Will You Help Us Calm Down?
Maybe you voted for Trump despite your apprehensions: you have a right to your vote, and I’m not here to change your mind. I believe that you thought through the issues, and based on your own life experiences, prioritized them as you saw fit. The Bible and the Constitution are just two examples of documents where there are many scholars looking at it with differing interpretations. I don’t think voting in this election was much different.
Most likely, you’re not a racist, you’re not a misogynist, you’re not a hateful person. Maybe he was just your candidate for change. You liked some of what he said. But one thing I have heard over and over from people who are distraught over Trump’s rise to power is that they are “overreacting” — that it’s “going to be fine”.
I get that if you haven’t had the same life experiences that our reactions might seem irrational. In this polarizing and divisive environment, can I tell you why we’re reacting this way?
Because it feels like you don’t see us.
Anyone who’s ever been the target of bigotry has a sixth sense for it, easily triggered by a candidate who casually uses thinly veiled slurs like “some, I assume, are good people”, accuses an American citizen of not being able to be impartial because of his ethnicity, attacking the Muslim parents of a Gold Star American war hero and failing to disavow the KKK.
With that sense we can feel what’s coming down the line, because we’ve been there before. When I posted this piece, with my raw emotions right after the election, I received a flood of responses from others their own anecdotes of openly hateful experiences growing up. You see, these same people who committed acts of bigotry against us are still around. Some of them still harbor the same feelings they did years ago, but our society evolved to the point where at the very least, it was not socially acceptable to act on those feelings. In fact, to a point where we were able to elect an African American President — twice. Racism is learned, after all, and for once, we had hope for a generation with a different outlook.
Anil Dash so beautifully stated: “It is only because progress has been made that we feel so gutted by this loss.”
The culture of any organization comes from the top — and there is no higher office in our country than that of President. So when you choose to put someone at the helm of this country, who openly bullies others, who makes sexist and xenophobic comments, you are, whether you like it or not, accepting this behavior. John Scalzi does a great job of explaining this with a Cinemax analogy.
And this is where we start to get nervous. Because hate crimes have already started spiking since he’s been elected. If it’s anything like the UK’s Brexit, we could be in store for an up to 60% increase in hate crimes in the near future. And that was Britain without an ongoing head of state unabashedly condoning it.
So when you create an environment where it feels ok to commit acts of hate, you are showing that you don’t consider what the impact would be on those of us who are affected to be important. That ultimately, it doesn’t matter to you. That means, once again, we are marginalized.
Nevada Senator Harry Reid sums it up: “White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear — especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.”
Because it undermines equality.
Bullying, at its core, is the rejection of a person’s worth. It is an attack on a person’s value. And that’s at odds with the reason that we declared ourselves an independent nation in the first place, on the premise that “…all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Do we still hold these truths to be self-evident?
When a group of people are targeted by a hate, they are limited in their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It’s a natural reaction to try to limit the amount of exposure you get to attack, and that in turn limits the way you lead your life.
I don’t like to talk about the discrimination I’ve faced, as a minority and as a woman, for a couple of reasons. First, it means I have to relive it — and it’s bad enough to have to go through it once. Secondly, there’s an irrational embarrassment that victims have: for the same reason that rape victims don’t run around telling everyone they meet that they’ve been raped, there is an unwarranted but destructive shame that goes along with being a target of hate.
As a minority, you are by nature more alone than a member of the majority. When minorities are attacked, we are nearly always dependent upon someone, a member of the majority to step up to help. And that by nature demonstrates a lack of equality, and of power. Worse yet, the more vitriolic the environment, the harder it is for those in the majority to step in.
Vanessa, one of my fellow alumnae, posted that an Indian friend was at the podiatrist with her children recently when she witnessed another woman at the front of the line berating the desk nurse, also a minority. At the end of her tirade, she shouted, “Now I know why deportation should be used!” Everyone gawked, until another (white) woman spoke up and told the racist woman that language was inappropriate. “My Indian friend could only watch as the two white women verbally duked it out,” she writes. “She had her two kids to take care of AND when you and your kind are the target, it is hard to defend yourself.”
And that has economic impact.
Acts of hate create and reinforce negative stereotypes. And that, in turn, leads to discrimination.
When I was growing up, my parents told me that I had to be better than white people in order to be considered equal. The advice was not unfounded: a study by Espenshade and Radford showed that in order to gain the same admission to universities, Asian students needed to score 140 points higher on the SAT than white students.
African Americans looking for work in predominately white suburban areas are up to 44% less likely to be hired than whites with the same qualifications.
A Yale University study showed that male executives who speak out more frequently than their peers are considered more competent (by 10%), whereas female executives are considered less (by 14%). Research shows that in the workplace, women speak less, are interrupted more, and have their ideas more harshly criticized.
With a higher bar to get access to the same opportunities, it’s no wonder that women still lag behind men in pay by 20%, with the pay gap even greater among women of color.
So what now?
I fully support the democratic process, and accept that Donald Trump is our next President. My greatest hope is that he proves all my concerns to be unfounded.
At the same time, I’m cautious. In 1922, The New York Times reported that “Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”
So please know that the way you vote has implications broader than the platforms from which you chose. That the very way that our society behaves is shaped by our electoral choices. That even if you aren’t a minority, the way you are treated, and the culture of a country is influenced by the leadership we put in power.
So please listen to the other side; in this world where our personalized news feeds and online experiences result in polarized views, the only way we can make any progress is to meet at the middle of the table, civilly and with an open mind.
This is the problem with America today, the technology that was supposed to bring us together actually isolated us into echo chambers and drove us further apart. — Trent Lipinksi
So please don’t dismiss the concerns of those who worry about our country under this administration. Please recognize that fears about safety, equality and decency are not unfounded. Please don’t miss the points we make by focusing on tone policing, a silencing tactic that works by derailing a discussion by critiquing the emotionality of the message rather than the message itself. As a friend of mine put it, shutting someone down by saying that they are “overreacting” shows an unwillingness to look at the experiences of our collective country.
And please, please, act to ensure that dangerous rhetoric doesn’t become normalized in this country. Speak out against bigotry when you see it. Defend those who are the targets of bigotry, xenophobia and sexism. Call things out when it’s hard, in your community as well as in our national leadership. I’m with Dave Chappelle: “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance, and we the historically disenfranchised demand that he give us one too.”
Note: We’re in a place right now where it’s hard for either side to see the other as more than just a caricature. We’ll never get anywhere if we don’t start seeing one another as people again.
I started a space on Medium called Marrow, to be a safe place where people of all walks and views can share personal narratives to help us understand how they arrived at where they are. It’s meant to be a troll-free zone where we can all be humanized once more.
Our priorities and decisions are driven by our individual life experiences, so only by digging into personal narratives can we move ourselves away from fear and demonization of the unknown. Sometimes these conversations can be tough face-to-face, or with the reactionary impulses of social media. The hope is that with thoughtful reflection, we can get to a better place.
Have no idea if this will work but it’s worth a try. Submissions and participation welcome! Guidelines here: https://medium.com/marrow/what-is-marrow-84fae3a1bc89…
