Trump’s ignorance about race, his critical lack of nuance and learning about it, is disheartening enough. But it prevails among liberals and the white left, too, in their 2016 post-election calls to forego identity politics. If there is a dirty secret in American life it is this: the real unifying force in our national cultural and political life, beyond skirmishes over ideology and party, is white identity masked as universal, neutral, and therefore quintessentially American. The greatest purveyors of identity politics today, and for the bulk of our country’s history, have been white
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