CommentsBELL VIEW--I have outrage overload. I know I’m supposed to write about issues facing the City here – but I can’t keep up with the president. From Nazis to Sherriff Joe to DACA, the outrage just keeps coming. The march in Charlottesville – which seems like a strange interlude from a distant past, for example – took place in August.
In high school, I got a job as a bagger at a grocery store. In those days, the checkout clerks rang up each item on a cash register and then sent the item down a conveyor belt to the bagger. I don’t know why, but I don’t do well in situations where I have to make split-second spatial decisions as more decisions head their way in my direction on a non-stop conveyor belt.
I felt like Lucy in the chocolate factory.
I quit that job to take another as a laborer on a paving crew. Shoveling 300-degree asphalt under the hot sun was preferable to this conveyor belt nightmare.
For many people like me, the Trump presidency has demonstrated one very specific aspect of white privilege: the freedom to ignore race. For extended periods throughout my life – unless I chose to engage the topic – the issue of race rarely amassed the urgency to bubble to the surface of my consciousness. I live in a diverse city, work in a diverse workplace, have friends of many races. And, honestly, I can discern no significant difference between people based on race. Class, culture, background, geography, political persuasion – sure. But race? As a white person in America I have enjoyed the luxury of living in a world where race really doesn’t matter very much.
For millions of white people in America, the election of Barack Obama amounted to a screaming smoke alarm in the room where they had previously kept their white privilege hidden. These people contend, with a straight face, that Obama was the most racially-divisive president of all time. And, for these people, that statement is true. For most of their lives, this demographic had the luxury of imagining that race simply didn’t matter. They could be good, decent people and never have to think about race. Sure, many of them had retrograde opinions on racially-charged issues – Columbus, the Confederacy, the Death Penalty, the Drug War – but none of these controversies occupied more than a peripheral space in their lives.
The election of a black president changed that. For better or worse, Americans derive a certain portion of their identities from the president. The president is, in some ways, the representative “American.” And millions of white people simply had no room for a black guy in the architecture of their identity. Suddenly, race moved from an issue that could be ignored at will to the central defining issue of their lives.
And they found this obsession exhausting. So, when Donald Trump was elected president, this group of white people breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Isn’t life better,” they seem to be saying, “not to have to think about race all the time the way we all did with Obama?” These people are genuinely confused about the outrage over Donald Trump.
On the flip-side of this phenomenon are the people of color who – in many ways – see Donald Trump as just another chapter in the long history of oppression. When Dave Chappelle chuckles about white liberal shock over Donald Trump, he shines a light on this aspect of white privilege. People of color in America have been training for Donald Trump their whole lives. Sure, they hate him, (who doesn’t) but they have developed a stamina and endurance that privileged white liberals like me have never needed until now.
I have to admit, I am exhausted. Often, I find myself staring into space dreaming of a world where I don’t have to think about Donald Trump every minute of every day. But we no longer have the privilege of escape. We no longer have the luxury of imagining that racism is dying.
(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.)
-cw
