145444321812488

People are not necessarily doing it deliberately. When called out, Todd immediately concedes the point. But that only reinforces how pervasive this idea of “normal” America as *white America* still is in the collective imaginary: It just comes naturally to Chuck Todd.

This is important because it fundamentally structures the conversation. Just like @nhannahjones says, Todd’s framing privileges the interests and sensibilities of *white* parents by elevating them to the status of “regular” (read: justified, legitimate) parental concerns.

It also obscures the nature of the conflict by suggesting it’s a confrontation between parents on one side and intruding educators on the other, with some special-interest parents who are not “normal” Americans in the educators’ corner: separate at best, distortions at worst.

This assumption of a white “normal” still governs the American political and cultural discourse. Once we start paying attention to how it distorts the picture, we find it everywhere – the pervasive perpetuation of a political, social, and cultural hierarchy of white domination.

It’s obvious in the use of the term “working class,” for instance. Here is a particularly striking example, from one of the leading post-/anti-liberal intellectuals: “working class” is just white people with certain reactionary sensibilities; “everyone” is just whites.

The most ridiculous example of this is the attempt by Republicans to present themselves as the party of the working class. That’s entirely detached from the socio-economic reality of American society – unless, of course, you’re talking about white conservative America only.

But it’s not just conservatives doing it. In the collective white imaginary, the socio-economic dimension is almost entirely ignored - the term “working class” just refers to a type of professional occupation in combination with reactionary cultural sensibilities of white people.

Here, for instance, is sociologist James Davison Hunter in a PBS @NewsHour interview diagnosing a “class culture war”: America split into two camps, a progressive elite vs the conservative middle and working classes - which only makes sense if you imagine America as all white.

https://twitter.com/newshour/status/1464074180660539427

From this depiction, you would never understand why non-white working-class people or socially conservative Black people overwhelmingly align with those progressive “elites” and vote Democratic. Once again, the actual nature of the conflict is sanitized and obscured.

The hard-to-kill myth that it was “the working class” lifting Trump into the White House has the same effect: Just like that, supporting Trump has nothing to do with race, but is the manifestation of a legitimate gripe of those down there directed at the arrogant elite.

In general, the conventions of political terminology are often entirely in line with the self-description of white conservatives - not coincidentally creating and perpetuating the idea of “regular folks” as a clearly racialized category of specific political valence.

This serves to perpetuate one specific idea of what America should be: A nation of and for white Christians, in which white Christians count as the norm and get to define who does and does not belong, and where the interests and sensibilities of white Christians reign supreme.