I am a person lucky enough to live in the greater Seattle area. When I see images of Trump rallies with a bunch of white people, mostly men, yelling racist obscenities or other awful things, I feel grateful for where I live. I work in a safe, diverse, non-profit workplace. I have great places to go and nice people to meet every day. Even my Republican neighbors seem respectful and kind. I’ve created a nice bubble for myself as a lower middle class liberal white male atheist. That’s a mouthful — I gave up on trying to figure out where to place the commas and hyphens.
I am lucky. I am also rare, apparently. Truth be told, with my family history, I should be a Trump supporter. My family came from working class roots: from Las Vegas; from farming and working class Franklin, Ohio; from Germantown, Wisconsin. I listened to my relatives complain about immigrants and African Americans for my entire young life. The language they used would have made any HR Department blush. I’m sure you get the picture.
Yet, here I am. Different. A person who feels that all of humanity is valuable, who seeks to understand people, who sides with those of different identities and backgrounds when faced with ignorance and discrimination. A Progressive. Why me?
I often tell people a story from my childhood, to the best of my memory: In early Elementary School I had a friend who was a really nice kid, taller than me by quite a bit, from an upper middle class African American family. I kind of recognized that he came from a more educated background than my family, and he was nice. He had another friend — also African American, but likely more working class. His friend didn’t seem to like me. At the time it must have appeared to me that the other kid was trying to keep me from my new friend. I thought he was mean to me, but more likely we were competing for the nice kid’s attention. I called him the N word. I was ignorant. I was a child. Yet I revealed my ignorance to my friend and things after were never the same. It hurt.
In the following years I paid attention. I listened to teachers. I sought out new role models. I came to love school. I read. I discovered Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, politics, philosophy, and good friends. I learned to think for myself and ended up as a lefty, atheistic, pragmatist. Boo!
There’s a part of me that is still that angry, working class kid though.
So, I guess you are asking how this will help with the white male Trump problem? For his generation or even mine there is likely nothing we can do.
But I read stories regularly of white males and even females in their teens, 20’s and 30’s behaving as I did when I was 8 or 9. Perhaps it will take pain — job loss, ostracism, isolation. People have to teach. People have to learn. Our society cannot tolerate otherwise.
Be prepared to teach. Trump has created quite a racist mess.