In The Line, Kaveh Shahrooz looks at the accusations among the ultra-woke that members of ethnic minorities in the United States who voted for Trump can no longer be considered ethnic minorities and are guilty of variant forms of white supremacy:
Did self-hating racist Hispanic and Black people help Donald Trump? Did sexist women stop the promised Democratic blue wave?
Those may seem like bizarre questions, but according to the woke left, the answer is: yes.
A new narrative began to emerge on election night, after it became clear that Miami-Dade County — a heavily populated area in southern Florida — would go to Trump, thus preventing an early Joe Biden blowout. To the woke left’s chagrin, it was Trump’s significant support among Miami-Dade’s Hispanic voters, namely those in the Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American communities, that kept the state in the Republican column.
In a direct challenge to the widely held belief that Trump’s presidency is the result of a simple racist white patriarchal backlash, the incumbent president actually increased his support among Latinos, black males, Muslims, and Native Americans on election night. He also appears to have maintained much of his support among women.
To compensate for this cognitive dissonance, standard bearers of the woke left explained this phenomenon by implying that these ethnic minorities were enacting a form of white mimicry, or “white adjacency.” First out of the gate was the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, fresh off the controversy surrounding her 1619 Project, who tweeted that “white Cubans” should not be lumped in with “Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans.”
Insofar as ethnic communities should not be assumed to share political interests simply because they speak the same language and come from roughly the same broad geographic region, it is hard to disagree with her. But her point was not anything nearly so straightforward. As she made clear in subsequent tweets, she believes that the Miami Cubans should more accurately be viewed as white because they sit atop “racial hierarchies based on whiteness.”
