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The U.S. presidential election was an upset of epic proportions.  It was also a wake up call for millions of white Americans whose African American friends and neighbors are just shaking their heads, because for people of color, this election was simply business as usual, a Tuesday in America.

As a white woman, I am working hard today to understand the appeal of a President Trump, just as I have been throughout the election.  The thing is, no one has really taken me up on that offer to educate me.  I’ve been able to identify just a handful of folks in my orbit that will admit casting their ballot for him, fewer did so proudly.  Three that I know to be exact.

That left me with seeking other explanations, typically online.  Sometimes the Internet is an amazing resource for seeking out information, and sometimes, not so much.  I have not been comfortable with the narrative that Donald Trump was elected by uneducated, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, isolationist, evangelical bigots.

Don’t get me wrong, here.  I believe that candidate Trump appealed to all those basest of instincts that still hold America captive in too many ways and in too many places.  I have watched enough footage of his rallies to not dismiss the ugly river of hatred that flowed freely.  JEW-S-A!  JEW-S-A! JEW-S-A! comes to mind, as does seeing Hillary Clinton referred to as a bitch and a cunt more times than I could count, and the image of President Obama with a noose around his neck is forever imprinted on me, as will be the call to kill and imprison journalists for simply doing their job.

So if Donald Trump’s voting base extended beyond the ill informed stereotype of the gun toting redneck living in the trailer at the river’s edge, who did vote for him?  The breakdown might surprise you, though, again, my friends of color will shake their head, unruffled with what the stats show.

• 63% of white male voters
• 54% of white female voters
• 13% of black male voters
• 4% of black female voters
• 33% of Latino male voters
• 26% of Latino female voters

That’s the racial breakdown, but it only tells us part of the story.  Here are some additional important stats:

• Hillary won the youth vote, but with significantly smaller margins than President Obama’s victories
• 81% of Evangelical Christian voters cast a ballot for Trump
• Trump outperformed Clinton with college educated white voters by four points (49% to Hillary’s 45%)
• 67% of non-college educated white voters backed Trump

These stats help bust the myth of just who it is that cast a ballot for Trump, and that is important information to have.  I am hoping that some of you who voted for him are reading these words, because I have a challenge for you in the days ahead.

White Americans don’t like the idea or characterization of being racist or bigoted.  It is distasteful and ugly and pretty damn easy to think that the word doesn’t apply to you.  There is a sense, I think, that being a racist involves the addition of behavior — engaging in some kind of hateful activity like we saw was commonplace at Trump rallies, rather than the subtraction of behavior — remaining silent or complacent in the presence of racism or bigotry.

It is very easy to be a racist or bigot in America even never having uttered the N word or other perjorative terms for Latinos or gays or Jews or Muslims or the poor or uneducated or rich and educated — anyone else that evidences difference.  Something that comes to mind is the idea of white people who claim they are colorblind, “I don’t see color, I just see people.”  Hog-freaking-wash.  If you don’t see color, you deny people of color their experience of being treated differently because of their color.

And just so you don’t feel so alone here, or put on the spot, let me be the first to say that I think of myself as a racist.  I am not asking the white folks reading these words to admit to anything I do not admit to myself.  Growing up white in America in the 1970s and 1980s on the south side of Chicago, it was pretty much a given that I grew up in a racist environment.  That culture is part of my fabric and I intend to write about it at some point.

Because I think of myself as a racist, coming from a racist history and environment, I work hard, very damn hard every day, to challenge that part of myself.  To see it and identify it and sit with it and understand it for what it is.  How racist or bigoted notions and ideas and prejudices are something to be acknowledged so they are not acted upon or do not influence behaviors.

And this leads me to the real point of this blog post, my challenge to those of you who are white and voted for Donald Trump.  He is a man who has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.  He is a man who picked a running mate that endorses conversion therapy for gay and lesbian people.  He is a man who clearly values women based on their level of attractiveness, through his own admissions.  These are factual statements.  I will not include his comments or actions that can easily be interpreted to demonstrate his racism or bigotry towards African Americans or Latinos or Muslims, because I have seen, repeatedly, how they have been rationalized or justified too often.

If you cast a ballot for Donald Trump because you are frustrated with the American economy, or our health care system, or the rampant corruption within our political system, or are a one issue voter championing the Second Amendment or the right to life movement, if you cast a ballot for Donald Trump despite his rhetoric rather than because of his rhetoric towards people of different colors or religions, what have you done to condemn those things and not excuse them?

You voted for a man that is endorsed by the KKK.  Is this okay with you?  Or should I ask, is this O-KKK with you?  If not, please speak up.  Silence is complicit.  Silence is acceptance.  Silence is tolerance.  Disavow the association, because from where I stand and from what I see, too many people who cast a ballot for Trump do accept and tolerate the hate that is so closely associated with him.

