“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” – Dr. Martin Luther King
You voted for Donald Trump, but consider yourself one of “the good people.”
You’re my friends, colleagues and acquaintances who tell me that you’re no fan of Trump but you held your nose and voted for him anyway because you hoped he’ll cut taxes, or you wanted to “shake things up,” or (of course) you “just couldn’t vote for Hillary.”
You insist that your vote for him had nothing to do with his views on race, immigration, religion, and other issues, which you claim to find repugnant. You tell me that it’s not fair to lump you in with the racists who share those views because, after all, YOU don’t think like that.
You may truly believe you’re not a bigot because you have friends who are black, brown, Muslim, LGBT and members of other marginalized groups, would never utter a racial epithet, and don’t personally agree with Nazi/White Nationalist/KKK views.
But that’s not good enough. Not anymore.
If you voted for Donald Trump knowing that those people desperately wanted him to become president, you consciously co-signed their hate and gave them the votes they needed to achieve their racist, supremacist, anti-Semitic ends.
You can’t issue disclaimers or try to qualify your vote. Presidential votes don’t come with qualifiers or signing statements. They are fungible – they go into one basket or the other, period. And you tossed your votes into the basket filled with the votes of bigots and haters. It doesn’t matter that you don’t share their views. You shared their vote and their candidate. You may not think like them, but you voted exactly like them. Your ballot was identical to theirs: “TRUMP.”
You voted for this. You helped make it happen. You are responsible for this madness. And it is up to you do do something about it.
Now.
If you don’t speak up now, you are even more complicit than you were on Election Day.
If you don’t speak up now, you have lost any right to claim that you are not a bigot – because bigotry isn’t defined solely by how you think but also by what you do and don’t do.
If you don’t speak up now in the face of this evil, this hate, this bigotry and racism, you are knowingly and purposefully endorsing it. And that speaks for itself.