People Can Change. People Do Change. It Takes Exposure and Empathy.
Take it from me — I’ve been there.
Until 2014, I was the world’s most militant young conservative libertarian.
Many of the people who know me now — as a Bernie supporter and quintessential flaming liberal — will be shocked by this, but it’s true. I vividly remember bashing feminists in high school (yes, I’m a woman), making speeches in Model Congress in favor of stricter immigration policies, and making outright offensive and uninformed statements about welfare recipients — how their situation was likely their fault and they “just need more discipline.” (Sorry, Mr. Morris — I know you graded that essay with clenched teeth.)
See, I grew up in the rust belt in an extremely Republican household — imagine Fox News playing in the background at virtually all hours of the day — and listened to conservative talk radio hosts like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck during every car ride with my dad. There was a singular black kid in my entire elementary school. Without any effort on my part, conservative arguments from those around me osmosed into my budding consciousness. They made sense to my young black-and-white brain, to the mental model of life that I was developing in my small town.
In 2010 I packed my things and headed to college, taking my merciless conservative attitudes with me. They survived, but throughout those years I could feel them degrading, despite my best efforts, as I regularly found myself in political and philosophical discussions with people who thought very differently from me. I still voted for Romney in 2012, but I had doubts about it.
Then, in 2014, I graduated from college and moved to the Lower East Side of New York City. There I found myself in a whole new world, surrounded by immigrants, hippies, and homeless people. After enough humanizing conversations with bodega owners, street beggars, and apparently hardworking people on government benefits — and enough discussions with my patient liberal friends — I could finally feel my metaphorical bubble being popped.
One particularly memorable moment occurred when my across-the-hall neighbors — a group of seven illegal immigrants from Mexico all crammed into a tiny apartment — volunteered to help my roommate and me carry our air conditioner up six flights of stairs and then installed it for us for free. As they worked, we asked them about their lives, and listened as they told us about their families in Mexico, their minimum wage dishwashing jobs in the city, their meager dreams for the future. They laughed with us, and sweated with us, and later we all went out together for drinks.
This didn’t fit with the story I’d always heard — the one that says that illegal immigrants are dangerous, are taking our jobs and our benefits, are the “bad guys”. The guys standing in front of me were some of the kindest and most generous people I’d ever met. I suddenly felt like I’d been lied to for my whole life — or like perhaps there was just a lot of complexity to the story that I (and everyone in my town) had just never known about or sought out. Realizing that my political compass was not accurate, I began to recalibrate.
Remember how I mentioned Glen Beck earlier, the conservative radio and TV personality known for angry rants and scribbling on chalkboards about Barack Obama’s ties to radical Islamists? Turns out he’s had a similar transformation of his own. Today, he’s a feminist and a Black Lives Matter supporter — seriously. What sparked his change of heart? According to him, it was Michelle Obama’s October 2016 speech urging us to reach beyond politics and simply think about women as people.
The thing about Michelle’s speech that hooked him, he says, is that it wasn’t rooted in the political divide. She didn’t make appeals to political associations or broad sweeping statements about large groups of people. She simply told a raw human narrative, detailing her own experiences being harassed as a woman, and appealing to the audience’s sense of innate human decency without attacking them as people. Beck explains:
“She didn’t say, ‘The government should do X, Y, or Z.’ She said, ‘We,’ ‘Us’ — without a political party. ‘We are better.’ ‘We need to stop this.’ It had to do with ‘Who are you as a human being?’ ‘How do you view women?’ Brilliant speech. That was a moment that transcended all political thought.”
It’s abundantly clear to me that the solution to the divide in our country is not more division. Nothing good comes of spitting vitriol at “the other side”. No one changes their mind because people are yelling at them — not me, not Glen Beck, not any of the Trump supporters. We change our minds when others engage us with respect and empathy — when we feel listened to and taken care of, giving us the space to go beyond defensiveness.
When I was conservative, I remember feeling extremely frustrated that the liberals in my life would dismiss my and others’ conservative opinions with comments like “I can’t even” or “that’s so offensive I refuse to even respond. F*ck you.” Now that I’m liberal, I get it. I understand that impulse, that inability to even begin to explain the patriarchy to someone who doesn’t see it at all, or explain why the “All Lives Matter” movement, while technically correct, misses the whole point. I understand the exhaustion, the desire to just write it off to the other person being ignorant and terrible. I understand the feeling that it’s not worth your time to engage.
But if we want to see real systemic change, we have to engage. We have to be brave, and sit with the uncomfortable views of others who are different from us. We have to wholly listen and try to understand, without reacting angrily and decrying their views.
