If White Supremacy and Racism Don’t Matter to You, I Question Your Empathy

3 min readOct 2, 2020

Your compassion, too.

Protesters at a Rise and Resist Against White Supremacy demonstration inside Grand Central Station

I have come to an uncomfortable truth that I avoided accepting before. White supremacy and racism are not a deal- breaker or even a concern for more Americans than I realized.

2016

During the 2016 election, when Donald Trump called Mexicans rapists, a colleague said to me, “Oh, he’s done.” Not only was he not done, but he also became our 45th president. I remember wondering why racism was overlooked. I rationalized that people didn’t think he was serious, that he was pandering to his base.

How else could so many be so uncaring?

Repeated support of racism

Donald Trump proved how serious he was over and over again. After Charlottesville, he called people brandishing torches, screaming, “Jews will not replace us!” “fine people.” He topped that with putting Mexican and other brown children in cages. Before the debate, he put a stop to Federal racial sensitivity training calling it “anti-American.”

Still, going into the debates, some voters were undecided. According to Gallup Daily tracking averages, he even had his highest approval rating of 49% in May of this year.

During the now-infamous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the president, yet again, refused to denounce racism. This time, he went to the next level by rallying the white supremacist group, Proud Boys with, “stand back and stand by.”

He also called Federal diversity training “racist,” claiming, “they were teaching people to hate our country.” According to the president, teaching understanding of people of color’s experiences is equivalent to hating America.

Instead of dialing back his racism, he’s digging in.

It didn’t make a difference in 2016. Time will tell what sort of difference it makes in 2020.