Summary

Coates opens this note by wondering why he did not anticipate the election of Donald Trump. As he points out in the first paragraph, he was not alone. An alternative viewpoint was the one held by Coates's father, who said that the election of Obama was a sign of desperation occasioned by the many disasters confronting the U.S. at that moment. Explicitly racist commentary directed at Obama should have clued him in to what was coming, says Coates, but he failed to consider the enduring power of white supremacy.

Coates's reckoning with white supremacy came about by sheer coincidence, namely that Obama's presidency coincided with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which Coates calls " America's preeminent existential crisis " (62). Whites, even those in the North, were forced...