Advice for liberal coastal elites in coming to terms with Trump’s election has been abundant, mostly to get out of our bubbles and work to understand Trump voters. The articles are everywhere, in newspapers and online news sites with links all over social media. We’re advised to consider who are these sister and fellow country men and what do they cherish, what do they fear, what are their lives like? How did they feel so marginalized that electing a blatantly sexist and racist man was okay?

Then there are the counter opinion pieces, by those of us horrified by Trump, that suggest rural, economically stretched and dissatisfied people try to understand us. After all, we did out vote them by now over 2.5 million.

I’m taking another path and I recommend it. Everyone in this country who lives with white privilege (e.g. you’re white so you can get away with a whole lot more shit than people who aren’t) should try to understand those who don’t. What is life like for black and brown people in this country? What do they cherish, what do they fear, how has being marginalized affected them?

Early this fall, as I watched way too many Americans run with Trump’s permission to be overtly racist, I began to be very afraid for people of color. I wanted to understand better how racism affects politics in our country, how it’s stayed glued to the every institution in our society, and what that feels like for people of color. I know the white liberal view of what’s going on. What’s the view of black and brown people?

So I made a commitment to get as much of my cultural input as possible from black and brown people through books, podcasts, movies, performances, periodicals and newspapers.

I’ve learned a lot, been challenged and dismayed and gob-smacked by brilliance hearing and reading about the everyday experiences of racism in your face as a black or brown person, the constant pressure of not being white, which makes you not right to too many people in some fundamental way. Like some white guy in the priority seating A section of a Southwest boarding line who asks a black woman, and no one else, if she’s in the right line. Or a man who spits in the face of a Latina teenager and tells her to get the hell home as she marches peacefully in NYC in the week after the election. Or white teenagers who chant “Build the wall” at the brown students in their school.

There are also stories of celebration and fierce resistance to diminishment, black and brown women and men who keep speaking truth to power, who don’t let up in pushing up against the bullshit barriers, as scary as it is to walk around in our country with skin that isn’t white.

And it really is scary. Listen to the stories, read the books. Start with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and then Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Listen to the podcasts Show About Race, Another Round, and Code Switch. To me, it’s a privilege to get to listen to black and brown people talk so openly and frankly about their experiences and frustrations and victories. You can laugh along with two very funny black women, Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson, as they riff off each other on Two Dope Queens.

Go see the movie Moonlight, “a vital portrait of contemporary African American life and an intensely personal and poetic meditation on identity, family, friendship, and love.” Watch the TV series Atlanta, creation of writer and musician Donald Glover.

Then when you’re wondering how white people can hang on to such openly racist attitudes, people who really do want to limit voting rights for black Americans, people who proudly declare their belief that white people are superior, people who quietly let subtle acts of racism swirl around them every day, read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

The novel opens on a cotton plantation in Georgia, and the unflinching depictions of slavery are both barely believable and completely make sense. Acknowledging how the wealth of this country was built by and on the bodies of black people being inhumanely brutalized by white people is a first step in understanding how we got to where we are today. We have a long and horrible history of racism and obviously still have a lot of work to do to undo centuries of harm.

Forget about understanding the people who voted for Trump. Understand the people who’ll be hurt by those votes and what underlies the forces that will hurt them. Starting to fully acknowledge the deep legacy of racism in the U.S. will help you understand how someone who wants change in Washington DC but doesn’t consciously hate black people could vote for Trump.

Let yourself feel the injustice of that legacy and think about how you’ve benefitted from it. Think about how you can help untangle the knot of racism that permeates and poisons our culture.

Education is a first step. Click on some of the links above and see where you end up.

 

Thanks to Samantha Bee for so perfectly labeling the part of America that doesn’t want to lose all the privilege their whiteness gives them, that doesn’t want black and brown people to do as well as them, that doesn’t want women to have any authority over their own lives, and particularly, their own wombs.

There’s a lot of ground to be covered here, but I’ll concentrate on the white boys’ intent to gain more control back over women and their bodies. I’m working to learn more about how white privilege and racism and classism and gender stereotypes all intersect to oppress people, but men’s control of women is something I know a lot about

Ever since our ancestors figured out, early in the history of the human race, that men inseminate women, that the miracle of creation is not women’s alone, men have been hell bent on controlling women so they can be sure any babies produced by the women they’re controlling are theirs.

