Photo courtesy of Associated Press

My road trip through Trump country taught me that staying in the liberal bubble has its advantages

This spring, my family took a cross-country road trip. My husband and I have a son who has autism and other cognitive difficulties. Having read about autistic children getting kicked off planes, as well as the recent United debacle in which an Asian-American doctor was forcibly dragged from his seat, when we needed to go to Los Angeles from our home in New York City for some medical treatment for our son, we knew we were going to have to drive.

It is common now for commentators to chide the “coastal elite” for sticking to their liberal urban bubbles, and urge them to get out into the heartland to understand the way other Americans live. This seemed to present an opportunity. We mapped out a route that would take us through the south of the country, including West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. But as we would learn on our trip, it is an exceedingly weird time to be a person of color, as I am, or a person with disabilities, as my son is, in the middle of Trump country.

We piled into our ten-year-old Volvo and set out. It didn’t take long before we spotted our first Trump signs in Pennsylvania — as well as Confederate flags. By the time we got to our first overnight stop in Winchester, Virginia, I spotted…