I Don’t Want To Be Mad At White Americans…But I Am
I really don’t want to be as angry as I am at white America. I know that statement sounds prejudiced and divisive. But it’s honest and true. I’m mad. Which has made this a very difficult time to be a brown-skinned person who’s half-white. Some of the people I am angry with are my family. And I love them. Even if they voted for a white supremacist like Donald Trump.
Asked my family why they wanted to vote for a morally bankrupt Atlantic City casino mogul for president. Even asked them not to vote for Donald Trump for president. (I had to try.) They said in reply, “they just can’t stand that Hillary Clinton.” They said they know men talk like Trump did on that Billy Bush recording. Yes, it was atrocious language; but it didn’t disqualify him from the presidency. Not in their minds. Not against her. And these were women speaking about Trump.
I watched the second presidential debate with a roomful of family — all Florida voters. All of them white. Thought I might be able to turn one or two of them from voting for Trump. I said I didn’t care if they voted for Hillary, but, as a personal favor to one of their brown-skinned family members, I asked that they consider not voting for Trump. They told me they loved me….but they couldn’t do that. They just “really didn’t like that Hillary” and they thought Trump would be a possibly good president.
“Trump is great at business, America needs that right now,” they said. As if that has any bearing on how good someone is at government. To me that was like saying a Stanley Cup-winning hockey coach could manage the Dodgers because he’s a good at handling millionaire athletes. But not to them. For them Trump’s business acumen means he might stoke the engines of industry and get America working again, or make the nation great again, or something again. It was always about “again,” about some return.
To my ears, Make America Great Again sounds like going backwards in time. To them, it sounds like the upside of a cycle, after time spent on the downside, like a revolution of a wheel — one that’s now lifting them back up where they belong. And they just can’t stand the idea of the Clintons back in the White House.
I pointed out how their candidate is racist towards Muslims, Mexicans, and blacks. They said that was all talk. I said he was sexist against women. They said that was to be expected — he’s from New York. I said he’s made fun of disabled people like a schoolyard bully. They said, again, he’s from New York. They live in Florida. They have opinions about New Yorkers down there.
Trying a different tack, I asked if they were unbothered by the fact Trump has been demonstrably racist towards black people, to the point that the Federal government sued him and his father for their prejudiced and discriminatory practices against housing black people in their properties…and they grew bored with that thought before I hit the punctuation of the sentence. Yawn. Rich New Yorker real estate mogul is racist towards poor black people? Tell me something I don’t know. Was their attitude. It wasn’t disqualifying. If anything it made him more real. He was honest about his racism. “Not like that Bill Clinton.”
This type of thinking confounds me. And I need to make sense of it because these white supremacy-apologists are my family. My direct relatives. Not some bigoted bozo who married into the family and always ruins holiday gatherings. No, I share genes with these people. Try as I might, these people who I know love and care about me, I could not stop them from voting for the sexist, bigoted candidate. They wouldn’t listen to me. His bigotry did not disqualify him from the presidency. Neither did his sexism. Because we all know that Bill Clinton… I heard it over and over again.
How could I fail in such epic terms to get my own family to listen and consider what I was saying? One of the women in the room watching the second presidential debate voted for Jesse Jackson in a Democratic primary in the Eighties. Jesse Motherfucking Jackson! And she voted for Obama. “The first time. Not the second time.” By then, she’d had enough. But Jesse Jackson! Really?! …And now she votes for Trump?
To say that the fact she voted for Jesse Jackson qualifies her as “not racist” would be utterly, and absolutely false. She is most definitely racist. I love her, but she’s racist. And she voted for Jesse Jackson. I always keep that in mind when I consider the American voter. They will do whatever the fuck they want when they step into that booth and draw that curtain. This time around, millions of Americans said they want Trump. Donald Fucking Trump. I don’t get it.
I don’t see how his reprehensible behavior towards other people doesn’t disqualify him from leading the party of Family Values. The conservative party. The Religious Right. The Grand Old Party. The Republicans let an Atlantic City casino mogul who loves gold, Vladimir Putin, and seeing his name written on the sides of buildings become their leader. Our leader.
