As the world knows, Donald Trump, a White male, won the presidency in 2016. But entertaining the hypothetical, one wonders, what if he had lost? What if one of the other twenty or so serious contenders for the presidency had emerged victorious? And what if the winner had not been a White male?

The unprecedented diversity of the presidential candidates in 2016 – two Hispanics, one African American, one Asian American, and two women – gives us the chance to think more deeply about race and representation. In the previous chapter, to gauge minority representation, I simply tallied how many racial and ethnic minorities won office. The 2016 presidential election tells us why this calculus is insufficient to understand the complexity of race in the American political context.