Right now, the next morning over coffee as I'm looking back over the past year, it seems like this race has been a struggle for survival. Some pundit last night -- I don't remember who, sorry, there were so many -- made the case that this surge for Trump might have been because he tapped into this deep-seated fear that the traditions and the values and the demographics of American had changed too much, too fast. Trump is the manifestation of a white majority clinging to their ever-fading majority status. The rise in numbers and efficacy of minorities, the rise in power of women... these things are too far away from our traditional way of life to be comfortable, and coupled with economic collapse and slow recovery, the loss of manufacturing jobs, etc., all culminated into this soul deep appeal to stop the change and bring back all the strengths of who we have always been.
Survival, yeah? This metaphorical struggle for "us" to "survive" as "who we are." That's a powerful piece. I don't think I've ignored this piece, but I do think I've underestimated the depth and breadth of it. Many people in our country feel that this has been a fight for our way of life.
Right now, the next morning over coffee as I'm looking back over the past year, I'm thinking about the type of survival I've been faced with this year.
Trans folks I know have experienced an upswing in violence along with the policies about where they are allowed to pee -- a general pervasiveness of a social sentiment and norm that 'you may not be safe anywhere because of who you are.' Physically safe, that is. This is not a way-of-life metaphor. This is a literal life and bodily safety reality.
Black folks have been striving to make visible the invisible and systematic killing of their young men during routine police encounters that would not have threatened my physical safety because I am white and small and female. Their very existence as black people is threatened, again, not in some way-of-life metaphor, but in the literal 'being disproportionately killed' reality. Couple this with disproportionate incarceration, underemployment, and other metaphorical way-of-life blockades and barriers thrown up every step of the way in their life's journey because of systemic and institutionalized racism, and you see that Black Lives Matter means stop killing us, and also means let us live.
Latinos, and I think Mexicans specifically, have faced an uptick in racism and xenophobia lobbed their way with all of this conversation about walls and border security and Mexicans being drug dealers and rapists. The thing is, the reality of this conversation is conflating two very different issues -- drug cartels and people moving to America for a better life. They have the same color skin and speak the same Spanish, so I can understand how people who don't bother to look past those things could naturally assume that every Latino is possibly a drug cartel assassin... no. No hyperbole. The drug cartels are a major problem on our continent, and one that needs to be addressed. Full stop. Somewhere else we can argue about how. Simultaneously, our country is becoming more brown as more and more Latinos who are just people, looking for a better life for them and their children, good solid citizens and Christians to boot, are coming to America and staying here. And they are harassed by police, by politicians, by laws, by citizens. Literal survival. Can I be physically safe in America my home? Will my children be physically safe in America my home?
Muslims (as well as, frankly, anyone who looks Muslim -- hijabs and turbans aren't just Islam; Middle Eastern features aren't just Islam) have received xenophobic hate and rhetoric about internment camps and locked borders because of their religion. Some dismiss this as just rhetoric, but that ignores the history of internment camps we have here in our country, and it ignores the more recent history of conflating violent religious extremists who are Muslim with all Muslims (3+ million in our country; 1.6 billion in the world). I got pepper-sprayed at a counter-demonstration against a KKK rally once; even as we're running away in chaos, no one turned to me and said, "she's a white Christian -- she's one of them!" No one has tried to block my churches from being built; no one has harassed or assaulted me for the religion I was. But this fear and hatred for extremists (justified) is being cast with blanket injustice against people who are just people.
And women. It seemed the country went crazy with understanding the daily danger that women are in, the daily harassment we face, the constant threat of violence and assault, the entitlement that men we do not know feel to our bodies. In reality, I personally have experienced no noted upswing in threats to my person since Trump's comments on that bus went viral. No upswing, just the same threat as always. But I have felt scared and unsafe almost every minute of every day as our public and political discourse rushed to explore, to expose, to minimize, to dismiss, to criminalize even the stories that women share of this constant harassment and assault. I feel physically unsafe in this world anyway, because women must feel physically unsafe in this world in order to be vigilant enough to hopefully remain safe. But now, now I also feel slandered and dismissed, long before ever speaking up.
For LGBTQ folks, people of color, religious minorities, and women, this election has largely become a struggle for survival -- the literal kind, where we want for physical safety and are not assured we can have it. And for others, we have the struggle for survival of our way of life as Americans -- the survival in which you won't die or be physically harmed, but life will change and you don't want it to. Objectively, these issues of survival are false equivalencies -- lifestyle versus actually staying alive? Not the same at all -- but psychologically speaking, these issues of survival all feel the same. People whose metaphorical survival is threatened feel (physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, cognitively) as though the are in a struggle for literal survival. Those who actually are in a struggle for literal survival... well, how could we possibly accept that your fear of change is commiserate to my fear for my physical safety, since, you know, it is not the same thing at all.
That's what I'm thinking about this morning. It is not that the people who brought Trump into office are literally fine with threats against LGBTQ, Black, Latino, Muslim, and women people... it's just that they feel like they too are under similar threat, that are threats our equivalent, and that this is just politics. I'm telling myself this because I'm not yet ready to entertain the idea that America is a place where half of the country actively wants to harm LGBTQ, Black, Latino, Muslim, and women people. I can't believe that yet. Right now I have to believe that this is not about America's desire to harass, assault, kill, and legislate against us, blocking us into perpetual unsafety and uncertainty.
We have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of healing to do. If it is true that pretty much everyone in our country feels like they are under threat (literal or metaphorical), we've GOT to fix that. In my ideals of America, the best of who we are is a diverse group that works together to find the best way forward. And we have politics and infighting and everything else because there is no way 300+ million people could all possibly agree on the best path forward. But the best of who we are is that we try. I don't trust that this kind of healing could possibly come from the very top of our government, not with this President. Other politicians, maybe. From us, the people? Yeah, we can do this.
We've got work to do. And we've got to be the best of who we are while we do it. And we need to do this together.
That's all I got in me today, optimism-wise. Because in my reality, half of the country just voted to decrease the physical safety LGBTQ, Black, Latino, Muslim, and women people. So here is my mantra, again and again:
We've got work to do. We've got to be the best of who we are. We need to do this together.
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