The air is charged with danger.
I’m at the pump filling up my tank. The gas, with my big supermarket discount, is $1.22 a gallon. I fill up my car for under $20. THANKS OBAMA! (No, really, thanks Obama.)
A guy, a white guy, across from me at the other pump glares at me, staring uncomfortably. I smile at him and nod, a universal gesture of neighborly friendliness. He keeps staring at me as if I just stole his last $20 bill.
I’m a black woman.
Another white man, at another pump, sees this and nervously starts making small talk with me. I’m nervous too. The other white guy finally relents in his gaze and gets back into his Dodge Ram or Tundra or whatever big ass truck he is driving (he really is driving a big ass truck). He drives off and I exhale, realizing I’d been holding my breath for a long time. I live in Ohio, Southwestern Ohio, in a rural county. I’ve lived out here in the boonies for 5 years and never had a problem, never felt much discomfort. But since Trump came on to the scene, dominating the Republican primary, the whole energy has shifted.
***
I’m going through a drive thru with my husband. He’s white. We’ve been to this local place at least once a month for the past six years. The girl at the window, holding onto the bag of food, looks at me, then at my husband, and then drops the food in his hand. She slams the window shut without saying “Thank you.” We both notice, but say nothing. We drive the 5 miles home in silence.
I’m online and I read stories about a white man shooting people speaking Spanish in Kansas. For no reason. Simply for hate. Last year the police killed over 100 unarmed black folks. Overall, they killed more than 1000 people of all races. That’s more than 2 black people per week. For American citizens, that’s 2 people per day. This doesn’t include the regular white citizens who kill black people and get away with it. You know who is killed at the highest rate by police? Native people. Yet, we hardly hear anything about that.
One night, leaving our house after a party, our best friends—a lesbian couple—are pulled over by the cops. It’s winter. The cops make my friend sit on the side of the road, without a coat, for an hour and constantly re-check her for sobriety. She’s not drunk. She tries to put her hands in her pockets, but they won’t let her. She doesn’t resist. Finally, they let her go.
***
In the media, it seems that people are struggling to understand this cross-section of American culture. I, unfortunately, know a few of these people. I didn’t know them to be racists until Trump started running. Then, all kinds of opinions and points of view which had been kept quiet now are out to play and they have no problem telling me, even though I am black.
“The white man is the only person you can talk bad about in American society and get away with it,” one white acquaintance tells me one evening. What I hear is: “We used to be able to force respect upon you n******. The penalty was death.” Yes, for these people, a black person “talking back” to them is a problem. It’s a problem because they do not, and cannot, and will not, ever see a black person (or a woman, or a gay person, or a Muslim) as their equal. So everyone must acquiesce to them and if they don’t, it’s a sign of the world gone wrong. A lot of attention has been paid to the economic situation of this demographic. And the economic hardship is inseparable from the racism, xenophobia, sexism and homophobia.
They have no accessible discourse to analyze what is happening to them in a country whose power structure, on both the right and the “left,” has nursed and incubated the racism we are now seeing boil over. The elites in power didn’t mind the racism as long as they could control it; so they never saw fit to actually shift their message and repudiate racist, and all other forms of “otherist,” thinking. But now they are no longer in control of their racist masses and they are losing their minds.
Happy people, no matter how ill-informed or entrenched in anachronistic thinking, don’t have time to beat people up. They don’t stare down people of color at gas pumps. They don’t throw food out of windows. They are too busy being happy.
Instead, people who are aggressive in this way—and this includes cops--are usually quite mentally ill. They are paranoid, delusional, and often suffer from low self-esteem (as the link above indicates). What is fuel to the fire of (racist/otherist) mental illness? Poverty.
How can you be happy making 7.25 an hour? (And that’s BEFORE taxes?) How can you be happy living in a broken trailer (and I’m not talking about those swanky little house trailers which pepper my rural neighborhood here and there), eating horrible food day in and day out, with little hope of changing the situation for your children? 51% of Americans make less than 30k a year. That comes to $2,500 a month before taxes; after taxes it’s about 2100 a month. I think we can all see that this works out horribly unless you are young and single without children. But if you’re older, with kids, trying to make ends meet, $2100 a month is incredibly difficult. And this is only if you happen to find hourly work at a place that will give you 40 hours a week, which low wage employers frequently do not.
This is the economic situation we haven’t grappled with. This is a lifestyle that nobody in Washington really wants to change. We’re squabbling over a $15 an hour minimum wage increase. That would only bring the average worker, who worked 40 hours a week, to about 34K a year. Nobody on Capitol Hill has to eek out an existence on that.
