I have to wonder why relatives – not just those who came of age in the pre-Civil Rights era South, but also those who came up during it – and even a non-zero portion of people my own age feel the way that they do. Don’t they ever go into town? Don’t they ever eat in restaurants serving foreign cuisine? Do they interact with people who don’t live on their block (or go to their church)? Doesn’t anyone at work have a different religious background, skin color, and/or sexual orientation? Why don’t I feel the same way that they do?
I think a lot of it is (in my case) opportunity. We moved to New York when I went into 2nd grade. That neighborhood was (and still is) wealthy (to be honest we were living beyond our means there). When I started school there were very few African Americans (and the same was true where I had previously gone to school near Los Angeles). On the other hand, WASP kids (like myself) were not a majority, and maybe not even a plurality. Most of the kids I knew were either Jewish or Catholic (I think in that order). My best friend was from India (and so were our next-door neighbors) and I remember several Greek kids who took Good Friday off a week later, because they went to an Orthodox church. Our friends down the street had moved there from Korea.
When we moved to Arlington, Texas a couple of years later (4th grade) a kid asked me where I’d moved from and I answered “New York.” She gasped and said “you stole our slaves!” She might’ve meant this to be funny but I remember thinking at the time that it was stupid. (I also found out later that she and her family had moved there from California in the first place.) The demographics were reversed; almost everyone was a WASP (despite being in Texas, formerly part of Mexico). Out of that majority, it seemed (for what that’s worth) that most were Baptists or Pentecostal, and I would guess that a plurality of them attended one especially large Baptist church. (We were Methodists.) The demographics shifted slightly as the area grew from more people moving in, and junior high had more students than elementary and high school had more than junior high etc. But, having come from suburban New York (which I’m certain has its own problems regarding discrimination), Arlington TX seemed absolutely backwards to me.
And here I should note that I am showing my own fear and distrust for fundamentalist conservatives.
I was glad to get out of Arlington when I left for college (in Austin) but not everyone left. Maybe they didn’t want to, or maybe they couldn’t if they did want to. A lot of those who didn’t are very firmly in the Trump camp.
Austin (if not UT Austin) was visibly and culturally more Hispanic than Arlington. When I got out of school and started working (at IBM) I found that Austin also had a substantial Southeast Asian population. Most of the people at work were either Latin@ or Vietnamese. It’s also where I happened to meet my wife, who had recently moved there from Ethiopia.
Today I live in suburban Maryland. We live in a minority-majority neighborhood and our kids go to minority-majority schools. The job I had before this one was with a company owned by Egyptian-Americans and had employees from all over the world. A lot of this was probably so they could pay lower salaries to H1-B holders, but their business practices are a whole other story. The owners invited everyone for Iftar once. I got to visit both Oman and Dubai while I worked there (I still dream of visiting Oman again).
So voting for Trump, for me, would be like voting against a huge portion of my life experiences, while voting for a portion that I’ve generally tried to leave in the rear-view mirror. Part of me thinks that some people who vote for Trump (and/or are Islamophobic, or just generally xenophobic) simply don’t get out enough. But part of me realizes that a lot of opportunities I’ve had to interact with people different from myself are exactly that, opportunities, and not everyone has them, whether they’d want them or not.
