I don't follow politics as closely as I'd like to these days so I may not know EVERYTHING (good and bad) President Trump has done. However, one thing has become more and more clear to me from the moment he was elected President: Trump stirs up raw honesty in people. For those of you screaming at your screen right now, stay with me. I promise this isn't as far-fetched as it may seem.
I count myself among the lucky biracial kids — I'm Black and Hispanic — in that I did not experience much racism in my life. Maybe it's where I grew up or maybe it's because my mom showed me how to avoid it by teaching me to "act" accordingly. She told me people expect me to fail and that I have to do my best to not only paint my family in the best light but also my race. This was something I just accepted back then. It wasn't until recently that I realized how horrible it was that she had to tell me that.
In this day and age when we've had a Black president and we have countless minorities in all kinds of professions, my mother still had to make sure I was always on my best behavior so that people will treat me the same as my white peers. And I just accepted that.
I feel like I was not alone in my acceptance. Sure, there were instances of publicized racism, but I don't recall anything like the horrid hate crimes we are hearing about today. According to CNN, hate crimes have increased since the 2016 election. This may be a correlation without causation kind of situation, but I'm pretty darn sure this increase in public hate is due to President Trump winning the election.
Notice that I said PUBLIC hate. Let that sink in. PUBLIC hate as in public displays of hate. This stuff doesn't just happen overnight. Things might have seemed better before because people just kept everything on the down low. All the hate was hushed, swept under the rug. Once it became unacceptable to treat minorities with inhumane hate and women like they were less than men, people didn't just stop doing it.
They just did it privately. And in my opinion, that's worse.
See when Trump says things like pregnancy is an inconvenience for business and there won't be another black President for generations because he thought Obama did such a poor job, it hits you in the gut with how blatant these statements are. There is no hinting or talking around the bush. He says what he says and, unless he regrets it and denies it later, he doesn't take it back.
So, the fact that he was elected having said such statements shows that we as a country have some work to do. It's a problem that a majority of the nation elected a man that said pregnancy is an inconvenience for business. It's a problem that America elected a man that implies all Black people are the same because he didn't like the way Obama ran the country so therefore there won't be another Black president. That's a really big problem! But thanks to President Trump, now we can SEE the problem.
In my opinion, we should take Trump and his crass words and use them to start a conversation. And not one of those I'm-going-into-this-knowing-I'm-right kind of conversations but one free of judgment so that both sides feel safe to express their perspectives and feelings and both sides leave feeling heard and understood. Only then will we be able to make America great again.