Stephen Henderson

Detroit Free Press

What are you supposed to do when your country doesn’t see you?

When nearly half the population elects a president who has promised to increase your misery through denial of your most basic rights, of your very identity as an American?

What do you do when that population says their votes were about low taxes or job growth or a message they wanted to send to the political establishment, and that’s why they had to embrace a leader who says your place in this country is expendable, debatable, crushable?

What are you supposed to do when your country says you don’t matter?

If you’re Muslim or Latino, if you’re an immigrant or an African American, Tuesday was the most bitter reminder you’ve ever had of the tenuous status by which you may claim America and her great freedoms. It was that brutal splash of cold water to the face, the one that wakes you from complacency, or belief, and recalibrates your understanding of reality.

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Donald Trump said he wants to add a religious test to immigration policy, to keep Muslims out of the country “for a time.” He said he’d build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, our neighbor country of brown-skinned people, ostensibly to stop illegal immigration but clearly to send a message about who belongs here, and who doesn’t.

Trump bragged about how he could mistreat and defile women, and all but called Hillary Clinton “weaker” because she was a female candidate.

And Trump has said that policies like stop-and-frisk, which have led to the violation of thousands of innocent black men’s rights and to some of the life-ending confrontations between police and black people, are somehow the path to racial healing.



Not since Andrew Jackson ran for the presidency essentially promising the brutal and near-genocidal removal of Native Americans from their lands has a major-party presidential candidate more brazenly wrapped his arms around bigotry.

The votes cast for him last week were a vile, knowing consent to all of that, and more. They were a nod to notions that question not only our status in this country, but our humanity.

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A hundred people must have asked me since Election Day about how I'm feeling, what my reaction was to the outcome.

I feel frightened and worried — for the first time ever after a presidential election. This is how my family feels. This is how countless others who’ve reached out in the last few days are feeling. And yes, for so many people who don’t suffer the consequences of racial, ethnic or religious bigotry but spend their lives pushing back against it, this is how they feel, too.

America has turned its back on us, and has made us question anew whether it will ever really have our backs in important and substantive ways.

All the progress that has been made since this nation’s founding toward equality, toward full citizenship for people who have been locked out — it seems tenuous now, and threatened.

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That’s not new for anyone who’s part of an historically marginalized group. You grow up understanding that life for you in this country is different, and that you’d better keep your head on a swivel or risk jarring, unforeseen disappointments.

But this was such a stark and convulsing disturbance of expectation.

Let me be clear: I’m absolutely not saying that all people who voted for Trump are bigots. I’m definitely not saying that racial, ethnic or religious division was foremost in people’s minds when they voted.

No doubt, the nation’s bigots supported Trump (the Ku Klux Klan broke with centuries of tradition and actually issued an endorsement for his candidacy) — but I don’t believe they make up the majority.

Indeed, what I’m saying is nearly opposite of that.

By voting for Trump, half of America simply said they were willing to accept, or risk accepting, the horrific bigoted consequences he promised to mete out, and they have justified that decision by elevating some other motivator — money, anger, job creation, political retribution — above the protection of other people’s rights. Of my rights. Of the rights of people I know.

That’s not overt bigotry. But it is a devaluing of equality.

Trump's voters were able to look past his consistent savaging of Muslims or Arab Americans, Latinos or African Americans, and vote for him anyway.

Which means that to half of America, essentially, we are unseen.

Our issues, which are often about life and death, and almost always are about the extent to which our rights as Americans are respected, don’t rank among the electorate’s chief concerns when the most important democratic decision is being made.

There is a negation involved in that decision that is frightening.

For me, the literary and historical echoes are deafening.

Ralph Ellison’s rendering of what it’s like to be black in America in The Invisible Man crystallized the concept of black people being faceless and their issues forgettable.

“I am invisible, you see, simply because people refuse to see me,” says the narrator of Ellison’s novel in one of its most powerful refrains. The character walks the streets and no one ever acknowledges him. He works to advance himself in a society where even the paths laid out for others don’t pay off for African Americans. And he comes to realize, slowly and painfully, how much of his own identity is defined by the way others see him.

“You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.”

History helps frame this moment as well.

For years, the subtext of the debate about civil rights and progress has been what role good people sometimes play in evil outcomes.

So few people espouse nakedly bigoted views, at least in public, anymore. But they nod at and repeat the coded language that has replaced outward bigotry.

And so few could recognize in themselves anything that contributes to inequality. They figure if they’re not cutting eyeholes out of bedsheets or shouting epithets, they’re not part of the problem. But they benefit from inequality, or fail to call it out where they see it. In this case, they’ve failed to stop someone whose explicit aim was to scapegoat and pursue discrimination, sew it into law and canon in new and dangerous ways.

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You can’t be blameless for that, no matter how much you mouth your love for this nation’s ideals.

This is what they've done with Trump — perhaps subconsciously — to look through, or look away from, the awfulness of his lurch toward inequality.

On NBC's Sunday morning talk show Meet the Press last spring, I invoked the specter of Republican rhetoric and symbolism, over decades, that fueled the racial and ethnic bigotry we were seeing more aggressively verbalized by Trump.

Political adviser Mary Matalin was furious (she said it made her want to choke me) and pushed back with: "Conservatives do not consider themselves bigots or homophobes or misogynists, OK?"

She’s not wrong. But like the others, she’s not seeing.

And not seeing is, unfortunately, very much the problem.

Stephen Henderson is Editorial Page Editor of the Detroit Free Press, where this column first appeared. Follow him on Twitter: @SHendersonFreep.

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