Briahna Joy Gray responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent book excerpt:

The question is not "identity politics or economic justice," but how to adopt a complementary union of the two.

...

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. Coates argues that admitting race, rather than class, was the proximate cause of Trump's electoral victory would mean that leftists "would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism." But that presupposes that class unity was attempted by the Democratic Establishment in 2016. Tragically, it was not.