Dear White America

Dear white America. Please don’t do it.

According to the polls, you are about to repeat what you have done in all but one presidential election since World War II—vote in the majority for the Republican.

In the past, this has meant voting against your own economic best interests, among other things. That would be the case this time; however, this time, the situation is a lot worse.

Voting for this Republican, Trump, would not only mean the continuation of massive corruption; it would be the end of American democracy as we know it. In fact, it would mean a continuation of the inexorable march toward tyranny.

Please be reminded that tyrants only protect selected members of their inner circle.

My nightmare is you cowering in your home, updating the lament of Pastor Martin Niemoller about Nazi Germany.

First, they came for the Muslims

And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Muslim

Then they came for the Hispanics

And I did not speak out
Because I was not an Hispanic

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Then they came for the blacks 

And I did not speak out
Because I was not a black

Then they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Masha Gessen, in his book Surviving Autocracy, describes Trump’s America:

Every political project requires a definition of “us,” the community of people it aims to unite and protect. This is true of both democratic and antidemocratic projects, it is true of nationalist and imperialist projects, and it is true, too, of autocratic attempts, though they are fundamentally antipolitical.

Precisely because an autocratic attempt is the opposite of politics it demands a narrowing definition of “us,” in opposition to an ever greater and more frightening “them.”  Where Obama’s rhetoric was expansive—an ongoing effort to create a narrative that included all Americans–Trump’s rhetoric is exclusionary. Trump never tires of reminding us that not everyone can be an American or deserves to be seen as an American, and that even people who have thought of themselves as Americans—culturally, socially, politically, and legally—can be declared not-American, un-American, or anti-American. Trump’s America is like Trump: white male, straight, besieged, aggressive. His campaign had promised to return his constituents to an imaginary past in which their jobs and daughters were safe from brown-skinned immigrants, in which the threat of what Trump called “radical Islamic terrorism” was vanquished or had never existed, in which white people did not have to treat African Americans as equals, women didn’t meddle in politics, gay people didn’t advertise their sexual orientation, and transgender people didn’t exist.

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Please do not help Trump and his henchmen continue their path to enacting this America.