Whether you like it or not, whether you accept it or not, whether you want it or not, the idea of what America is is changing, moving forward, expanding, and accommodating that melting pot that was such a proud symbol of who we were as a country.  Do not pay lip service to loving America and being a patriot if you do not respect all Americans.  The American melting pot contains more than Northern European immigrants from several generations ago.

You have an opportunity to make America great again by disavowing that part of Donald Trump that tolerates and promotes and champions hate and bigotry.  Are you up to that challenge?

_________________

Elections stats provided can be found here and here and here.

These days . . .  they are hard.  Brutal days, for so many people.  Being gay isn’t easy.  Being black isn’t easy.  Being Latino isn’t easy.  Being Muslim isn’t easy.  Being a police officer isn’t easy.  Being a woman isn’t easy.  Hell, even being a Trump supporter isn’t easy these days.  Nothing seems easy these days.  We are angry.  So many of us feel angry these days, myself included.  It is exhausting.

When my daughter was going through her cancer treatment, my salvation was hope.  The trick, though, was in having to choose hope.  I learned quickly that when I chose hope, in whatever manner that presented itself, my life was made easier.  That active choice to hope, to believe, helped make my unbearable life bearable.  Hope guided me to savor the moments with my girl, to keep the focus on her, to believe we would be okay, despite the wreckage of cancer.

In my grief, choosing hope guided me, too.  In every way.  Hope allowed me to put my feet on the floor first thing in the morning, change diapers for my surviving son, find joy in places large and small.  Hope is what brought us to adopt our youngest son.  Hope is what allowed us to heal when our open adoption was closed.  Hope saw me through six months of illness with my Dad when there were days he was full of rage and vile insults, a cancer growing in him, changing him, that we had no idea existed.

Hope has been my religion, in a very literal sense.  An external structure, a faith, that provides support and comfort in difficult times.

These days, though, choosing hope is hard.  Really hard.

My son is a student in a Chicago public school.  There are constant threats of cuts, closures, and strikes.  Literally every day of his formal education has been a challenge on some level.  Gun violence in Chicago staggers the mind.  The numbers have a numbing effect.  We live in Illinois, a State that has existed without a budget for two years now.  Our elected officials spend more time blaming and posturing than governing.  Social service agencies that have existed and served vulnerable people for over 100 years are closing their doors and no one seems to care.

There has been great strife in my son’s school since January.  Grown adults acting like horrible, ill behaved children.  I have been the subject of rumors and mean girl campaigns that have had me in tears more often than I care to admit.  Acquaintances literally stop talking when I approach, then walk away.  Others challenging me with lies and accusations about me, not wanting to accept the truth I offer.  It has made me realize that if a community of local parents with a common interest can not make things work, why should we expect more from the politicians in our capitals?

I spend too much time on the Internet for professional reasons, and the imbalance skews me, perhaps hardens me.  There is so much outrage on the Internet, leaving not a lot of room for nuance.  There is an Old West “good guy” or “bad guy” mentality that develops.  People want to know and label where you fall on any number of issues.  We take one another’s temperature with close screenings of words and status updates that may or may not be accurate, then judge accordingly.  It is easy to become jaded and defensive.  Too easy.

Guns and rape and gorillas and religion and politics divide us.  I honestly have started to consider the possibility of a modern civil war erupting in the US, as it feels we are hurtling in that direction at an alarming rate.  So many of us seem to live in a place of fear.  We fear difference.  We fear violence.  We fear authority and the government.  We fear one another.  We fear guns.  We fear gun control.  As someone who lived in fear for two and a half years, I can tell you that it messes with you. Living in fear is not a healthy state of mind.  It changes you in ways that are potentially devastating.

This weekend a dear friend, in confidence, told me I was not handling myself well online.  That I was making myself a victim instead of listening to others who had been victimized.  Her words stung.  Still do, honestly.  I keep thinking about them.  This morning, wallowing in this sense of helplessness and hopelessness I feel, I appreciate that I feel victimized.  It’s no one’s doing.  It’s simply a consequence of living in the world today, feeling victimized, feeling powerless, living in fear. Allowing that fear, that sense of victimhood to bleed into my day-to-day, well, that ain’t cool.  It’s paralyzing and counterproductive and proof of an absence of hope.

Dammit.

So now what?  Now I have to work at choosing hope.  I have to try hard.  Then, I have to try harder.  I have to, perhaps, step away from online stimulation.  I have to take nature walks.  I have to play with my boys.  I have to dance.  I have to remember the people I love who have left me and the lessons they taught.  I have to believe. I have to find faith.  I have to go to the joy.  I have to remind the people I love that I love them.  I have to revel in the snuggles of my toddler and the clever of my young son.  I have to commit to change.  I have to use my voice.  I have to surround myself with art.  I have to read other people’s words, swim in their stories.  I have to appreciate a rain drop and a flower and the curve of a branch.  I have to pay attention.  I have to take care.

