Look at the Future

On November 8th America took an extraordinary step backwards. Despite the attempts to find exonerations and justifications for them, the vast majority of white Americans stood up and proudly declared their support for racism, misogyny, and many other forms of hatred. It was a dark and terrifying moment for anyone who values the freedoms for which America supposedly stands. Trump’s election harkens back to what the man himself called “the good ole days,” when it was acceptable to “rough people up,” or perhaps, lynch them.

I’d like to harken back to a more recent “good ole day,” the one captured by the picture below, taken of me and my family in 1992. That was a real good ole day. A day when even in Mississippi, a multi-racial family was embraced, when a public university selected the Lebanese mother of three diverse sons as its chief academic officer, when three brothers who look as unalike as could be imagined were fixtures around a school that in 1962 had rioted to prevent integration. In 1992, it seemed that my family represented the future. My mother, born in Vicksburg, MS to Lebanese immigrants told me that when she was a child in the 1950s our family would not have been able to exist in Mississippi.

Yet our family thrived. Lebanese, Vietnamese, White, and Black, our family was embraced and accepted. Because this is what the future looks like, and even in Mississippi, people recognized it.

Let me be clear, I do not accept frail excuses like a poor economy or disgust with the political class as justifiable reasons to have supported Donald Trump. I would not have accepted those excuses from Depress-era Germans in the early 1930’s, and I do not accept them from Recession-era white Americans in 2016. A vote for Donald Trump — regardless of the motivations of the voter — was a vote for bigotry.

But I do know that even in the reddest parts of America, people are willing to embrace change and differences. They just need to see what that looks like. Contrary to the popular narrative that liberal elites in coastal cities live in bubbles, the reality is just the opposite. People in small-town Mississippi — among many other states — are the ones who live in bubbles. Even in a university town and a diverse family, I had never met an openly gay person or anyone Jewish until I left Mississippi at age 16. In the six years I lived in New York City, my “bubble” included people from all over the world with every imaginable skin tone and speaking myriad languages. In Mississippi there was my family.

Yes, rural white Americans overwhelmingly opted for hate on November 8th, but not because they are inherently racist. As a white Mississippian I was no more born a racist than my youngest brother, black, was born a thug. What we must do to combat the hatred Trump has unleashed is to show white America what the future looks like, and it is not monolithically white by any means. America’s future is diverse and beautiful. Increasingly full of families that look like mine.

THIS is what the future looks like. And I know it is a future we are capable of embracing. If in 1992, a small town in Mississippi would love my family, then in 2016, a nation is certainly capable of doing the same. We succumbed to our darker intuitions recently, but we are still better than our worst demons, we are still a nation that can look to the future. I hope you can see some of that future in the picture below.

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