Who Will Deny You and I?

Shadowboxing with the notion of a Trump presidency and my own white privilege while listening to Kendrick Lamar

It’s old news by now, but no less jarring when it comes lunging back at me after a short period of not thinking about it: Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. I am still waking up to this surreal fact, again and again, like a recovering amputee drifting in and out of consciousness, each awakening a re-realization of the missing limb.

When I went to bed at 2am on Tuesday, November 8th, bleary and bruised from the sustained shock, dismay, and disbelief, I pretty much knew that we would be waking up to this incredible fact, but I was still holding onto a few threads of hope for a miracle. Over the course of the night, swing state by swing state swinging red, and then by surprise Trump wins in Wisconsin and Michigan, what had seemed an almost foregone conclusion when we began—Hillary Clinton winning the election—had become a conclusion that would take a miracle to achieve. I was so ill-prepared.

My wife, Viki, is pregnant. If things go as hoped with the pregnancy, in the springtime we will bring a son into this world of light and air and dirt and buildings and people and infinite complexity. Happily, he will know nothing of this human specimen called President Donald Trump, just as the birds and the squirrels and the dogs in the park know nothing of “The Wall” or The Apprentice. But unlike the birds, our son will be born into the society that has just elected “The Donald” as its leader. Like all of us here in America, and like many people around the world, our son will be affected by this fact.

There is a vindictive instinct in me that wants President Donald Trump to fail fantastically, so that he will finally be revealed to his supporters as the witless fraud I think he is, and then stinging from the embarrassing and detrimental backlash of their willful blindness to all of the red flags he proudly waved as he sauntered from podium to podium, they will feel badly and atone and vow to do better next time, and we will be able to say we told them so, and Elizabeth Warren will win by a landslide in 2020.

But I need to stop that kind of thinking. To wish failure upon Trump in the White House is to wish ill on the world. Because now he actually has power—tremendous power, to borrow a term from his default rhetoric of thoughtlessly overdrawn superlatives. This isn’t Donald’s locker room anymore, where offensive, idiotic things get suggested that probably don’t happen in real life. We are moving from the realm of talk to the realm of action. As crazy as this is going to sound, I need to start hoping that all of the most extreme and offensive things he’s said and promised on his campaign turn out to be of the nature of his caught-on-tape suggestion that when a man is “a star” he can just “grab {women} by the pussy” because “they let you do it”—that is, the nature of bullshit. A toothless running of that tremendous, tremendous mouth. Debased proclamations manufactured for sensation, provocation, and the kind of ego-masturbation that Trump knows people like to watch, whether openly or in secret. This is not to say that offensive talk isn’t in itself damaging and symptomatic—of course it is, and so much damage has already been done by Trump and the condoning of Trump as a candidate. Seeing as there’s no reasonable cause to expect him to apologize for any of it or try to make reparations, the best case scenario, as far as I can see it today, is that at least he doesn’t actually carry any of it through.

This particular hope may not be too far-fetched, because it seems to me that Trump has seen his campaign for presidency as an extended, televised locker room speech, saying whatever incendiary things he thinks will make his team and fans go crazy for him at that moment. Of course this is not acceptable behavior—to flap the lips without concern for accountability, to publicly demean women and people of color, to lie, to knowingly exaggerate and spin information, to make promises that can’t be kept—and therefore, many of us thought, certainly wouldn’t be considered acceptable behavior for someone campaigning to become our Commander in Chief, but apparently about 50% of the people who voted on Tuesday feel differently about that. I guess we all have our types. A deal-breaker for me is a turn-on for others. Take, for example, the fact that Trump’s favorite thing to do is praise himself, and that he refuses to acknowledge, even a little bit, that he might be flawed. While I see his policy of unapology as sociopathic and egomaniacal, others associate his refusal to admit mistakes with a notion of unwavering confidence that, with grit and determination and a multi-million dollar loan from your parents, can carry a privileged white man all the way to the cover of Forbes Magazine. Show us the way, Donald. We are getting your message loud and clear: If we put our faith in you and your so-oft-mentioned “billions,” you will make us more like you.

