As a white man, I’m deeply embarrassed. How could I have believed the racist stories? The same way I believed all those stories when I was a kid.
Yes, I’m a white guy. And I’m not just vaguely white, I’m a seriously white guy. In American race relations, I don’t epitomize ‘clueless,’ but I might be in contention for the title. I was raised in the segregated south, and it seemed so normal I didn’t even notice until decades later. I was taught all the southern justifications for the Civil War (it was mostly economic, Robert E. Lee only joined the Confederacy reluctantly, it was gentleman defending their lands, yadda, yadda). Many history classes devoted to Reconstruction. I might have heard the phrase ‘Jim Crow’, but I won’t swear to it, and lynchings were mentioned once. By accident. They told me the southern stories, and as a kid, I believed it all.
These days, I’m embarrassed that I was so ignorant for so long. Part was because things were hidden, but I know part was stuff I didn’t want to see. I still don’t want to know. I’m an adult, so I try not to look away, but I keep finding places where I still do.
I believed that Trump was elected by working-class people angry at political parties who didn’t represent their interests. I thought that was believable, since I’d watched my own work benefits erode every year. Sick leave, retirement, longer vacations, job stability, the 40-hour work week, all gone. I could see how that would leave people soured on the two big parties.
The second story about how intellectual elites were disdainfully sniffing at people in the fly-over states fooled me, too. I didn’t know people like that, not exactly, but my liberal friends and I would look at their justifications for this or that idea, and dismiss them as transparent fabrications.
Both of those ideas are plausible, and commonly told, and they’re lies. I began to suspect that as time went by, with Republican racism getting bolder and less hidden. And then there was Charlottesville, and I realized I was completely wrong. This wasn’t just isolated bits of racism and prejudice. It was white men.
I strongly recommend Ta-Nahisi Coates article, The First White President, published in the Atlantic. I don’t love everything he does, but this article is seminal. Coates lays it out, and he gives the real numbers he uses to support his position. Here’s one interesting stat:
According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.
Trump wasn’t elected by angry workers, he was elected by whites. His white support was overwhelming across all class lines, and in every state. The people who elected him weren’t uneducated or even under-educated. The people who elected him weren’t poor, or even average, but a bit richer. They don’t match the stories, but lordy, were they white.
And it sounds like these white men were horrified.
At the end of the first black presidency, we had new choices: an overqualified, slightly stuffy woman paired against an under-qualified white demagogue. Clinton was the approved Democratic party candidate; Trump wasn’t even a Republican.
As the election progressed, we found out more. Clinton was controlling, and had a hard time being open and honest. And a ton of people were massively threatened at the very idea of her. The Republicans tried to generate a string of ‘scandals’, even as each one failed to hold water.
Trump revealed that he was an open fabulist, a sexual predator, a know-nothing, and, possibly, an idiot. Trump was a philanderer, a petty and vindictive bully, and the least godly man I have every seen running for office. He trashed honest people, attacked anyone who opposed him, and he issued an amazing string of lies that simply never stopped. Whenever he was faced with obvious evidence, Trump doubled-down, escalating each situation before doing something else outrageous as distraction.
And when the choice came up, America wanted the idiot. Sure, Trump barely won, and only with targeted help from America’s enemies, but he nonetheless won.
I can’t fool myself. America chose Trump. It’s what happened. And we did it on purpose. All the rest — emails, Benghazi, IRS, Vince Foster — all that was window-dressing, each claim crumbling under inspection, but shambling on as zombies claims. People — no, white people — welcomed each false scandal, knowing they were false, because they needed something they could hold up as cover. Nobody cared about, say the email server, or they’d be upset with all the Republicans who’ve been caught doing exactly the same thing since then. Hillary’s server was useful to people who knew they would never vote for anyone other than a white man.
From the moment Trump began getting national attention, he’s spent every week as if actively trying to prove he’s the devil incarnate. He betrays our troops, and his core voters are OK with that. He lies, he steals, he breaks every promise, and they applaud. They don’t care about that stuff. No matter what, it’s better to have the devil Trump than any woman. Or, god forbid, another non-white.
