“Empathy isn’t a favor I owe white Trump voters. It has to go both ways.”
“I know I could have and can do more to listen, to be compassionate, to operate from a place of love. But more than what I could have done is what white people themselves could do. For this election is in part about white people’s relationship to whiteness and each other.
The degree to which white, liberal, urban America relied on polling reports and FiveThirtyEight and the Upshot to tell them everything was going to be all right is incredible. I derived confidence from those predictions as well. We all stuck to those websites like a driver sticks to incorrect Waze GPS directions. Instead of driving, we acted like passengers, trusting in the machine instead of our own eyes. Meanwhile, outside the vehicle, in the real world, the GOP nominee was making sweet xenophobic and job-promising love to the other white America.
There’s a group of white people who left the suburbs and the Midwest for those much-maligned coastal elite cities to experience community and create new economy jobs and invent absurd artisanal mayonnaise, and while they were busy swiping on their phones through the faces of people just at the other end of the bar, they could and should have been talking to their cousins and uncles back home. White Americans, does the world have to pay for your broken family ties? Does Fiji have to drown and California burn because you got bored in Iowa? Don’t you have Facebook? Didn’t you invent it?”
