I go into work today surrounded by the reasons for Trump. Not voters for Trump - reasons for Trump.
I serve a community where 80% of the households never attended college. Over half of our families have parents that never finished high school. The Great Recession devoured 5.6 million jobs that these workers were qualified for, and the recovery has given back almost nothing - just 80,000 new jobs can be had without any college coursework.
The neighborhoods around us are full of young people eager to prepare themselves for college and to pursue a much better future. Their parents, on the other hand, are a decade or more removed from student life, yet America’s new economy insists that they, too, must return to school before they can return to work. Meanwhile, during President Obama’s tenure, college tuition has risen by one-third to one-half even at the community college level. In a painfully real sense, adults with no college history and no job are caught in the economy’s growing sinkhole. Can’t get work without college, can’t afford tuition without work, can’t attend classes cuz ya gotta work --- can’t attend my classes in high school because I have to work to pay the rent that my parents cannot quite afford because they have no college experience. This is exactly how poverty becomes generational. It is also how millions of citizens perceive that the system is rigged against them.
The housing collapse that brought all this on gave us two polarizing populist movements -- Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party -- screaming the same flabbergasted question: Why is the government bailing out banks and corporations instead of helping us? Has anyone in power effectively answered that question in a way that East Side San Jose or Detroit or Pittsburgh can understand? I’m grateful that we had a skilled economist in the White House for eight years; no doubt he saved us from utter ruin. But that’s the large “us” that he saved. The smaller version of “us” is still wondering, eight years later, why we aren’t any closer to solvency, why we still can’t climb even one step above destitution.
The best that either major party has offered are their tired lines about tax breaks for the already-successful (Occupy and Tea Party: “bailout - we tried that already”) and the vague mantra of “creating new jobs” (East Side: “but we need college to get them and we can’t afford college”). Besides, that duolith is so soaked in cash that it’s hard to believe that they will really, truly build meaningful opportunities for anyone besides themselves. America turned its back on that system yesterday. Instead of a multicultural surge in voter turnout this year, when you compare to 2008, over 11 million citizens voted outside the duolith or stayed away from the polls completely. And in the end, our president-elect successfully cast himself as the enemy of both parties.
I don’t believe that Trump or his party have the answers -- not by a long shot. I don’t believe he’ll bring about the revolution that his supporters crave. But I understand the anger, the fear, and the frustration that made him the champion of those living on the edge of the sinkhole. I work at that sinkhole. The families I serve live right on that edge. They predominantly speak Spanish, and today their students walk into school under a blanket of fear about what might happen to their loved ones before they even have a chance to get to college. I reject and resent the campaign that thrust this blanket over our communities. In fact, I reject any and every campaign that tries to cast a blanket over any community; whether they lack education or native birth, no family deserves to have their plight or their beliefs demeaned. The healing begins when we peel off those derisive and dismissive blankets, because underneath those labels, East Side frustration isn’t that much different from Detroit’s or Pittsburgh’s or Green Bay’s or Cleveland's. If I can counsel my students today to peer out from that heavy, terrified blanket and see that common thread, perhaps we can begin to rise together.
