Abstract
In this chapter, William Major explores the intersectionality of race, real estate, and power through the racialized discourse of Donald Trump. Through this exploration, Major elucidates the spatialities inherent to the preservation, expression, and reification of whiteness in the United States. Major demonstrates his argument through surveying the verticality (walls), sequestrations, and segregations in Trump’s America.
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Notes
- 1.
See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s “Race to the Bottom: How the Post-Racial Revolution Became a Whitewash.” I am indebted to Crenshaw for clarifying my thinking on the idea that Barack Obama’s election and the postracial discourse by liberals and conservatives alike over the last decade paradoxically prepared the way for Trump: “the very rhetoric of post-racialism that greeted Obama’s ascension to power has proved instrumental in the dumbfounding political rise of Donald Trump, the man who is in every way the photographic negative of Barack Obama. The feel-good presuppositions of post-racialism played directly into the evasive habits of the white supremacist heart, permitting Americans to congratulate themselves for achieving a historic breakthrough that had very little to do with our actual racial history” (Crenshaw 2017).
- 2.
See e-mail from Stephen Pinker to Thomas B. Edsall of The New York Times for a brief discussion of how evolutionary theory and psychology contribute to an understanding of tribalism in political thinking: there is “a growing realization in political psychology that tribalism has been underestimated in our understanding of politics, and ideological coherence and political and scientific literacy overestimated” (Edsall 2017b).
- 3.
Elaine Tyler May’s new book, Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy, historicizes contemporary American security fears. May argues that after World War II, Americans came to embrace a “bunker mentality” at home, one that relied on the nuclear family to “maintain social stability, nurture self-sufficient citizens, and provide protection in a dangerous world” (2017, 7). With the social and economic unrest of the 1960s and after, the home was no longer the ground for personal security: “Houses that once provided protection became places that needed protection” (2017, 9). Fear of personal harm from strangers, immigrants, and others, she argues, forms one of the foundational narratives of the last 60 years and helps to explain the current security regimen in the United States.
- 4.
See David Remnick’s “The Racial Demagoguery of Trump’s Assaults on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2017.
- 5.
My analysis of race and property are informed by legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris noteworthy article, “Whiteness as Property.” Harris argues that “Whiteness and property share a common premise—the right to exclude” (1993, 1714). Indeed, Harris notes that whiteness is inevitably bound with property, and that the line between whiteness and blackness is the line between ownership and being owned. Historically, the absence of whiteness “meant being the object of property” (1993, 1712).
- 6.
Much has been written about the lawsuit against Trump Management Inc. For a useful summary of the charges and outcome, see Michael Kranish and Robert O’Harrow, Jr., “Inside the government’s racial bias case against Donald Trump’s company, and how he fought it” (2016).
- 7.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called accusations of racism “outrageous and ludicrous” when asked about President Trump’s “shithole countries” remark. In addition, she predictably noted that Trump was merely after a “colorblind” immigration system (2018). Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, who were present in the meeting with Donald Trump, have yet to acknowledge that he used the term “shithole countries” to refer to Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa.
- 8.
My interest in housing segregation and Donald Trump owes much to Richard Rothstein’s important work on property and racial separation in the United States over the 100 years, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Rothstein argues that the federal government played the major role in creating racially segregated living condition in the United States. He argues convincingly that the separation of whites and blacks is de jure rather than a de facto element of American life. He calls this the “de facto segregation myth” (2017).
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Major, W. (2019). Donald Trump’s Wall of Whiteness. In: Kowalski, J. (eds) Reading Donald Trump. The Evolving American Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93179-1_4
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