This is the same guy who pushed the government to try to shut down the rising tide of Indian gaming, using all sorts of horrible racist statements and outright lies about Native Americans who he saw as his competition and who he felt were getting an unfair advantage against him — a man born to a rich and powerful real estate mogul father, a man who screamed at Congress that things weren’t fair for him and his gangster partners — right up until the point he saw that Indian gaming wasn’t going away, so he quickly flipped sides, partnered with Indian gaming, called himself a genius for doing so, and was suddenly happy as a fat old dog with a steak bone as he watched them put his name up on the sides of their casinos.
That’s really all he seems to want, to be able to see his name in gold wherever he goes. It makes him feel important. (Perhaps if he sees his name in gold on enough buildings he’ll one day feel almost as good as he would have if his father loved him. Maybe not.)
But that guy, the Indian gaming flip-flop guy, is the new leader of the conservative party. They rallied behind him because winning an election is more important than dooming our nation to a global embarrassment and launching an epic vote of no-confidence both in democracy in the age of reality tv and in the American experiment writ large. They traded dignity for victory. Will this late stage development in the history of American democracy be its death knell before it assumes its final form: hateful techno-fascism?
Too early to tell.
But this idea keeps many people up at night: Did we just elect a leader who’s basically Hitler with Twitter?
Comparisons can be made to Der Führer, sure. I won’t make the obvious ones here. I will say Trump is working with a very similar playbook. The pattern is there. But Trump is also 70 years old; he fundamentally lacks Hitler’s more youthful vigor, his focus, his vision, his drive to exercise his will, his quasi-religious view of himself, and his speed habit.
Trump doesn’t like to work that much. He’ll tell you that himself. He prides himself on his *taps finger to temple* what he has up here. His smarts. His brains. And, interestingly, much like the Nazis and other white supremacists, Trump believes his brilliant mind is the product of eugenics. It’s a sign of his superior breeding. He likes to compare himself to a racehorse. He believes that, just like a thoroughbred, he has a genetic advantage to think like a winner. But leaving eugenics aside, mostly Trump just likes to make deals. He likes shortcuts. He like to judge beauty pageants. He is not at all cut out to be President of the United States. That’s waaaay too much work for a man like Donald Trump. And it’s too much of the same work everyday.
He’s never been a public servant before, he has no idea how much service is necessary in the day-to-day life of a politician. Plus, he looks down on those chumps. He buys their favor the way kids collect Pokémon. He said as much himself in a presidential debate. And just like him not paying his taxes he think that makes him smart. Or at least it did. Now he is one of those chumps. He will not be a good president.
Trump will have a slam-bam First 100 Days. Truly magnificent. Thrilling. It’ll be beautiful. The classiest hate machine you’ve ever seen. It’ll be decorated beautifully. You’ll see. Luxurious. Golden. Beautiful. And then he’ll have to get down to work. He’ll slug through the first six months. But it’ll get to him. Having to work so damn much. Never having time to tweet. He’s gonna hate it.
I’d say the over-under is one year.
He does one year, and then he retires, citing a health scare, or perhaps the intractability of congress. Look, people, I tried, but those people are losers. Sorry. You can hear him saying something similar at a press conference. Right before Mike Pence is named the new President of the United States and all hell breaks loose for women, gays, black people, Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, trans citizens, all the people that Trump demonized in his campaign and are now vulnerable to a truly hateful politician like Pence.
In many ways, I don’t fear a President Trump. He’s a villain, no doubt. I just think he’s old, overweight, vain, thin-skinned, lazy, petty, small-minded, competitive to the point of distraction and obsession, and perennially focused on how he appears––that’s not really the best bold stroke description of a personality of a great political leader. He lacks the vision and energy and stick-to-it-ness of a real dictator. He will be horrible for the country. For sure. But in my opinion, the real danger is what he’s done to our national character.
