Identity Politics and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Apparently, Ta-Nehisi book has a new book coming out, and he doubles down on identity politics.  Here's an advance rebuttal:  Racism May Have Gotten Us Into This Mess, But Identity Politics Can’t Get Us Out:

Coates takes it a step farther, casting those who focus on the role economic anxiety played in 2016 as disingenuous “apologists” who only emphasize class in order to avoid their own complicity... Coates is right to highlight how race affects the level of public sympathy for those who suffer...
Race is an important factor in this narrative, but centering it exclusively risks shifting focus away from those voter concerns that politicians can actually control. Personal prejudice, unfortunately, is not one of them.
Economic justice isn’t a panacea. Criminal-justice reform, immigration, and voting rights, for example, are all crucial progressive issues rooted in identity which would become less visible if we didn’t “see race.” But without a strong class-based argument, Democrats will be left to rely on the twin engines of demographic change and racial solidarity to win in the future. Unfortunately, neither is reliable.
Although identity can, at times, serve as shorthand for political views, it provides no more certainty than a stereotype. Racial groups are not monolithic — nor are their voting patterns written in stone. It is the height of hubris, for example, to assume that non-Hispanic immigrants and non-immigrant black Americans would be equally invested in immigration activism as are certain recently arrived Latinx communities...
My ultimate quibble with Coates’s piece is with its pessimism — the presumption that the union between rich and poor whites, forged in the heat of antebellum anti-black antipathy, is America’s destiny as well as its past.

And my follow up comments:

Basically, there have been two Democratic perspectives on why Trump won in 2016:

1. Americans are racist.
2. Americans wanted a change in the economic status quo.

Obviously, there is some truth in each of these perspectives.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, a highly respected African-American intellectual, seems to place more weight on racism as the determining factor.  Briahna Joy Gray, the author of the article I forwarded, places more weight economics as the determining factor.  As she says:

Barack Obama’s two campaigns are a powerful model for what a presidential pitch centering economics, rather than race, sounds like. As Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and Bob Dole observed, Obama’s 2012 stump speech was “very much an FDR Democratic class-warfare speech … He’s very much running on economic populist themes in tough economic times.” Highlighting class, Obama was able to win decisive numbers of white voters in crucial midwestern states. Despite his own identity, he won. Twice. Democrats should not let Trump’s racism drive them away from that effective strategy.