I need to start hoping that Trump is going to do less damage than I fear. There are the extreme things that he simply cannot do, because there is no way our congress and citizens would allow him to—like ban all Muslims from the country—and which I suspect even he, deep down, knows to be indefensible and unviable (despite being unwilling to acknowledge that it’s racist to even suggest it). But then there are the things he could do—like repeal President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, stripping millions of Americans of health insurance, or elect a conservative justice into the Supreme Court who will make the removal of women’s rights to abortion a distinct possibility. He has already appointed a climate change denier to head his Environmental Protection Agency team, and a hard-right “nationalist” as his chief strategist. As counter-intuitive and difficult as it is, and as unlikely as it’s looking, I need to hope that overall he surprises me by being something like a decent human being, by conducting himself differently in his newfound role than the ways I have seen him conduct himself thus far, by being more mature, more respectful, more trustworthy, less fickle, less ignorant, less prejudiced, less bullish (and less likely to proudly hold up his bullshit turds like they’re golden nuggets). And I need to start hoping that the supporters who think they would prefer him to stay the Donald Trump they elected last night will start to change along with him.

What I’m hoping is that the bigots who get turned on by Trump’s bigoty talk are a small minority, and the rich, whatever-it-takes-to-help-me-get-richer people are another small minority, and the people for whom intolerance is a part of religious devotion are another small minority, but then the majority of Trump voters are people who disapprove of the bigoty talk but are reluctantly willing to overlook it in the name of more favorable traits and hopes, like the promise of a job, or if they have a job, the promise of no longer feeling under-served by a government that nevertheless takes a gut-kicking chunk out of every damn paycheck they get. And I need to hope that all the women who voted for Trump understand something about the nature of his bullshit that I do not, that of course they are not proving him right by letting him grab as he pleases because they see him as “a star.”

One of the things that is dogging me right now is the probability that while Trump’s impending presidency threatens to terrorize the lives of so many humans in a real, on-the-ground, physical way, my life, and Viki’s life, and the life of our son, will most likely suffer little direct consequence. Because we are white, and we come from upper-middle-class backgrounds. We have benefitted from a heritage of privilege, and will probably continue to do so. This reality does not come from a system of rightness, and it is my responsibility to acknowledge that, especially in the face of a governmental administration that is looking to turn back the clocks on racial and social progress. Some might call it “white guilt” and roll their eyes, but it’s not about me making myself feel better. Quite the opposite. It’s about a necessary sharing of injustice. And there is guilt involved.

I’ve had to go to the gym a lot lately and pummel the punching bag. I usually pump Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly into my headphones. The first words on this mind-blowing record arrive in a crackling sample of a rejoicing chorus from a 70’s reggae song: “Every nigger is a staaar, ay, every nigger is a staaar / who will deny that you and I and every nigger is a star?” This chorus sets the tone for the whole album, the cover of which is a grainy black and white photo composition of Lamar and a crew of black friends celebrating shirtless with stacks of money on the White House lawn, over the limp body of a white judge (his eyes x-ed out with marker, gavel still in hand). It’s a depiction of revolution, an affirmation of lives that have been devalued, and, now, a stunningly apropos refutation of Trump’s view of America, in which select “stars,” such as Trump himself, are of greater value than other people—a view which will soon be looking out from the Oval Office windows we can glimpse between the raised fists of these systemically disenfranchised men.

When I, a privileged white male, listen to Lamar’s roiling “King Kunta” while throwing angry punches at an inanimate, body-sized bag, am I appropriating anger that is not mine? I don’t think so. I think I am joining in the anger of injustice that should be everyone’s. I am angry, and the anger of blacks and women and Muslims and Mexicans and the LGBTQ community and many more, needs to be connected to my anger. The outcome of this election has made it even more eye-wideningly clear than it already was that all of us need to be listening and engaging with voices across cultural differences—including political ones.

