The process elected Trump to be President of the United States on 8 November. Lots of people are publishing reactions. I am from Texas, and because I know the culture there, I always felt that Trump was a respectable candidate from the perspective of my culture of birth. Most of my friends are in Seattle and New York City, and over the campaign cycle, I felt that people who were from those cities could not understand why Trump was popular. I feel fortunate that my background enables me to intuitively understand why people would support Trump. Also, I have lived in Seattle and NYC long enough to understand why people supported candidates other than Trump. To me, both major party candidates seemed electable. Obviously the count of election votes proved that the total voter base hardly differentiated them, because the election was close, as all United States elections are close.
Some people felt that the election was a citizens’ referendum on civil rights. The election was a lot of things, and it was a vote for what sort of civil rights people favored also. Those people who cared about civil rights were especially passionate in discussing the election outcomes. There have been some reports of increased tension among conflicting groups. Other writers are publishing to explain these things.
On Friday 11 November I took a train to Bushwick in Brooklyn. For one part of the ride, a homeless crazy man came into the train car where I was. I say he was homeless because he was dirty and wearing dirty clothes. I say he was crazy because his shirt was unbuttoned to expose his chest in the way that some crazy people wear their clothes, and because his actions were the sort of actions which crazy people will do like drawing negative attention to himself and creating tension and danger for no apparent reason. Upon entering the car, he announced loudly that he was going to slap all the white people who voted for Trump. This is NYC, and every white person going to Bushwick is queer, and overall if he was looking for Trump supporters he was on the wrong train because everyone on on this subway voted for someone else. The sentiment was there, though, that white people were responsible for an injustice.
NYC culture tolerates crazy people doing outrageous things on the subway. Over time I learned the etiquette, but there is a way that typical people respond to this common occurrence and in response crazy people also follow the rules of engagement. The rules permit any angry crazy person to yell, stomp, wave their arms around, threaten violence, pee on the train, and smell bad just so long as they do not do too many of these things at once or, if they do too many things at once, they are obliged to only do them briefly then move on to the next train car for the next performance. The proper response from the non-crazy joining traveler is that they cannot make eye contact with the crazy person and they have to pretend that they do not notice him. How this plays out is that the crazy person approaches various people on the train and targets them by communicating with wild behavior, but cannot touch them. If the target makes eye contact, then the crazy person is allowed to engage them more intensely, and is allowed to physically touch them to provoke them further and trigger the beginning of an escalated social event involving more participants. If the target of the wild behavior just looks away and acts passive, then the other train passengers watch the experience and tacitly are there to suggest that they would enforce the social boundaries if the performer transgresses them.
I was at the end of the train as the last white boy. There were a mix of races on the train. The leading actor in this drama was black, and he identified who was white and male and walked to them in a line. He went to the first white guy and called him a “white bitch” then raised his hand as if to backhand him. Since the performer was following the rules, that first participant ignored him, and pretended that he was just reading his phone and did not notice the threat or yelling. There was a pause and then that bid for social connection resolved. The crazy guy then walked to the next person and asked them if they voted from Trump. That passenger choose to respond with no active response. Again there was a pause, he was called a white bitch, and the loony moved on down the subway. There were two more guys and they got their exchange, then it was my turn. The performer had established his routine at this point. The crazy guy did a side shuffle in front of me, which is a tricky strategy to try to get a passenger to look up so that the provocateur can collect eye contact and be justified in escalating the stakes of the match. I knew the trick because in the time I spent in India I learned all these strategies from experience with the hijra on the trains, and I was not going to be fooled. He called me a white bitch and I did not disagree. Then he followed the rules and went into the next car in the usual crazy way, which is to only change cars when the train is moving. That was the end of the experience.
Today Saturday 12 November I had to go from Manhattan into Brooklyn on the A Train from the Chambers Street station. I was on the platform there, which is by the World Trade Center and among the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world. A black man approached me, obviously drunk, dressed in the attire of the homeless, and began the crazy exchange. He said, “Excuse me white master”. New York people know their surroundings, and I came to realize that he was black and I was white and I was the only white guy around. He went on to say that following the election, blacks now ought to call whites “master”, which is an allusion to the African slave trade in the United States in which whites owned blacks and blacks had to call whites “master” because the whites owned them. He was calling, “Master, master!” and saying that he was sorry while taking drafts from a liquor bottle. He told me that he was sorry, and then he said that black people have to obey all white people. He called for me to approach him. If I had, then by the social rules in NYC, then that would have been license for him to escalate the situation. Of course I had no reason to approach him.
I was at a Wikipedia event in the World Trade Center earlier that day on the 40th floor looking down at buildings. Every building has a story, and even every window in every building is a room where a person goes and that person has some life narrative that they are enacting. There is no way to understand everything that happens in New York, but when I am high in a building and look out, I see lots of windows and try to imagine how many stories the windows represent. To get the privilege of looking out of a window in Manhattan already means that a person has advanced in social competition and found some kind of success in life and is enjoying more privileges than just about anyone else on earth. The responsibilities that anyone takes to go along with their privileges are mostly a matter of personal choice. I regret the income disparity in NYC, and how so many people enjoy everything while so many others in NYC and elsewhere in the world seem utterly miserable. When I was younger and in rural Texas I felt so helpless, and when my life improved with a move to Seattle I was still in really rough shape until I learned how to take opportunities to get what I needed to approach a middle class life. Still, I often feel like so much of my fate is because of chance rather than anything I control, and I feel so fortunate that I am able to pass my life in ways other than being crazy on the subway or otherwise helpless and unfortunate somewhere.
My being lightly threatened lightly in these ways in NYC is not supporting evidence that other people might be threatened elsewhere. I do attribute Trump’s election to these odd experiences. Sometimes black people on subways try to provoke me with racial insults, especially the homeless. In these cases, I know that tensions are high and the time is close to election so I think that is the cause. I wish that it were possible for society to develop without people feeling fearful or without negativity increasing. Even though I am hopeful for longer term aggregate positive social development, it seems that present changes are going to harm some individuals for a while.