There is an artist from Kentucky that speaks to me.  Charles M. Laster, C.M. to his friends.  From the moment I first saw his art at an Outsider Art Fair in Harbert, Michigan back in 2009, in the days when my girl was still alive, but we knew she was dying, his art moved me.  I have felt, in looking at his work, that he is a fellow traveler in life who sometimes stumbles, but whose hope keeps him going.  His art is eternally hopeful, I think.  Today, in the midst of my wallow over Orlando and Stanford and Chicago and all places touched by violence, I glanced at a piece of his art I was lucky enough to purchase this winter.  This is it:

C.M. reminds me to believe.  To believe is my responsibility, one that, I hope, leads to a better quality of life.  One that allows me to raise my sons to be kind and compassionate men.  One that allows me to power through times of uncertainty.  One that allows me to forgive and ask for forgiveness, whatever is called for in any given moment.  One that I can breathe and sleep and experience and live.

I needed a sign today, a reminder to hope, to choose hope.  I found it on my bookshelf.  I am grateful.

This post is part of ChicagoNow’s monthly “Blogapalooza” challenge.  Bloggers are provided a writing prompt at 9:00 pm and must post by 10:00 pm.  Here is tonight’s prompt:

“Share your favorite quote (or quotes) — from a philosopher, author, comedian, politician, friend, family member, movie, whoever — and write in detail about why it resonates and has meaning for you.”

I got married in the spring of 2001, just shy of fifteen years ago.  Fifteen years ago, man. That is a long time.  I am proud of us, my husband and I.  We’ve weathered many storms in those years, and somehow, miraculously, have remained solid, together, married.

Back in 2001, it was my husband who was the creative one.  I was the sensible one. The social worker.  The career driven one.  My husband and I met through a classified ad in the Chicago Reader.  It was 1996, so that was pretty much pre-online.  We met through a freaking newspaper, people!  That is how long we’ve been together.

I make note of that, because in all the time we’ve been together, words have factored into our relationship.  In a big way.  It was my words on the classified page of a newspaper that attracted the love of my life to me.

One of the things that I loved about my husband from the get go was that he was a writer.  Not me, mind you.  Him.  He was the writer.  I was the fan, the groupie, the hopelessly straight girl from the suburbs who was attracted to creative types.

Six weeks after we met, my husband, then just barely a boyfriend, moved away to Europe for six months.  Our courtship was virtual, through words, and remains, to this day, the single most romantic period of my life.

The words we shared on a daily basis, me at my keyboard in Chicago, Jeremy at his keyboard in Amsterdam, are the foundation for those fifteen years of marriage.

When he returned, we moved in together.  It took a few years, but, finally, he proposed. I was inches away from popping the question myself, but, gratefully, he was first.  I know that is impossibly anti-feminist, but I’ll own it.

We wrote our own vows, of course, because, well, words.  They have always been important to us.  They are our glue, the adhesive of our understanding.  Words.

I had a complicated relationship with being a bride.  It truly did not appeal to me.  I felt, in many ways, like a prop, a symbol, a pretty girl in a white dress playing a part. One of the ways I marked the day as my own was with words.

My dress was made for me by a homemaker in Dyer, Indiana.  The fittings took place in her kitchen.  She had made my sister’s dress and my sister-in-law’s dress, too.  I was a challenging client, I think, because of that whole ambivalent attitude towards all things bridal.

The dress was plain satin.  No tulle, no train.  It was strapless with sweet scallops along the bodice.  Along the hem of the dress, in periwinkle blue embroidery, was a quote.  It was a line from an e. e. cummings poem.  My sister found the quote for me, she knowing me better than most.  As soon as I read the words, I knew they were the ones. A bit like the man I was marrying.

Always it’s spring, everyone’s in love, and flowers pick themselves.

Fifteen years later, those words encapsulate hope for me.  Hope.  More than anything else, the thing that has gotten me through life.

At the time, I didn’t know from hope. My parents were alive and well.  I hadn’t yet thought about motherhood, let alone burying a child.  Cancer was a bad thing that happened to other people. I was still naive.

Fifteen years ago, as I prepared for marriage to the man I love, the words meant something different to me.  They were about spring and potential and life and all things that are new and joyous and possible.

Hope evolves, just like life does.  The ten words that wrapped themselves around the hem of my wedding dress have evolved, too.  I may have lost my naivete to grief, but I still cling to joy, to life, to potential, and to that earnest love for a man who still stands beside me.