"He's Simply Not Hearing"

"But of course this is a different and much darker picture since whites aren't new arrivals to power. They've always had the power and they mostly still have it. Trolls and racists sometimes ask what's wrong with having National Association for the Advancement of White People if there's a NAACP and no one thinks there’s anything wrong with that. But most people, even if it's more intuitive than reasoned, realize that it's fundamentally different. The ethnic consciousness and demands of the powerful and dominant are intrinsically aggressive and threatening in a way that those of the powerless or marginalized are simply not.
"On another level, though, I found Coates essay what I can only call baffling."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reacts to Ta-Nehisi Coates's new article, "The First White President."

Meanwhile, Asad Haider at Viewpoint criticizes both Coates and Mark Lilla.

And Marshall writes "that some significant number of white voters who were activated by racist appeals need to be won back to turn back the tide of Trumpism."

"Here are some unsettling truths: Trump won. Some voted for him because they're white supremacists, but others did for a range of other reasons (party loyalty, negative partisanship, anger about economic stagnation, resentment in response to cultural despair and decline, Clinton hatred fueled by a mix of right-wing media and foreign meddling, and on and on). Trump voters of all kinds aren't going anywhere. They are our fellow citizens and have the right to vote. Many of them probably aren't persuadable by left-of-center candidates, but some of them probably are. Moving beyond Trump and reversing the agenda of his presidency will require appealing to some of these voters."

Damon Linker at The Week also criticizes Coates.

"When you construct an entire teleology on one cause—even a cause as powerful and abiding as white racism—you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates the thesis. So Coates minimizes sexism—Trump's disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump's divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) Coates doesn't try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn't even mention the estimated eight and a half million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump—even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban-rural divide is a sham."

And George Packer at The Atlantic takes Coates to task.

As does Chloé Valdary.

And Thomas Chatterton Williams in The New York Times.

And Kyle Smith at National Review.