Progress?

Originally published on November 10th, 2016

So, Donald Trump was elected president last night.

Today, one side is protesting in major cities, the other side is finally free to be explicitly racist and sexist, and everyone in between is dumbstruck and despondent.

There are a hundred adjectives that easily come to mind to describe the general mood around me and my friends, and the most positive are ones like “determined,” “resilient,” and “pissed off.” The rest are more along the lines of “depressed,” “stunned,” and “hopeless.”

We all thought things were getting better. Things were moving in the right direction. They had to be, right? I mean, gay people can marry each other now, we have universal-ish healthcare, we elected a black president, and people in a number of states can smoke pot legally. Isn’t that what progress looks like?

But as it turns out, a lot of people in this country were not as happy about this as you would think. They were just largely silent, because social norms had shifted to the point where opposing these values was unacceptable. It was not okay to openly hold hatred in your heart, because racism, sexism, and any number of other -isms were extremely stigmatized everywhere you looked. And that’s definitely progress in one sense, even if it doesn’t go very deep.

But then Trump came along and made it okay to have these thoughts again. He made it okay to speak these thoughts again. The hatred and bigotry never went away, it was just lying dormant until someone came along to mobilize all those who felt this way. Trump was the perfect someone to make it happen.

Things were bad enough while the police regularly killed unarmed young black men across the country. Now, the racists and sexists are feeling more empowered than ever to speak their minds without consequence. The KKK was seen celebrating Trump’s victory in public this morning. A woman had her hijab ripped off as the assaulter proudly told her she would be deported soon. Another woman was told to go back to Africa. And who knows how many hateful messages have been written on school walls, painted on cars, or yelled at minorities in the streets.

Trump normalized this behavior by doing it on literally the largest stage in the world and by having millions of supporters come out to cheer him on and vote him on. I’m terrified of the nation that wants him to be our leader, and I’m terrified of the influence he will have on the rest of the country.

I truly think this election set us back 100 years. It’s hard to believe that not even 100 years ago, women were not allowed to vote. We’d all like to think that we’ve come a long way since then, but I’m not so sure we’ve come very far at all.

Sure, if Clinton had won, the composition of evil people would not really be any different. But those evil people wouldn’t feel empowered and justified, and their actions would still be heavily stigmatized. I can’t imagine how scary it must be to be a minority in this country now that you know just how many evil people there are and now that they are permitted to be openly hateful.

There will be many more messages written and slurs yelled at non-white people. There will be physical attacks on minorities, maybe even murders. There will likely be a backlash from minorities against whites. This country feels more broken than it has in a long time, but that’s only because 60 million people got together to cheer on the fissure and help it expand.

Why are people so terrified of anyone who is different than them? Seriously, who even cares about this anymore?

For as integrated as this country can seem at times, it still really is an extremely segregated nation, both by choice and by norm. We still have black neighborhoods, white neighborhoods, and latino neighborhoods. Each culture has its own sports, food, schools, language, websites, movies, clothing, clubs, and music, with little crossover at all. Hell, you could argue each political party has their own culture.

I’m a white person who watches the black people head south on the Red Line while I head north. I’m a white person who stays away from Kingston Mines and goes to John Barleycorn. I’ll speak with people from other cultures at work, but it’s rare that I hang out with someone who isn’t white. I don’t watch BET or “black” movies, I don’t listen to rap, I don’t read black authors, and I don’t understand black people.

And that right there is the root of the cause. To a large extent, humans are still those scared little primates in the forests, unsure of the other primates walking toward them, but expecting and prepared for the worst. People are afraid of the unfamiliar, the unusual, the unknown. If we never spend time together, we will remain scared of each other. We will continue to hold on to stereotypes and prejudice because we will have no evidence to discount them.

We have to talk to one another. We have to learn from one another. And we have to do this out of honest curiosity and interest, not out of obligation. We have to let black people move into our neighborhoods and not move away when they do. We have to move into latino neighborhoods and not try to replace their culture with our culture. We have to open both our minds and our mouths and freaking spend time with one another. If we don’t do this, things will never change. Ever.

I don’t want to end on such a pessimistic note, but I’m not sure there’s room for optimism right now. This is an awful thing we have done. Electing Trump is probably the worst thing that our country will do in my lifetime. Or at least I hope it is.

I hope that this is a wake up call to the nation that our problems are not fixed just because we papered over them by electing a black president. I hope this is a wake up call that we still don’t understand one another, and we need to make an effort to do so. I hope this is a wake up call that the world is still pretty messed up, and that good things don’t last unless you continue to work for them.

This has been a dark few years in this country, and it has all been capped off by an extremely dark day. But this is not the end. These are not the only people in our country. These people are only as powerful as we let them be. We can change. We can improve and grow. We can stop this from ever happening again.

We have to stop being afraid of one another and assuming the worst in others. In my experience, you tend to find what you’re looking for. Look for the good in people and give them the chance to prove you right. They will.