I didn't know it would be Trump in particular, but I knew someone like him was on the horizon unless serious people began taking seriously the predictable anxiety accompanying our nation's transformation into majority-minority status. Serious people—friends, associates and colleagues, including an editor who told me race no longer mattered after the 9/11 attacks—instead kept telling people like me to stop "injecting" race into everything, to leave the past in the past, to embrace what was about to become a post-racial world. That reader of mine showed otherwise.

I could see a man like Donald Trump coming in November 2008. At the time, was the lead columnist for the Sun News newspaper in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A regular reader of mine left a frantic message claiming president elect Barack Obama would make white people slaves as payback for all that white people had done to black people.

And now, even after a man became president while using openly bigoted rhetoric after spending five years spreading racist birther conspiracy theories, even after white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, those same serious people, along with a growing chorus of white centrist and conservative pundits, as well as more than a few liberal political analysts and politicians, are still reducing the nuance of race and race relations into bold-sounding screeds against an "identity politics" they can never quite bring themselves to clearly define. They believe they are above the fray, but are essentially saying if black people keep defiantly fighting white racists that good white people will retaliate by rewarding Trump and his bigotry another four years in office. The idea seems to be that for white Americans—non-racist white people—being reminded of racial inequality is worse than racial inequality. That's why most white Americans seem more disgusted by Colin Kaepernick's peaceful protest to highlight police brutality than the injustices he is calling out.

This summer, Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster, co-authored an opinion piece in the New York Times saying Democrats have lost recent elections because working-class voters felt "abandoned by the party's shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures." People of faith also feel marginalized within the party, Penn claimed—not seeming to realize, or care, that the bulk of working-class voters are people of colour and are in favour of the shifts he disdains, and that black people, the core of the Democratic Party, make up the most religious racial group in the country. Columbia University professor Mark Lilla has made similar arguments against "identity politics" both in the Times and in a new book. Even leftist darling Bernie Sanders has made remarks about going "beyond identity politics," which he later had to clarify in order to emphasize he wasn't being anti-diversity.

"Generally speaking, white Middle Americans aren't racists. They don't long for a return to Jim Crow," Robert Robb recently wrote for the Arizona Republic in a column. "They're just sick of having identity grievance politics thrown in their faces all the time." That echoes the complaints of the anti–identity politics cohort: It seems that reminding people that 12-year-old Tamir Rice was gunned down for the sin of playing with a toy gun in a park in an open-carry state by a police officer who had previously been fired for being unfit to carry a gun is little more than "identity grievance politics."

Too often, white people who talked themselves into supporting Trump overlooked that racism because they simply weren't bothered by it.

I knew that regular reader of mine who messaged me in 2008 wasn't part of the fringe; neither was he racist. He wasn't rich, went to church regularly, and would give me the shirt off his back if I was cold, even though we had passionate disagreements about everything under the sun. He was just scared because change—good, bad, or boring—brings with it the unknown. Fear has a way of blinding a man to darker realities; he becomes so focused on protecting himself from imagined threats he can't see the real dangers facing others. I knew he spoke for many others in our newspaper market, which included a county on the coast of deep-red South Carolina that gave Trump nearly half the vote during a crowded GOP primary and 70 percent of the vote during the general election.