I remember when I heard about Trump running for president; I remember how I laughed. This wasn't the first time a celebrity tried to do something like this, something out of their "comfort zone": Michael Jordan played golf and baseball, Tila Tequila tried to tell us that the Earth was flat – it wasn’t the first time we saw is what I'm getting at. So when I saw Trump running for president I sat there and thought that it was just a joke. He was going to fail miserably and we were all going to have laugh about it. And for a long time, a lot of us did.
Jokes, and little comics sprung up throughout the internet and were discussed amongst family, friends, and coworkers. "Trump running for president" was the punchline and we kept laughing. Even sketch comedy shows and cartoons like The Simpsons made jokes about Donald Trump becoming president because of who he is and because of his demeanor: a man who goes back on his word with each speech, fumbles over his words, makes insults like a child, and incites racism by generalizing people with awful stereotypes. This man would never win. This laughter, however, began to wither as days turned into weeks. Except for mine. I laughed all the way to the final week, all the way to the day before Election Day.
Where I go to school, which is in South Jersey, there were a few Trump signs here and there, but more began to sprout up as Election Day closer. Someone erected a huge Trump sign around one of the entrances of my campus, and even equipped it with deer cameras to ward off vandals. My friends and I didn't think anything of the signs. They were just jokes outside of the internet, we thought. "How could people be so stupid?", "They're going to be so disappointed when he loses," and "America is sad," are just a few thoughts that popped into my head. I am explaining all of this because I'm trying to show that Trump voters weren't a problem for me or my friends. They were just jokes.
It wasn't until my friend posted on Facebook that someone had called her a "refugee." She was at Wawa when a stranger simply called her a refugee just because of the color of her skin.She, a citizen of America for basically all her life, was called a refugee.I'm not ignorant to the concept of people shouting racist thoughts ideologies? at strangers in public, but I always thought that when someone shouted hate talk speech? in a public space that everyone in the vicinity, or at least the majority, were against it. That those types of words were for the drunken, ignorant, hateful scum of the planet. I knew these people existed but something that bothered me: could this have been because of how close we were to the elections, or was it just a coincidence? After something similar happened to me, I concluded (with no hard evidence, I will admit) that this was probably because of the elections.
The day after my friend's event, I had someone lock their car door on me. This came as an astonishment to me. I'm a 5'9, husky black guy, I guess I can resemble the shitty stereotypes that are presented in television shows but all my life I never had this happen to me before and it honestly was heartbreaking for it to happen to me on campus. This campus that I have been currently attending for four and a half years has been my home. I made a bunch of friends that I can currently say are my family, When people ask about the school I attend, which is Stockton University, I always say the same thing "It's a great school, the politics of it can be a little wonky, but the people are pretty great. We have little to no crime on this campus and everyone's respectable." I felt like I was living an illusion the whole time when I heard that noise come from that car and see that guy's face stare at me as a threat. This place didn't make me feel I was at home anymore, I felt like I was just on a college campus surrounded by a bunch of strangers. And this was only the day before election day.
The morning after Election Day the air was stagnant and the gloomy clouds that brought the slight drizzle didn't help. The first thing I saw once I got off the shuttle on campus was an art piece in the middle of the Arts building. It read, "Make America Hate Again" And the piece was Donald Trump's head spewing out all the hateful words that he said in the past. I’m guessing that it was supposed to be informative and empowering to minorities and people a part of the LGBT community, but I believe my friend described it best: "It didn't make me feel better, it just made it more real or just made me feel worst."
"It didn't make me feel better, it just made it more real or just made me feel worst."
In my class people were crying. There were people crying because they were scared, and even my professor was crying because she felt like she had failed us, the next generation, the lazy-entitled-punks, known as Millennials who now had to pray to God that their rights weren’t taken away. I didn't think of it like that at first, and I still hadn't when I began to cry when after? as she told us to think of all the good things in our lives. Ya know, to cheer us up. The thought of my brother destroyed my ability to "man-up." I began crying not because I thought about my rights being taken away, but because I might be taken away from my brother. I knew that cops saw black men as threats because that's how some of them were trained to be. This knowledge has followed me around and made it harder for me to deal with life, especially when I am driving with my friends and they decide to go just a little bit over the speed limit. If a cop pulled them over I could become another hashtag.
