Cameron Dichter | What love means

Real Talk | “We can not be free until they are free”

By Cameron Dichter 11/13/16 11:48pm

There is no simple explanation — and therefore no simple solution — for the tragedy that is a Donald Trump presidency. It revealed how divided our country is, how disparate our worlds — liberal and conservative, urban and rural — have become. But in order to make sense of the senselessness, I turned to James Baldwin’s, “The Fire Next Time,” which came out of an era of deep racial tension in the 1960s — a period of similar divisiveness.

His writing has helped me understand that while I can disavow Trump all I like, I can no longer disavow his supporters.

In “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin spoke about the “innocents” — those who, though they may not call themselves bigoted, are maintained by the belief that they are superior, that they have more of a claim to the world than those who look different than them.

And while such a belief may seem so repugnant as to merit the exclusion of those who possess it, Baldwin believes, “You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope.”

The “innocents” belief of their supremacy is so central that it constitutes an identity, a reality, and to lose it, as Baldwin writes, is to “ ... wake up one morning to find the sun shining and the stars aflame.”

For many of Trump’s supporters, those stars had been burning for quite a while.

Prior to last Tuesday, I believed our country was progressing. Progress, I assumed, meant creating a path of uplift and inclusion for those who had historically been denied it.

What I didn’t consider is that such progress means nothing without first dealing with the ideology that is bent on impeding it. And for those who I had attempted to exclude from my worldview, such a concept of progress was ultimately seen as a threat to theirs.

Multiculturalism is something that we as a community have chosen to cherish but for many outside our liberal bubble, especially those living in rural areas, there is something very dangerous in the prospect of accepting a different culture, race, religion or sexuality as equal to one’s own. Doing so threatens the supremacy of a singular lifestyle, the promise of assimilation and therefore the very definition of what many believe it means to be an American.

As Baldwin writes, “ ... they suppose that it is they themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”

Rather than trying to resolve the existential strains of this population for whom the world was changing all too quickly, I decided it best just to leave them behind. Instead of providing them with a new reality I simply cut them out of mine.

I made this choice every time I wrote someone out of my life on the basis of their bigotry. I made it when I nodded along when Hillary Clinton deemed Trump supporters irredeemable. And I made it when I chanted ‘stronger together,’ knowing full well who I meant to exclude.

The path forward is, as Baldwin describes, that, “ ... we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

To be clear, this love is not intended to either forgive or condone the acts of those who promote oppression or threaten our common humanity. Attacks, such as the one targeted at Black students at our university can never be met with passivity.

The kind of love that’s required will not be kind or easy. This love will be a reckoning.

It should also be noted that this is a very different conception of love than the one that the Clinton campaign had been peddling. This isn’t about coming together in an abstract sense. This is about facing our troubled history head on and providing salvation for those who are entrapped by it.

A Clinton victory would have done little to quell the underbelly of bigotry in America. We’d just be pruning the leaves, never reaching the root.

If this election has taught us anything, it’s that we can no longer separate ourselves from our history and from those with whom we are most at odds.

The vision that was propagated by the Clinton campaign was gravely out of touch with the needs of Middle America — the very needs that Trump exploited.

While we cannot disassociate Trump supporters from the hateful rhetoric their candidate espoused, we do ourselves a disservice, and further enclose our liberal bubble when we believe Trump’s voters only support him for the same reasons we abhor him.

Instead, we should strive to hear their concerns and find sympathy in the fact that they — people just like the rest of us — should find their only solace in a candidate who threatens our collective salvation.

CAMERON DICHTER is a College junior from Philadelphia, studying English. His email address is camd@sas.upenn.edu. “Real Talk” usually appears every other Monday.