Black and MAGA: The identity politics inside a pro-Trump store

There are Confederate flag swimsuits and “White privilege cards” but shoppers inside the store run by a Black woman say race isn’t a factor for them in the election.

Jo Anne Price wears a button that says, “You find it offensive. I find it funny. That’s why I’m happier than you.” Price is a Black woman who runs a store selling pro-Trump merchandise in Christiansburg, Virginia. She’s 72, wears black-rimmed glasses and her gray hair swept back, and has been lifting weights for 20 years. She says, “racism is a made-up word,” and “I don’t know what it is, because it doesn’t exist,” and “if I don’t accept it, it doesn’t apply to me.” By the register, she sells credit card-like objects, one of which says, “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD.” “When you give it to a state trooper, he’ll let you go. Won’t write you a ticket,” Sebriam Vannoy said of the cards, with a laugh. Vannoy, an older Black gentleman, wore a head-to-toe camo print outfit with “Trump was right” and three Christian crosses printed on the chest. He said the card had worked for him. “He laughed at it and did not write me a ticket,” he said of a law enforcement officer who stopped him. (There has been at least one similar incident: in Alaska in 2022, a woman showed a police officer a “white privilege card” instead of her driver’s license, and she said he let her go.) Vannoy and Price are all in for former President Donald Trump and his reelection bid. They know it’s unusual to be Black and a supporter of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, though both the Republican and Democratic campaigns are trying to shore up or gain support in communities of color. “I hear from some Black ladies that will say, ‘Well, he never did anything for Black people,’” Vannoy said. He says he responds: “No, he’s not a president for Black people. He’s a president for all Americans.” Price, a former chairperson of the Montgomery County GOP, said she didn’t mind the Trump campaign’s assertion that Black people would relate to him because he was a convicted felon. “I did prison ministries for five years. If you’re a convicted felon and then somebody else is a convicted felon, there’s a camaraderie there,” she said. She blames the mass incarceration of Black men in the 90s on “Biden’s laws,” the controversial 1994 crime bill of which President Joe Biden was a key supporter. Despite the merchandise that was an explicit rebuke of the way liberals talk about race, gender and social justice, beneath the surface, identity still mattered to those inside the Trump store on a rainy August afternoon.