Why? Because I know I would never have come around without the compassionate and probing questions from my liberal friends and neighbors. Because these people exist — in large numbers — and we’re not going to win any gains unless we acknowledge that they’re there and they matter and they are people. Because, anyway, isn’t that what we’re asking them to do for us?
People voted for Trump for lots of different reasons, but, speaking for the people that I know: My relatives didn’t vote for Donald Trump because they’re outright racists who wish evil on minorities and women and gays. They voted for Trump because, as rural white people, they feel unheard, disdained, and forgotten by the political system, and he made them feel heard and appreciated.
My relatives are fearful of the way the world’s changing, particularly with the rise of terrorism and Isis. They just want someone — anyone — in office who is different, who is anti-establishment, who at least pretends to empathize with their struggles — someone who will, in their words, “break the system.” As David Wong writes in this extremely insightful article,
To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. “Are you assholes listening now?”
Some of you will protest: “Okay, so Trump is antiestablishment, but he’s a TERRIBLE HUMAN. He hates minorities, which means these people are still bigots!” And I hear you.
But one thing you may not realize is that the number of non-white people in places like West Virginia is often under five percent. Many people — like my relatives— didn’t grow up with any black friends, or even acquaintances, in school. They just aren’t thinking about minority rights or LGBT rights. At a time like this, when the world as they know it seems to be burning down, the fact that this man says mean things about groups of people that they’ve never met and can’t relate to seems like a minor detail. While some Trump supporters may indeed be wary of Muslims because of the way the media has painted them (I can personally attest to Fox News warping one’s sense of reality), most of them don’t actually hate those people — they just aren’t personally connected enough to them to care.
Studies on empathy have repeatedly shown that diversity is critically important for us and our children: Researchers found that in school, children’s exposure to students different from themselves leads to improved cognitive skills, including critical thinking and problem solving. Furthermore, they found that students exposed to students of another race or background show generally higher levels of empathy for other people that are different from them. Diversity, paired with the intentional exchanging of stories and compassion, is a clear and well-trodden road to peace.
So how do we apply that to our countrywide divide? Do we make mandatory interstate bussing laws to facilitate cultural exchange? Do we create domestic “study abroad” programs for New Yorkers to understand the plight of whites in Appalachia and vice versa? How do we bridge a chasm of experience that feels impossibly wide?
It seems obvious to me that what we need is more dialogue, in any form we can get it — storytelling, art, social media, and, above all, real conversations. We need to give our attention and compassion to the poor whites in Kentucky and South Dakota and listen to them speak about their problems, their fears, what they care about and why.
Of course, paired with that, we need more stories from our own “side” as well — more publicizing of Muslim-Americans’ personal narratives, women’s narratives, queer narratives — accounts of real individuals’ struggles that, like Michelle Obama’s speech, clearly illustrate our common humanity. (note: Brandon Stanton, of Humans of New York, did a great job of this on his 2015 trip to speak to refugees in Syria.)
This year, we need more honest, and uncomfortable, and ultimately loving discussions around the Thanksgiving table. This year, when your grandfather makes a snide comment about Muslims, instead of staring at the floor or entering into an argument, ask him why he feels that way. Then keep asking why. Don’t interrupt him. Don’t try to “set him straight” or convince him he’s wrong — that isn’t what this is about. Truly be curious and just listen. You may be surprised at what you hear.
I do not believe that my relatives are bad people. I do not believe that the 59 million Americans who voted for Trump are “bad people”. I truly believe most of those people are inherently good — are just trying their best for the people they love — and are merely subject to fear, to paranoia, to clinging to what they know in the face of their way of life disappearing.
This is all to say that the “basket of deplorables” mentality is precisely the problem. It’s easy to write off Trump voters as hateful and inhuman, not worthy of compassion. It feels good. But that attitude will never change those people’s minds, just as it didn’t change mine. Their resentfulness towards us will only grow as ours grows towards them, adding bricks to the wall between us and drowning out each other’s points of view. It’s up to all of us to give each other a voice — and start a dialogue.
I see some of you rolling your eyes at me and this whole essay— at the idea that I would even attempt to excuse these people and their decision to vote for a hateful demagogue. After all, they’re barely people if they can vote for this guy, right?
Well, I, for one, really hope not. After all, I used to be just like them myself. And I’m going to be sitting around a table with a whole bunch of them this Thanksgiving, passing the green beans, knowing deep down that if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have escaped to the big city, there’s a good chance that I, too, would have been a Trump supporter. Alternative universes, amirite?
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