Trump conjured up some of the evil lurking in our souls. He’s made the Left angry and afraid to the point of violence. He’s made his own followers feel emboldened to enact their own aggro form of Trumpism wherever they find themselves. Now it’s like The Purge but for bigots. If all politics are local, Trumpism is going to making every square mile of America ugly, mean, and dangerous.
I don’t think my family recognized that when they said they “just don’t like that Hillary.” They didn’t see how voting for Trump is voting for more people to be attacked, assaulted, and battered in the streets, in school, and at work. Now, nowhere in public life is safe for millions and millions of Americans. They didn’t see that. Now, they think that’s unfortunate. They don’t like to see that happening. But they don’t think that has much to do with Trump or them voting for Trump. That was already going on, they say. Just like Trump’s sexist language. They know that men talk like that. And now, they know that people abuse Muslims in gas stations. That people spray paint swastikas on the homes of Jews. Again. They wanted things to return. Be careful what you wish for.
I tried to convince my own family not to vote for Trump and I failed. I couldn’t convince white people to care about others enough not to elect a bigot, who’s already made our country into a far more dangerous place and he hasn’t even been sworn in yet. But I hope they’re really satisfied with not having to see Bill Clinton back in the White House. I hope that balances out against all the millions of Americans who will be abused in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. I hope they’re glad that their dislike of Hillary has propelled a hateful, vengeful, crony-loving, gangster-partnered, Putin-admiring, casino mogul into the most powerful position in all of the world. I hope it’s all worth it to them. Because they’ve risked a lot of people’s lives and safety, a lot of people’s sanity and their right to be themselves, in order for them to feel good and not be bothered with “that bitch Hillary.”
You must understand they really don’t like her. A lot. Like way more than they care about the rest of us. Some people call that white privilege. That ability to blithely put your comfort over the lives of people of color. Of course, those same Florida voters, my family, also feel that way about women, even though some of them are women. And they feel that way about the disabled, even though one of them is disabled. They’re a curious bunch to be sure. And I’m having a very hard time not being angry at them. To my way of thinking, what they’re doing — how white America is valuing others interests against their own — is reprehensible. But I love them. They’re my family. Which makes how I feel suck worse than a dog shit lollipop.
It’s like a scene towards the end of a disaster movie: in an icy wilderness, trapped on the side of a snowy mountain, in the middle of a heinous storm, me and people like me are hanging over a cliff, held by a rope, that’s attached to you, white America, you can hear us calling, you hear us shouting for your help, and the storm is getting worse, and you’re scared — that much is clear — and you feel like we might drag you down with us, that we’re too much weight for the effects of gravity, and now, there above us, afraid you might be sliding down towards us, to hold your purchase, to keep yourselves safe, to look out for yourselves…you cut the rope.
And you let us all fall. Into the darkness.
Who knows what will happen to us. But it’s not your concern. That’s how it feels. It’s hard to think that someone who does that cares about you. It’s hard not to think that that person is dooming you to a life far worse than you just had — stuck on the side of an icy snowy mountain in the middle of a storm. That’s why I’m still angry at you, white Americans.
You may be wondering: But you don’t mean all white people do you? No, not all white people. I’m not angry at all white Americans.
Does that make you feel better? If for a moment you felt good reading that I’m not mad at all white people, you shouldn’t be too proud of yourself. That’s a very thin version of caring.
Here’s the thing about caring about other people: It’s messy. It hurts. Sometimes it makes you angry. Sometimes it makes you scared. Sometimes it makes you feel like you’re the bad guy. You may recognize these feelings from when you love someone. When you care about someone, you’re willing to risk not always feeling good about yourself, because you want them to feel good about themselves. And you want them to live a life as free and fully alive as yours. That is, when you care about someone.
That’s why I’m mad at you, white Americans. I don’t feel like you care about the rest of us. And some of you are my family. That’s a hard truth to realize because an Atlantic City casino mogul decided to get into politics. But that’s how it goes. White supremacy is a motherfucker. And sometimes it’s your mother…or her family. And what do you do about that? I don’t want to be angry. But I am.
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