BY RON HOWELL
November 13, 2016
Many Donald Trump supporters try to cover their intentions. They say their choice was about ideology, about the direction of the country.
But every exit poll shows it was about race. Whites overwhelmingly voted for a man who has a history of rejecting black people wanting to live in his apartment buildings, who said he wants to send Mexicans back to Mexico, who said he wants to keep Muslims out of the country.
Even a majority of white women voted for Trump, despite his saying he’s free to grab women in the crotch. White women pulled levers for Trump even as he called Hillary Clinton, who would have been the country’s first female President, “a nasty woman.”
I teach at Brooklyn College and I’ve seen students cry as they shared fears engendered by the outcome of Tuesday’s voting. One student, a white woman, spoke at a gathering on campus Thursday and broke down in tears as she said she was embarrassed to be white. She said that gays, lesbians and transgender people have as much reason as blacks to be fearful of Trump.
Election night was like the unexpected death of a loved one, she said.
As for me, I have hope: that the election of Trump will bring racial and cultural minorities together and will help them gain political power as they assert themselves in self-protective ways.
The campuses of the city’s public colleges are becoming “safe spaces” for otherwise marginalized students who can emote and grow during the Trump years. One black student spoke of a social media exchange that devastated him. A white acquaintance from high school, now a Trumpite, told him black people should not be upset about having been slaves. The black student teetered between shock and anger as he spoke.
Many of us, especially older ones, understand that this country has been about race since its founding. Clinton, not a radical when it comes to black interests, has called slavery America’s “original sin.” It’s a sin for which the country has tried to offer penance, as in 2008 and 2012 when it elected Barack Obama to the presidency. But the atonement quickly dissolved.
The insults directed at Obama were remarkable. In 2009 a Republican congressman shouted “You lie!” to the President, as the executive was speaking from a podium at a joint session of legislators. Giggling with delight, Trump began flinging the “birther” meme, suggesting Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore an illegitimate occupant of the office.
The U.S. media committed a professional crime of nonfeasance in this past election cycle. It failed to tell us how determinative race would be as an issue. Yes, sure, the pollsters blew it. But so did journalists.
This purely racial aspect of white America’s embrace of Trump became evident on Election Day. It was all in the exit polls.
We learned that it was not just about poor whites who lost jobs making cars or working in coal mines. That’s what we had been led to believe. No, exit polls showed that, in fact, Trump got more support from the white upper classes than the lower ones. He did better than Clinton with Americans making $100,000 or more a year. Clinton did better than Trump among the poorer white voters.
So much for the pervasive nonsense that educated whites would reject the race-baiter as only the ignorant yelled their support for him.
We’ll be forced to reckon with what this reveals about New York City, too. Some of my white students have said that many of their neighbors and relatives are Trump loyalists. They acknowledge especially strong fervor in Italian communities in the southern part of Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Blacks, especially, feel confirmed in their belief that many workaday New Yorkers are anti-black.
But take my word, this will produce positive change. Black, brown and gay New Yorkers will coalesce as a new force in New York City and around the nation. The U.S. Census Bureau says racial and ethnic minorities are now a majority of children under the age of 5.
In the long run, Trump will not succeed.
What a horrible divisive article. You should be ashamed to publish it on your blog. If this is the way peole think we are in big trouble.
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