So stupid. Controlling a woman and telling her what to do might be a way to make sure any babies are yours, but it requires vigilance and abuse and denigration and it’s certainly not the best way. Respecting women, celebrating women’s strength, holding abusers accountable when they harm women — that attracts women, that keeps a woman at your side, that motivates a woman to keep you at her side to help raise those babies.

So what about all the women who support white fuckboys and their views? I won’t describe someone else’s life and experience, but I do know from working to end violence against women for almost 40 years that feeling trapped by current circumstances, violence, intimidation or expectations from their childhood entangles many women with partners who are disrespectful and controlling.

A week ago Friday when I first saw the news about Comey reintroducing Hillary’s emails into the election (and let’s remember, everyone, the George W. Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails), I understood again how hard it is to win as a woman if the white boys really don’t want you to. But actually, it isn’t white boys that are the problem. It’s white fuckboys, the ones who can’t stand the idea that a black President will be followed by a woman President, the ones who really think being white is better and should give them more control. How did they lose so much control?

Well they’re poised to lose even more which is why they’re so desperate. Looking at demographics, soon there won’t be enough of those white boys in this country to hold on to any control they have left unless everyone else agrees they should have it.

But already we’re at a tipping point, before white people in the United States are outnumbered by minorities. There are enough straight white women and men who are fine with sharing citizenship and power over their own lives with black and brown people, gender fluid people, LGBTQI people and women. Not only do they think it’s perfectly fine to have a Black President followed by a President who is a woman, they think it’s about time.

So white men who are losing their control over women, over the number of black and brown people in the country, over the ability to deny freedom and autonomy and power to all those “others,” are grabbing as much final control as they can, like taking ground in a war. If they can pull us all back to a place where women don’t have access to reproductive choice, where hatred and violent acts against black and brown people, Muslims and Jews, is okay, where groping and denigrating women is fine, where voting is difficult for black and brown people, where income disparity keeps increasing, then it will take that much longer to get back to where we are today.

Except we don’t have to go back at all. We can, and hopefully will, go forward. Vote for justice, decency, community, tolerance and diversity on Tuesday.

Vote for Hillary, then keep voting Democratic all the way down the ticket.

Give those white fuckboys the defeat they deserve.

People across the United States are celebrating last night’s World Series victory of the Cubs and choosing a new President. How are these events related? Both offer an opportunity to push back against the culture that condones abuse of women.

The Cubs acquired Aroldis Chapman in a trade with the Yankees this summer, knowingly taking on a man who abused his girlfriend. Although he denies having hurt her, he doesn’t deny having shot a gun into a wall multiple times during a fight with her last year and didn’t dispute his 30 game suspension. Did it bother the Cubs that Chapman is an abuser? Or was it more important to win a World Series?

Cubs president Theo Epstein claims he talked with Chapman prior to the trade and that Chapman was “heartfelt” in his answers. What does Chapman say about that conversation? He doesn’t recall the details and was “sleepy” while they talked.

Now the Cubs have a World Series win and an abuser to thank in part for that.

Here’s the connection with the election. I’ve had to accept over the past several months that I share this country with many people who are not only comfortable with Donald Trump’s racist, misogynist, and xenophobic views but welcome the opportunity to share their own such views.

But I also think there are many people supporting Trump because they are anti-choice and their religious convictions are driving them to accept the hateful aspects of Trump because he may be able to deliver a Supreme Court that will over turn Roe v. Wade. Still others will vote for Trump because they view themselves as Republicans no matter what and will swallow what they don’t like about Trump to vote with their party.

What both supporting the Cubs and Trump leads to, however, is condoning a culture of violence and abuse of women. Any time we support anyone who has been abusive to women, whether it’s firing a gun to frighten your girlfriend (and most likely strangling her, as she originally told police) or groping women and bragging about it, we tell ourselves, our children, everyone, that it’s okay. Nope, #NOTokay.

