In wake of the election, America has work to do
On the night of the election, the Canadian immigration website continually crashed. Google Trends shows a spike in searches for “Canadian immigration” starting at 11 p.m. According to The Telegraph, American internet searches for “emigrate” steadily increased throughout election night as well. Of course, moving to Canada memes and tweets weren’t invented Tuesday night. In 2012, the internet had plenty of fun ridiculing people tweeting that they were moving to Canada after the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act. The Canadian website crashing, presumably due to increased traffic, is different. This was the result of people actually panicking over the potential of a Trump presidency and attempting to see how they could leave the country.
I am writing this the morning after the election and know for certain now that Donald Trump will be the 45th President of the United States.
Part of me also wants to move to Canada. However, if the Trump upset Tuesday night proves anything, it’s that this country has its work cut out.
On the one hand, the election Tuesday night was not a surprise. A country founded on and still steeped in white supremacist values voted for the candidate endorsed by the KKK. But on the other hand, I was surprised. I woke up Tuesday morning anxious. But I was anxious about my essays, readings and laundry piling up. I actually felt rather confident about a Clinton win. So, when Trump won Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, I was shocked. And looking at the exit polls, I am even more shocked. CNN exit polls show that white people 18-29 voted in larger numbers for Trump. In fact, when looking at both age and race, as well as gender and race, Trump won every white demographic. Yes, that includes white women.
Less than a month ago, after the Trump tapes and accusations of sexual assault, FiveThirtyEight released a graphic of what the electoral college would look like if only women were to vote. The country looked overwhelmingly blue. But after these election results, it seems clear that it was not gender that decided the election — though Hillary Clinton was undoubtedly hindered by her gender — it was race. White people, both men and women, elected Donald Trump president. And that’s why moving to Canada is simply out of the question.
The results of this election were the culmination of resentment — some justified and some not. The grievances of working class Americans cannot be ignored, but the target of this anger must never be marginalized communities. Disillusionment with government has been misdirected at Muslims, immigrants and the LGBT community.
Trump capitalized on these real frustrations, using them to fuel xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism and more.
Ignoring the causes of Trump’s success, whether by moving to Canada or becoming apathetic about the political process in general, does nothing to protect these communities that have been so negatively impacted by the toxic rhetoric of the 2016 campaign.
It is time for white people, myself included, to do some real soul searching. Don’t give your homophobic uncle a pass at Thanksgiving dinner. Don’t laugh when your friend makes a racist joke. The bigotry that Trump brought to light was already a danger to marginalized communities long before the election. But now that he has rendered it more visible for those of us who had the privilege to ignore it before, it is our responsibility to make sure we are working to positively change our culture. A Republican-controlled Senate, House and executive branch is frightening for women, people of color, queer people and undocumented immigrants. And while it may seem like there is little we can do now, it is vitally important that we reach out to those most likely to be impacted, offer our support and work to heal as a country.
Lena Melillo is a senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law and gender studies. Her column, “’Pop Politics,” runs every Thursday.
So much to say in breaking down this article…. But let’s start with this: Anyone else find it ironic that Democrats upset with our election results are researching Canada’s immigration laws in anticipation of a move, given that they don’t seem to believe immigration laws matter in the first place? I get the distinct impression they don’t believe in following immigration laws.
The writer expresses her latent racism — “Part of me also wants to move to Canada” — by completely dismissing our neighbors to the south. Why, when NIMBY white liberals protest Trump, do they promise to flee only to Canada? What’s wrong with Mexico, the country most liberals so vociferously defended against Trump’s claims about Mexican illegal aliens? Her offensive comments triggered me, I’m afraid of microaggressions, and demand my safe space!
Here’s the deal – for all the empty promises of celebrities fleeing to Canada or elsewhere is Trump got elected – all those liberal hypocrites would rather live in the US with a Trump prez than anywhere else in the world. That is a fact. That is how awesome and badass the US is. We should take more pride in being Americans and not let “patriotism” be a liberal punchline synonym for “racist”. The fact these threats meant we can finally get rid of sanctimonious Lena Dunham and Chelsea Handler, among others makes me very happy. Although I know they will never follow through on their threats because although they expect all politicians to mean what they say – these vacuous celebrities never do. I also strongly disagree every one of the 60 million people who voted for Trump did so because all 60 million of them are racist. You do realize many of those whites that voted for Trump also voted for Obama both times? Perhaps more people despised lying crooked Hillary and wanted to send her a proverbial finger at the polls? Only the most liberal, insular person would feel all white people need to take a good long hard look in the mirror and confront what they have done. This is ridiculous. And this myopic thinking i also why you all were blindsided in this election – keep it up.
Funny, and so shortsighted and agenda driven are you, that Trump’s repudiation of the KKK doesn’t matter. It goes to show you that women can be bullies, too. Your micro-agressions are too numerous to count and the safe-room is locked! There comes a time when people like you who renounce the cornerstone of democracy – elections – have to leave. Just leave and stop disrupting the truly productive folk. Grow the hell up. The push back is on, baby!
Here we go. Another article has the same liberal view as always. Keep saying ‘Love Trumps hate’ and yet did exactly what they said Trump supporter would do after they lost – bullying, violence and totally against the first amendment when other people disagree with them.
You keep saying ‘do not judge’ yet now blaming everything and tagging all Trump supporters with xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism without even listen to their voice. Now, you want to force other people with different opinions to be silent, which would cost you another republic presidency four years later for sure.
I assume you already checked out the exit poll result from CNN/NYT. Now, the fact is, for the people with college degree, Hillary has only 4% thin lead. What makes you think your are the central of universe? You are not even get enough support from college degree voter to call yourself ‘majority’ statistically. Even in California, Trump gets 33%. But have you ever found anyone around you saying they support him? Nope! Because we are undercover. We know what would your liberal would do if you know we support him. We will get ignored, bullied or maybe fired. Trying to silence the people with different opinions, that’s not Democracy. That’s actually called Fascism. You can do this to us, then one day someone else would do the same thing to you. When you are mocking ‘low educated, poor red neck Trump supporter’ , we slap your face by voting our president.
Wake up and communicate with the other side. World is not just black and white, blue and red. Keep denying won’t help you understanding the rest of the world.
The polls conducted did not factor in the Tom Bradley effect. A small fraction of the voters lied to the pollsters that they would vote for Clinton when they were really intending to vote for Trump. In the case of the Californian gubernatorial race between Tom Bradley and Robert Deukmejian in 1982, the polls over-inflated Bradley’s potential y 14 percentage points; and it was a close election with the latter scraping through by an absolutely paper-thin majority. My estimate of the Bradley effect was about 7 percentage points for the Clinton-Trump election, and that was clearly reflected in the battle-ground states. Since Clinton was a white candidate who supported non-white minorities, I estimated half of the the Bradley effect in this case.