But that was something I could avoid if I tried hard enough, lowering my percentage if I keep my hands out of my pocket, kept my hoodie down, and tried not to seem too suspicious. I can avoid getting shot by the police, but random acts of hatred are harder to dodge. I thought back to my friend's incident when someone called her a refugee, I thought about a car locking on me, and then I thought about my grandmother and friends who told me how Galloway, the city where Stockton is located, use to be a city thriving on KKK members. I thought about violence happening to me because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and someone just getting tired of looking at me or someone deciding that it was time to eradicate the blacks from Galloway. I was exhausted with fear and thought I that was being a little bit overdramatic, but how could I be when these were the same reasons some KKK members gave when they killed an interracial couple or when a bunch of drunk boys decided to attack a gay couple. So when people started getting a little comfortable with their ignorance on campus, I started thinking the worst. And then more things started happening.
People passed out flyers with Barack Obama's face and, written underneath it, letters like a kidnapper's ransom, "We Pay for Your Free Stuff." It wasn't clear if this was aimed at minority kids specifically,but still made one of my friends uncomfortable, because it still seemed likely that the flyer’s target was minority students. Something else hat happened, this time on the day of the election,was when the word "Gook" was written on the board in a classroom that was usually taught by an Asian professor. Three out of the four events instances that occurred told me that something wasn't right on campus anymore – something was disturbed.
On the second day after the election, I was hit with mass tweets of people telling their accounts of what happened to them on the "First Day of Trump's America." All the tweets were from people around America, but what hit home was when a professor at my school shared her friend's story of how a man grabbed her by the crotch and told her "If [his] president can do it then so can [he]." My fear for my safety, my friends' safety, and my girlfriend's safety rose as I continued to read tweets and stories one after the other. My friends were scared that their rights were going to be taken away, that Trump would open those gay conversion camps that his VP was raving about or that Trump and Pence would continue the air strikes in Syria. I told them to calm down because we knew how the government worked: some things don't go through like we think that they are going to, and we, as Americans, aren't going to let super radical, xenophobic changes happen. While I told them to not worry because Trump is not in office yet, I did tell them to worry about the people who supported him because we're surrounded by them.
No, I do not believe that every single person who voted for Trump shares his beliefs or believes in the words he spewed throughout his election (even though it is hard for me to tell myself that because I find it hard to understand why would anyone vote for someone like that), but ultimately I get that although your views don't necessarily have to follow the person's you voted for, there are other peoples’ that do. There are people who hate gays, who hate blacks, and Mexicans and etc. that voted for Trump: those are the people we have to avoid and the people we're looking for when we're walking to our classes or grocery shopping. For us, any of those people could be the person who wrote "Gook" on the chalkboard or would like their car door on me as I walked by or would call my friend a refugee. Yes, it's a bit overdramatic and yes these kinds of people have probably been in plain sight way before the election, but how can we just be complacent when all these acts of hatred hit way too close for comfort? We can’t, and in my opinion we shouldn't. I have had friends read my articles before they get published and I remember one of my editing friends telling me to use words of confidence so that the reader won't doubt me, but I don't feel right using those words because I don't have all the answers. With everything that's occurring I honestly don't know what to do, what questions to ask, or what needs to be answered. I write to open topics for people, the topics that no one wants to think about or haven’t thought about because that's the only way to fix issues that affect our daily lives. The election has rocked me to my core and has revealed to me that we aren't better than our ancestors or our past, or at least that we aren't getting the job done. In one my classes my classmate said that the election has brought out the worst in our country and now it's time for us to deal with it with discussion and not with violence. And I agree with him, but I also wonder at what cost. Did I have to lose the handful of safety I had in my college? To have it tainted with realism? Did my friends have to be attacked for just the color of their skin? As much as I don't want to say it, the answer is: maybe.