Also featured on To Pimp A Butterfly’s opening track, “Wesley’s Theory,” is funk legend George Clinton (any relation to Hillary?) who I once saw perform live in the most unlikely of venues. From 2000 to 2004, I went to Vassar College, a privileged and elite and predominantly white institution in upstate New York, and one night George Clinton and his P-Funk All-Stars came to play our cafeteria. In the supremely ill-suited room we waited hours for Clinton to grace the stage while a supposedly founded rumor circulated that he was smoking crack in his tour bus. Finally, he appeared at 1:30am in a hooded cloak, and with his eyes closed tight proceeded to yell unintelligibly into the microphone and smack it with his hand while the All-Stars played behind him. So unprepared were we all for this moment, Clinton and the audience alike, connection was impossible. Looking back on it, ashamed by the fucked-up gap that existed between us, I see it as a painful lesson in mutual unknowing. Here we privileged elite were, in the midst of an expensive, purportedly mind-expanding liberal education, standing befuddled and cynical at 2am before this legendary black artist elder who had spent his whole adult life making progressive, soul-asserting music while most of us had been watching Ross and Rachel get together and break up and get back together again on Friends. He couldn’t even look at us. And it all went down in the same room where, that morning, I had been eating a three-egg omelet to order while stressing about a paper I had to write on gladiators for a class called Sports, Society and Politics of the Roman World, the bill of it all footed by a college-fund that had been left to me by my great-grandmother who, as far as I can tell, renounced and hid her Judaism in order to join WASP culture and enjoy its social and economic advantages. I know: Am I disqualified from talking about fairness? Maybe. I hold out hope that anyone who wants to talk about fairness has a right to at least try to talk about fairness.

What I want, what so many of us want, seems simple enough to identify: A world (not just a nation) where love is more prevalent and stronger than fear and hate, where more humans than not see and treat each other as equals, where there’s enough employment, food, and shelter to go around, where consideration for the wellbeing of not only our species, but also fellow species and our environment, is understood to be a shared global interest and responsibility. These named ideals are of course not simple to achieve, nor simple to put into practice by living your life accordingly, even for the person who already holds them as ideals. But that’s what ideals are. Visions of possibility to strive toward, to the best of our limited abilities, so that we may progress. And I’m confident that even though there are infinite potential roadblocks we would have to confront along the way, these simple few ideals are nearly unimpeachable, both in theory and in practice. I recognize that as an upper-middle-class two-degree-holding healthy white male with a loving family and a good job, I am very privileged. I am privileged not only because of the socio-economic advantages that tend to attend my demographic, but also because those advantages allow me to think about and prioritize interests greater than my own. It is easier to say let’s all put our energy toward global healing when you haven’t lost your job to foreign outsourcing, or to undocumented immigrants that your employer—for example, Donald Trump—is exploiting in order to make more money for himself. In any case, I’m still confident I could defend these ideals against most challenges or attacks using little more than common sense and decency, free from the kind of self-interest or bias that often renders “morality” a subjective term.

So, even if Donald Trump hasn’t given much cause to hope that his presidency will take any of these ideals into much consideration, I still owe it to the world to hope that he might.

When I got home from the gym, I went to Viki and put my hand on her belly. Then I leaned down and put my ear up to it, listening to the sounds of my son’s body shifting around in the amniotic fluid. I thought about singing to him, because supposedly he can already hear sounds from the outside world. The chorus of a Bob Marley song came to mind—“Three Little Birds,” you know the one: “Don’t worry / about a thing / because every little thing / is gonna be all right.” But I could’t bring myself to sing it. Not right then. Chances are my son will benefit from most of the same privileges I have. But that doesn’t mean everything is all right—far from it. Everything won’t ever be all right. That’s a given. Marley sang it in the face of this reality. It’s not a song about surety. More often than not, it’s a song you sing when you aren’t sure whether things are going to be all right. It’s the song I kept singing softly into my father’s ear while he was dying in the hospital. It might not be true, but it’s a necessary hope. Next time, I’ll go ahead and sing it.