I am whiter than white, so I don’t feel qualified to fully absorb the feelings of people of color and how they might be reacting to the recent election. I’m still sorting out my own feelings and reactions.
It’s difficult to reconcile the conundrum of Secretary Clinton winning the popular vote by a large margin, while significantly trailing in the electoral votes. Of course, it’s easy to pinpoint where the gap occurs — PA, MI, OH, FL and WI — but not as easy to understand why so many voters who were happy to elect a black man as President were not willing to elect a white woman.
There’s lots of theories, and I suspect the “reason” is due to many factors. It’s impossible to say one, or two or even five factors are the reason for the difference between popular and electoral votes. While it’s important to understand why this election happened the way it did, it’s not effective to place blame. We need to learn what happened to avoid repeating that mistake.
What’s also important is to look at everything, even when it makes us uncomfortable. I loved this blog by Rolandz, which suggested that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the right campaign to run, but white America wasn’t ready to hear about systemic racism and intersectionality. Those ideas make many people feel uncomfortable, but the Democratic party can NOT turn its back on minorities and people of color just to win elections.
Toni Morrison recently published an essay in the New Yorker, and it is powerful. I highly recommend reading all of it, but here’s a taste:
Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.
She’s right. Europe is generally less diverse than the US, but we are a white-dominant society. I remember a recent commercial on television that received a lot of criticism because the family in the cereal commercial was mixed race. We have thousands, hundreds of thousands of families like that in the US, but that was one of the first times a mixed race family was in a television commercial.
Ms. Morrison goes on to say:
So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.
On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people.
Brava, Toni Morrison! I am so glad to see someone stand up and talk about how racism was a substantial factor in the recent election. If reaching out to these people means we have to abandon our support for the Democratic base, I want nothing to do with it.
Ms. Morrison’s essay was one of sixteen essays that appeared in the New Yorker in the aftermath of the election. The entire series is outstanding.