This isn’t about pitying people who are willing to do violence and harm to others simply because they are different. Because, let’s face it, minorities fair worse than whites in this economy. Incomes for the average black family went down under Obama. So this isn’t about pity for bigots. It’s about the safety of people of color and other oppressed groups in this country.
Income inequality only increases hate crimes.
One of the reasons I supported Bernie Sanders was because I saw that improving the quality of life of people on the bottom, would shift the affective charge in our culture. It would make America safer for everyone. People who feel they have something to lose don’t act out as much as those who feel they have nothing to lose. And for many of these people who support Trump, all they have of value left to lose is their whiteness. So they’re going to fight for it. And yes, that is racist. But it’s all they’ve got. If they had something other than their whiteness to hold onto, they wouldn’t be so attracted to Trump. This is what is at stake.
I don’t have anything personally against Hillary. I think she is smart, competent, and a successful politician. I hate that right at the moment that the income inequality of this country is at a boiling point, she is coming in with a kind of savvy political knowledge that people distrust. It seems like she is being punished for mastering the techniques of governing that have been the status quo for generations. It’s not right; she’s studied, she’s worked hard, she’s paid her dues. She shouldn’t be punished for succeeding in this system on its own terms.
But, I also fear that 4 to 8 more years of squeezing the people at the bottom will turn up the heat on our melting pot and it will become, as it clearly is on its way to, molten lava. I don’t want single payer healthcare, free college, and a $15 minimum wage because I need those things. I don’t want them because I feel so sorry for the bigots who are suffering economically. I want those things because only by taking care of each other, even if we abhor each other’s views, will we be able to move towards a more egalitarian society. The illness of bigotry cannot be treated with starvation, heroin addiction and white hopelessness. Basic well-being must be established first—only then will people feel safe enough to evolve out of their lizard brain, socially constructed, survival instinct which is the fuel for the violence of hate crimes.
***
I recognize that a Hillary Clinton Presidency will be a necessary achievement for our country. This country is sexist, and her victory, and by God she HAS to win if we are going to make it out even partially unscathed, will be an important sign that a large coalition of American voters recognizes that men and women can govern with intelligence and restraint. Hillary can do it. And, even if we do not agree with everything she does, she is a poised and erudite thinker that we can be proud of as our President. She will not make a fool of us.
At the same time, she is part of an elite in American society that doesn’t see itself as such. I’m part of that elite too—highly educated, a “topish” earner (though not a top spender, hehe, and by no means in the 1%), etc.--and I don’t feel particularly powerful or privileged. And, I don’t feel that I should be penalized for achieving the American dream (against all odds, like Hillary and Bill, and Obama, and Sanders, I might add). However if we do not realize that something has to change, we will be in big trouble. The implosion will continue. I hope that Hillary’s movement toward Bernie’s policies isn’t just election talk. I hope she will make good on it. Because it is people like me who are on the chopping block first, who are on the chopping block right now.
Eventually, it’ll be the white elites who support the status quo they come for. But for now, it’s me and people who look like me—and I have to live knowing that the anger of the “silent majority” is coming my way first. I have to pay the price for the neoliberal policies that have impoverished them and for the neocon views that have taught them that I am the enemy.
It is not hyperbole when I say that I hope I only have to pay that price in cold stares and rude drive thru service. I hope I do not have to pay that price in blood.
***
This weekend I’m driving to Illinois, across the state of Indiana. For four long hours, I’ll cross truly hostile territory. Klan activity is high there and the highway is peppered with anti-abortion signs and heterosexual marriage signs.
I’m going to see a friend, but I know it is possible I might not make it. 2 per week. 2 per day. I spend a lot of time thinking about what to do if I’m run off the road or taken into custody on a bogus charge. I think about where to place my insurance card, driver’s license, and registration so the officer can’t possibly think I’m reaching for weapon if he pulls me over. I think about leaving final voice messages while I wait for him to walk to my window, in case none of those preventive measures works and I disappear.
“Make sure you have a full tank of gas before you go,” my husband advises. “That way you don’t have to stop in any strange towns.”
This election feels like life and death. We need to defeat Trump so that all Americans get the message that hate and hate speech is not going to be tolerated.
And, if you are a white person, and you see a person of color or any other minority being micro-aggressed, speak up and intervene as the man did when I was pumping gas. It makes a difference—a big difference. He was basically saying, “I’ve got your back.” And that back up mattered.
I am going to vote for Hillary in the general election and I will campaign my ass off for her, as I did for every Democratic candidate since 2004. But as a country, we have a long way to go. Bernie’s agenda is real and needs to be put into action, no matter who is President. We can’t drop the ball down ballot. We have to keep on working and fighting for the country we want. And we must raise the standard of living for all Americans before we can begin to truly reckon with our racist/otherist present.