Enough
Roxane Gay, writing at The New York Times:
These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry.
Naomi Beinart, writing about attending high school the day after the election, also at the Times:
… most of the guys I saw that Wednesday appeared nonchalant. A smiling student shook his friend’s hand and said sarcastically, “Good election” in the same hallway where I saw a female teacher clutching a damp tissue.
Why did it seem these boys were so unperturbed? I worried that my guy friends might care about women only until it conflicts with other, more pressing, priorities.
A contemporary and ridiculous (I mean the latter not in the vernacular, but the actual dictionary definition — “worthy of ridicule”) response to teaching accurate accounts of the slavery, imperialist land theft, and genocide inherent in America’s history is that it could make some people feel bad. Well, yeah. I, an American, SHOULD feel AWFUL about living on stolen land, about the genocide concurrent with said theft, and of the past chattel slavery whose repercussions still warp everything here from economic opportunity to equal justice.
Similarly, I SHOULD feel badly about patriarchy. I SHOULD feel the pain of the violent, corrupted, un-just order it has forced upon us all AND BY FAR THE WORST OF IT upon women. (Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”)
So, feeling bad. Feeling bad? How can anyone even begin to learn from history, to fix themselves, to send society in the right direction unless they feel pain and regret and remorse? And that’s the takeaway: they don’t want you to feel bad because they don’t want you to learn, and they don’t want you to learn because they don’t want you to think.