As Adrienne wrote on Facebook today, about the Cubs victory last night, “You don’t knowingly employ someone who not only broke a law but abused someone. You know what it does to young boys and girls when a team puts him on the big stage? It sends a message that it’s OK. It sends a message that if you’re talented enough you can do anything you want with no repercussions. That’s not fucking ok. That perpetuates a culture of abuse of women.” In Trump’s case, it would be that you’re rich enough that you can do anything you want. 

The Cub’s shouldn’t have acquired Chapman and Americans shouldn’t hire Trump to be President. It doesn’t matter what piece of good you think you can pull out of the mistake of elevating an abuser to an exalted status — that he can pitch the shit out of other teams, that he could make abortion illegal again, that he can help win the World Series, that he can implement a fiscally and socially conservative agenda — it’s still a mistake.

Abuse of women is #NOTOkay now and forever. Remember that when you make choices.

 

Mike and I worked together at a natural foods bakery. The year was 1976 and baking breads and cookies with whole wheat flour and honey as the sweetener felt revolutionary. My job was to scrub out the loaf pans, Mike made cookies. We both lived in Montague Center, a small town north of Amherst, Massachusetts where we both attended UMass. We often talked at work and sometimes saw each other around town — out for a walk, at a party, sitting on the porch of the large farmhouse where I lived with a changing cast of housemates.

Eric was waiting tables at that point in our lives so he was rarely home for dinner, but there were almost always a few other housemates around. One night I invited Mike for dinner. I don’t remember who else was there, but I know Eric wasn’t.

After we finished eating I started clearing the table and stood at the sink rinsing dishes. Mike came up behind me in the kitchen, reached his arms around me and cupped a breast in each hand. WTF? (Though that wasn’t a thing then like it is now.)

I turned around, asked Mike what the hell he was doing, and never invited him over again. I avoided him at work. Soon I moved away and didn’t have to worry about running in to him in the neighborhood.

What’s your story? As women, we all have them and now many women who’ve never told their stories of groping and grabbing and flashing are telling those stories thanks to Donald Trump. In the aftermath of his braggadocious video about assaulting women and subsequent dismissal of the women who’ve been assaulted by him, there has been an outpouring of stories.

Who would have thought we’d have Donald Trump to thank for anything? But his arrogance and denial have prompted a national conversation on sexual assault unlike anything I’ve seen in more than three decades working in the movement to end violence against women. There was a lot of media attention to sexual assault on campus  last year (which I wrote about here), but this has gone far beyond that. This time women who were assaulted long ago or yesterday, women who did or didn’t go to college, women who never told anyone about being molested, are talking. They’re telling their stories about being fondled and violated and subject to unwanted sexual touch.

#NOTokay is a Twitter feed started by writer Kelly Oxford asking women to share their first sexual assault that got more than 30 million replies in five days. 30 million! The New York Times called the result “a kind of collective, nationwide purge of painful, often long-buried memories.” There have been almost 93,000 Facebook posts tagged with #notokay.

As I’ve written before, over the last 30 years I’ve asked women I meet if they’ve ever experienced unwanted sexual touch. Only one woman has said no. One. My conclusion? Unwanted sexual touch is a universal female experience, but until recently no one ever talked about it. Now women are talking. If you’re a woman, I hope you’re safe enough to be able to tell your story. If you’re a man, listen.

Finally, perhaps, we’re having the national conversation about sexual assault I’ve been waiting so many years to hear.

Social media has been full of people struggling to find appropriate words for the anguish that rose in our guts last week.  So much loss, so much anger and mistrust, too many guns. What can any of us do?

Maybe instead of asking ourselves what to say, we should ask, what to read?  If you’re white and struggling with meaningful ways to respond to last week’s shootings, you could start by understanding how your skin color provides you with a privilege that’s probably invisible to you but that’s had a powerful influence on your life.

Read “White Privilege:  Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” the 1989 article by Peggy McIntosh that has served as a seminal piece to help educate white people who strive to be allies with communities of color.  Doing ally work means understanding the ways in which whiteness has allowed you to move through the world with a freedom and lack of fear not available to people of color.

