I expected I would wake up Wednesday morning and write a column with a dark joke about how America walked away from the edge of the bridge but still needed to grapple with the issues that brought it there in the first place.
I was wrong. What happened last night wasn’t a suicide, a decision to go out with one great last hurrah, a vote that we all knew we would not, could not, come back from.
What happened last night was a murder centuries in the making. A massacre. And, as Kurt Vonnegut said, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” But I guess I’ll try, even as my hands shake on the keyboard and my stomach churns inside me.
In queer spaces and communities of color, today feels like a funeral. And not just in the usual way, like the recent murder of the 24th trans person this year and the trials of Dylann Roof and the killer of Walter Scott playing in the background of life. For communities used to funerals, today’s feels particularly big.
Donald Trump has previously talked about making a national database of Muslims and blocking their movement into the country. The only thing worse than that is the potential violence that follows when the commander-in-chief uses his bully pulpit to bully. There are stories on Twitter today of devout Muslim women having the talk with their daughters about how they can be forgiven for not wearing the hijab.
Queer people woke up to a president-elect who’s promised to remove federal LGBT protections and appoint Supreme Court justices who want to make their marriages illegal. They woke up to a vice president-elect who proposed moving AIDS research funding to conversion therapy; a man who wants to torture them until they break down and deny who they are. The man who passed a law making it fully legal to discriminate against them is now on his way to the Naval Observatory.
The Latin community is waking up to find out that their next president opened his campaign by calling them rapists, drug dealers and criminals and promising to keep more people like them out. He’s promised to deport millions of people, many of whom have broken no laws since they fled from poverty or violence. Some of them barely speak their parents’ native language but could find themselves forced back to a country they might not remember.
Black people are waking up to a president-elect who still believes that the Central Park Five, exonerated by DNA evidence, should’ve been killed for a crime they clearly didn’t commit. Their new president made his first headlines by saying people like them didn’t belong in his buildings. Our next attorney general might be Rudy Giuliani, who made it legal for police officers to stop and frisk people of color for no reason at all, a policy that Trump has publicly supported.
The suicide hotlines are ringing with the grief and desperation of the people above. But none of them gave us Trump. There’s nothing they could’ve done to stop this.
Women are waking up to find a president who’s bragged about sexual assault moving into the White House instead of a relatively qualified woman. Their next president has promised to appoint justices willing to, and capable of, making it so that the government can declare what a woman can and can’t do with her own body.
Well, some of them gave us Trump.
Trump won by dominating the votes of white men and winning the votes of white women. They are almost solely responsible for the impending sense of doom minority communities are waking up to as I type these words.
A popular theory among (white) pundits is that white America had some sense of “economic anxiety” that led to them voting for Trump. That theory would say that minority communities just got swept up in the aftermath. The harm done was perhaps tragic, but entirely due to voters pursuing their own economic interests. Trump voters don’t hate people of color, women and queer people so much as they just don’t care one way or the other about them.
But that theory is patently untrue. Clinton won among voters who were worried about the economy. Clinton won among voters making less than $50,000 a year. The economically vulnerable clung to her. It was the white people who were comfortable who wanted to Make America Great Again.
Trump won among people concerned primarily with immigration. He won with people primarily concerned about terrorism. He won among people scared of others with a darker skin tone. He strung white Evangelicals along with promises of a Supreme Court that would overturn a woman’s constitutional right to privacy in medical decisions and roll back the clock on LGBT rights.
What happened on Election Day wasn’t a suicide or a dispassionate killing, but a gleeful murder of the people that many Americans wish weren’t here. People wanted to bring American back to the golden days, when people of color couldn’t vote or use the same facilities as white Americans, when LGBT people stayed closeted, when the disabled were ignored and when women were trapped in abusive relationships so “family values” could thrive.
And they won. There are enough of them to win the House, Senate, presidency and, soon, the Supreme Court. What makes the election doubly painful isn’t just the murder but the knowledge that the perpetrator will remain out there, unpunished, and able to strike again.
White America sent exactly the message they intended to. They gave us all of the other backgrounds funerals, or allowed them to happen. Why should they care about another one?