The Greatest Value — Trump and the America We Made

The Greatest Value — Trump and the America We Made

by Scott Woods, Art by Marcus P. Blackwell

Black people have been telling this country from day one that it was jaw-droppingly racist on a molecular level. We’ve been told that we were wrong, that we were paranoid, that we made everything about race. We were made to feel uncomfortable at our jobs because we tried to tell you that you were killing us one micro aggression at a time.

Well guess what: you have Donald Trump as a president because white people make everything about race…they just don’t know it.

Voters of all colors largely turned out for Democrats, holding our noses, but in formation nonetheless. It’s what we’ve always done: vote against parties that can’t be bothered to hide their loathing for our existence. At the end of the day, more than half of white women and well over sixty percent of white males came out in force for Trump, a candidate who shouldn’t have made it out of week three of the primaries a year ago. We did our part. White America, on the other hand, largely kept its mouth closed at office water coolers and voted something resembling their conscience.

Every talking head on television is going to spend no small amount of time over the next few weeks unpacking how this happened, even though none of them were right for the last year and a half. They were wrong all the way up until midnight, at which point they basically imploded, suddenly very lucid and honest about white voters in ways they dared not report before. Everyone was wrong about this election, from CNN to the conspiracy theorist at your local barbershop, and they were wrong about this election because we have all been wrong about America, specifically what it means to be an American.

In short, we’ve been misattributing what America’s greatest value is.

America’s premiere value – the thing that America not only subscribes to but actively works toward – isn’t liberty or justice or freedom. It’s not even any of the issues politicians run on, which is why Trump was able to win without actually addressing issues at all for a full year. America’s premiere value is comfort. It is not anything in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or carved into any of our monuments. It is simply wanting to not feel scared unless we are the ones doing the scaring. We are a nation of bullies, and we have officially crowned a bully as president. Not a leader; an openly racist, clearly misogynistic bully.

Here’s how much of a bully your new president – and the old America he represents – is: today, in schools across this country, children are scared. In some places teachers are being told by admins that if students are having a hard time processing what’s happened that they can send them home. Over a presidential election.

America, you have literally elected an in-the-flesh boogeyman as the leader of the free world.

We think we’re special in Ohio, or at least in the middle of it. We’re not special. We’re as racist as the rest of the country we’re constantly trying to be better than, and in some ways insidiously so. We pretend that because we’re a northern state or because we have good restaurants or because we weathered the recession pretty well or because we went for Obama the last time that we’re not like Texas or Florida. We love touting the bon mot that Columbus was voted one of the smartest cities in the country a couple of years ago. But then you look at the exit polls last night and discover that more than half of college-educated voters went Trump. This isn’t about rural Ohio. This is about white Ohio.

The results turned out this way because people who haven’t really lost anything feel like they’ve lost everything because a few people that don’t look like them got a little something. And despite all of the technologies and information and entertainments at their constant whim; despite the fact that they have, in fact, lost nothing while being begged to share what shouldn’t have to be asked for in the first place; despite the fact that no one is killing them on sight for what they are, or that no one has ever actually taken their guns; or that, when convicted of horrific crimes, they are treated with slaps on their wrists because of the potential they preternaturally possess because of their station in life; they’re scared of a system that does nothing but reward their existence at every turn. They’re scared because of a self-accusing national spirit, that if the people normally used to fuel the machine that grants them such largesse were given any access to it at all they would visit upon them retribution. There is nothing in history to support this result, but then context isn’t America’s strong suit.

So here we are, entering the era of an indisputably historic presidency that hasn’t even begun yet and already feels like the most dangerous of precipices. America wasn’t going to be all smiles and tax cuts if Clinton had won, but it wasn’t going to be a place led by a Doonesbury cartoon. But then, a lot of us are having to reconfigure our definition of America today. Or, more accurately, realize the America some of us have always been living in.

Americans were asked to vote their conscience. And last night, they did. What that means moving forward will require several steps backwards to see what we’ve been getting wrong from the beginning.

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