Then listen to the Code Switch podcast “Can We Talk About Whiteness” which includes an interview with Peggy McIntosh.  And while you’re there, subscribe to Code Switch, an excellent podcast that explores “race and identity, remixed.”  Keep the learning going.

Read two recent books that speak directly about the experience of being black in the United States, from both a woman and man’s point of view.  Citizen by Claudia Rankine is brilliant and startling, that she lives with so much overt racism everyday.  Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is Coates’ letter to his son about the very real and often lethal danger that faces black boys and men in our country.

We all need to step closer to understanding how profoundly race affects people of color in the U.S.  Black lives matter.

 

At this point, not having heard from the editors at The New Yorker, I assume they aren’t going to print the letter I sent in response to an article published in the April 11 issue. The Voyeur’s Motel by Gay Talese is a disturbing piece about Talese’s long association with Gerald Foos, a man who bought and retrofitted a motel decades ago so he could watch his customers having sex. Apparently the article is an excerpt from an entire book Talese has written on this subject.

Knowing how difficult it is to have a letter published in The Mail section of The New Yorker, I listed all my professional affiliations, hoping my credibility in the movement to end violence against women might help get my letter attention.  But I seem to have remained unplucked from the slush pile.

Very disappointing, not because it means I won’t appear in The New Yorker, but because it means the editors there don’t get it.  They published an article that reinforces rape culture at a time when there is finally starting to be some serious public attention paid to how male privilege and assumption of entitlement to sexual gratification leads to sexual assault, and what can be done to prevent that.  The piece highlights, without challenging, how Foos and Talese participated in sexual exploitation from positions of privilege.  Foos had the money to buy and modify a hotel to be able to satisfy his sexual needs.  Talese wielded privilege from his position as an established journalist to justify participating in Foos criminal behavior and not intervene.

So I’m going the self-publishing route.  Here is my letter — you actually don’t need to read the Talese piece.  It’s meritless.

Who Is the Voyeur?

While Gay Talese has no trouble finding fault with Gerald Foos for his lack of self-awareness and easy justifications for decades of voyeurism, he appears blind to the ways in which he is very like Mr. Foos (“The Voyeur’s Motel,” April 11). Talese does, at one point, ask, “Where was I in all this?” He goes on to give possible answers but never settles on one and continues, “Still, whenever an envelope from Foos arrived, I opened it.” It’s apparent he opened the letters because he’s a voyeur also. He has hidden his voyeurism behind a successful career as a journalist, but he still climbed the ladder with Foos and watched a couple engage in oral sex from the attic of the Manor House Motel.

Perhaps Talese feels he has a stronger moral compass than Foos because the murder Foos witnessed and helped initiate bothers him more than it does Foos. But what about the rapes and sexual exploitation, undoubtedly perpetrated against people with less privilege than financially secure white men? Foos also reported these to Talese over the years, yet Talese gives them only a passing glance.   Where is the concern about those crimes and Foos doing nothing to stop or prevent them? Where is his correspondence with Foos imploring him to act?

Mr. Talese must not know about the growing body of evidence that bystander intervention to stop or prevent sexual crimes can be an effective deterrent. Voyeurism was a crime in Colorado under the Unlawful Sexual Contact statute when Talese received the first letter from Foos. Talese had countless opportunities to intervene with Foss from the very beginning, without creating any conflict arising from confidentiality agreements or journalistic considerations, however self-serving they may have been. He had a critical responsibility to intervene that deepened with every new revelation from Foos.

Claiming a journalistic interest in Foos’ “research” does not change the criminality of both men’s behavior. Talese could more usefully employ his journalism skills reporting on ways to prevent sexual crimes, including those Foos perpetrated and witnessed. Talese may argue that his interest had nothing to do with his own titillation from Foos’ reports of sex and sex crimes. But Talese can’t deny his role as a bystander nor avoid the evidence that he finds satisfaction in observing and judging others, just like Foos.

Grace Mattern
32 West Street
Northwood, NH 03261
603.828.6218
Advisory Council, National Sexual Violence Resource Center
Research to Practice Specialist, Prevention Innovations Research Center, University of New Hampshire
Former Executive Director, New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence