In their thoughtful review of Black Grief/White Grievance, Lisa Beard raises the vital question of how we should understand multiracial right-wing grievance, by which I take them to mean both the growing participation of non-White men in militias and other violent right-wing groups, as well as the increased Black, Latinx, and Asian American votes for Trump in the 2024 election.
Cristina Beltrán describes this as “multiracial whiteness,” arguing that Republicans shifted their appeals to non-white voters from “conservative multiculturalism”—a form of recognition that identified elements of non-white cultures that resonated with the values Republicans claim to espouse—to the promise of participation in a politics of aggression, exclusion, and domination. This allowed non-white cultural and political conservatives to dispense with calls to identify in terms of a racial group identity and to partake instead in a political project in which freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others. In Cruelty as Citizenship (2020) and her 2021 piece in The Washington Post, Beltrán’s analysis focuses on the pleasures of domination, which is a key part of the appeal of white grievance, but there are two additional factors that I would also emphasize.
The first is the impact of Latin American racism on why certain Latinx communities dismissed the racism and xenophobia of the Trump campaign. As I show in Theorizing Race in the Americas (Oxford, 2017), national ideologies of multiraciality often obscure the persistence of anti-Black and anti-indigenous racism in Latin America. The vile attacks against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, during the 2024 presidential campaign, for example, were consistent with the Dominican Republic’s long history of dehumanizing Haitians, which culminated in 2010 in their denaturalization and the current mass deportations. Anti-Black racism and identification with whiteness thus led some Latinx communities to believe that anti-immigrant rhetoric did not apply to them.
Multiracial right-wing grievance is also the result of a zero-sum view of politics—which I identify as one of the constitutive features of white grievance—that sees a win for another group as a loss for theirs. In 2024, resentment against what they perceived as the unfair advantages that more recent refugees and asylum seekers were afforded—in contrast to long-standing undocumented immigrants with no path to citizenship or those who migrated legally after drawn-out naturalization processes—played an important role in turning some Latinx immigrants against the Biden administration and the Democratic Party. Tragically, this dynamic of grievance and resentment powerfully called some Latinx people into identification, to draw on Beard’s work, with a political project that was, in fact, committed to their continued exclusion, subordination, and violent removal and deportation.
As we grapple with the question of why non-White voters would be drawn to a political project that seeks to simultaneously “make America white again” and ensure that non-Whites remain in a subordinate role, it is vital to pay attention not only to how they are seduced by the pleasures of domination, but also to how a zero-sum view of politics allows resentment of gains by other groups to warp how racially minoritized groups might assess who can best represent their interests.
