The End of White Politics Quotes

“Kulinski's fans in the audience represent the id of some of the most vocal people on the progressive left; in many ways, they're the id of the Bernie Sanders supporter: white, male, Millennial, and uncompromising. Typically, these young white men, who love Bernie more than sliced bread, are also raucous, rowdy, and quick to heckle anyone deemed insufficiently progressive, the problem her being that anyone not named Bernie falls into this category for them.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide

“For the next cycle and beyond, any Democrat who wants to be successful needs to understand who he or she is trying to reach and how. One out of every four voters in the Democratic primary is a black person. That means that anyone who wants to win needs to start with black people if they want to build a coalition based on a solid foundation of committed and engaged voters and citizens.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide

“Dems should be looking toward untapped numbers rather than the Joe Lunchbuckets they assume abandoned ship for Trump in 2016. It wasn’t the white working-class voters who flipped from Obama to Trump that the Democrats really lost. To believe this ignores the fact that there are big cities in all of the controversial states Hillary Clinton lost—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—with large black populations. It ignores the fact that the decrease in black turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee was larger than the margin of Trump’s victory by a factor of ten, meaning that it wasn’t the white working-class voters who abandoned them, it was the black voters who felt they weren’t being acknowledged and so chose to stay home who tipped the vote in those states.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide

“In the election of Donald Trump, voters’ opinions on race mattered more than any other factor. It wasn’t economic anxiety that led some white voters to the Trump tent. Let’s let that lie finally die. It was a feeling of racial resentment toward people of color—a sentiment that Trump vocally shared with them—that prompted these voters to rally around him.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide

“Racism isn’t necessarily something that white people think about on a daily basis, but the increased share of people of color in the electorate has created a moment where America’s focus has finally been forced to address issues of racial and gender justice, arguably for the first time since the civil rights movement and subsequent legislature. Our increased numbers demand that the powers that be address racism and white privilege once and for all. This coalition of newly empowered voters of the Obama era along with social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, has to some white Americans signaled that they are losing, when actually it’s just society realigning to become what it is meant to be.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide

“The facts are there. The movement is coming; the change is already happening. This is the end of politics as we’ve known it in America. We’ve been doing white identity politics since America’s founding. We just called it politics. The white men booing in that room represent the past. They need to understand where we are going, so they don’t get left behind. The women and people of color are already getting in formation, and we aren’t going to be thrown off course.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide