A recent essay by the prominent author Ta-Nehisi Coates called Donald Trump America’s “first white President” because his white nationalist, white supremacist agenda is so blatant.[1] I liked the article but not the title, not the refrain. I get his point; Coates follows the twentieth-century writer James Baldwin in distinguishing people “who believe that they are white” from people who present with an appearance American society constructs as white, an important distinction for understanding the elephant of white nationalism in the American room of so-called democracy. But I always thought of Woodrow Wilson as America’s first white President because he Read more