Like many of you, I’ve been scratching my head about why so many voters of color shifted to Donald Trump in 2024. Consider the case of Reading, Penn., which is 70 percent Latino. In 2020, Trump received 36 percent of the vote there. This year, that number jumped to 54 percent.
How does the Democratic Party, which prides itself on embracing diversity, lose so many minority voters to a candidate who brazenly throws insults at them?
The question has profound implications for the readership of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. As Michael Lind, co-founder of New America, has pointed out, the Democratic Party operates as an ecosystem in which major foundations, advocacy-oriented nonprofits, and universities feel their role is to represent certain constituencies by pushing the party to the left, particularly on issues of identity.
It’s a real possibility that the sector’s success in doing just that paved the way for the Republican Party’s sweeping victory last month.
Clearly, this is a moment for self-reflection on a very pointed question: What does the progressive nonprofit world not understand about the identities of the people it claims to champion and represent?
Getting It Wrong
I’ve gotten things wrong enough times to have something to offer here. Let me tell a story.
My first job out of college was teaching in an alternative school on the near northwest side of Chicago in the mid-1990s. We prepared urban minority high school dropouts, mostly 19- and 20-year-old Puerto Rican and African American young adults, to take the GED exam.
I had never met an urban minority high school dropout before I got the job. In fact, I had never heard of the GED. But I had read a lot of theory about identity and diversity in college — bell hooks, Cornel West, Audre Lorde, the standard 1990s critical race curriculum.
It was a small program, maybe 40 students total, and on the first day of school, each of the four teachers gave a pep talk to the entire student body. The first three, veteran educators all, spoke about the importance of hard work, discipline, high standards, and can-do attitudes.
Feeling the need to make an impression, I gave an impassioned address about being a teacher who believed education should raise political consciousness and disrupt the systems of injustice oppressing every person of color in the room.
Boy, did I feel good about myself after that speech.
Later that morning, a Puerto Rican student named Angel approached me. At 21, he was the oldest student in the program, older than me, in fact. He thanked me for my passionate speech and then asked, somewhat gingerly, if anything I had said was going to help him get his GED.
“I’ve taken the exam twice already and failed both times,” he told me. “This is my last chance, and if I pass, I get a dollar more an hour at Cub Foods.”
I realized something in that moment. The speech I had given was really about my identity, not Angel’s. To my circle of highly educated friends, I had proudly described my role in the program as an “educator for liberation.” But Angel just wanted a teacher who could help him get his GED.
Lessons Learned
Honestly, I’m embarrassed telling this story. I share it because I think its lessons are much the same as the lessons of the election:
First, my views on identity and diversity were grounded mostly in my experiences in the demographic of highly educated professionals, rather than from deep experience in low-income ethnic minority communities.
Second, those views were wildly out of step with the self-conception and aspirations of many people in the groups I claimed to represent.
Third, I based my status and identity on those views, which made it hard to change them.
Angel had clearly seen my kind before and was smart enough to be suspicious. He was basically saying: Are you here to help me achieve my aspirations, or are you here to achieve your aspirations?
It caused me some serious soul-searching. Why indeed was my own sense of identity so deeply tied up in getting people like Angel to view himself as oppressed? And if I succeeded in getting Angel to call himself a victim of a racist system, was that likely to improve his life, or make it worse?
Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi notes that the dynamic of using the language of social justice to gain status is even more pronounced today. In reality, many statements white college graduates find racist are not viewed as such by ethnic minorities. For example, a Cato Institute study found that huge majorities of African Americans and Latinos agree with the statement, “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”
Just try saying that at a liberal foundation, advocacy organization, or faculty meeting and see how it goes.
It makes me wonder, actually: Is it possible that an Ivy League graduate using the term “Latinx” could actually be more off-putting to some Latinos than an insult comic calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”? I’ve learned the hard way many times that people really don’t like being talked down to by those who live more comfortable lives than they do.
Many minority scholars have been saying some version of this for years. For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, wrote a terrific book called The Lies That Bind, in which he advised people to stop using the phrase “as a” this or that identity. The reason is simple: It suggested that the speaker represented an entire group of people that had almost certainly not elected that person to represent them.
I am a highly educated professional who is also a minority (immigrant from India, Ismaili Muslim by faith), I have been on both sides of this. One thing I can say for sure: When someone misrepresents my identity to elevate their own status, I feel a sense of visceral anger. As I’ve written in the Chronicle, when people ask me or my kids to speak more about what it’s like to be a victim of Islamophobia — rather than the experience of being inspired by Islam — it feels like something deeply sacred has been violated.
But here’s the thing about a democracy: Working-class Latinos in Reading, Penn., might not be able to represent themselves at faculty meetings, but they sure can in an election. And that’s exactly what they did. The social change world needs to get the message.
