I’m a white American from the northeast and I felt the same way. When trump won the first time, it felt like I’d just discovered that the floor underneath my bed was rotting away.
I was blind to it because I didn’t need to see it, but it was always there. My relative privilege insulated me and ensured that I contributed to the problem
I am from Boston, northeast has always been super racist and still is.
We just hide our racism by using different words, like ‘those people’. Go to any town/city meeting and you will see 50% of the people going up to talk about their ‘concerns’ using phrases like that. It’s all very veiled and vague, for sure, but it’s incredibly obvious what they mean. Being racist here is 100% cool as long as you are not doing it directly.
And hell, most of my white progressive anti-racists friends, are very very uncomfortable around non-white people. I had the ‘privileged’ of growing up a lower-income mixed race community, but most of my peers have zero experience with non-white people.
Well yeah, but there’s also naked and aggressive racism, like lynchings, for example, that I just didn’t notice before. I mentioned where I’m from because I also thought that only happened “in the south.”
Neither is acceptable, to be clear, and both happen all over the US, tragically.
I’m a white American from the northeast and I felt the same way. When trump won the first time, it felt like I’d just discovered that the floor underneath my bed was rotting away.
I was blind to it because I didn’t need to see it, but it was always there. My relative privilege insulated me and ensured that I contributed to the problem
I am from Boston, northeast has always been super racist and still is.
We just hide our racism by using different words, like ‘those people’. Go to any town/city meeting and you will see 50% of the people going up to talk about their ‘concerns’ using phrases like that. It’s all very veiled and vague, for sure, but it’s incredibly obvious what they mean. Being racist here is 100% cool as long as you are not doing it directly.
And hell, most of my white progressive anti-racists friends, are very very uncomfortable around non-white people. I had the ‘privileged’ of growing up a lower-income mixed race community, but most of my peers have zero experience with non-white people.
Well yeah, but there’s also naked and aggressive racism, like lynchings, for example, that I just didn’t notice before. I mentioned where I’m from because I also thought that only happened “in the south.”
Neither is acceptable, to be clear, and both happen all over the US, tragically.