The Heartbreak of Raising a Black Daughter in a Red State

[Algernon Moncrieff]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/opinion/sunday/trump-racism-black-children.html

I am consistently jolted back to reality, and not just by evidence on the internet, like a video that surfaced of two white parents teaching children to be “patriotic” by vandalizing a mosque. My reminders come in the form of my daughter’s answers to “How was your school today?” One recent afternoon she reported that two girls she considered friends could no longer play with her. The reason: She’s brown.

My daughter, who’s 8 now, has been called “the maid” by her white classmates. Even more devastating, in some ways, is when she absorbs the attitudes the other kids seem to have learned from their parents. The other day, she asked me why “Mexicans are so dangerous.” I had to calm the tremor in my voice before I could correct her.

I’m well aware that bigots weren’t invented on Mr. Trump’s Inauguration Day, and I know that these experiences could occur in any state at any time. But I would be naïve to believe that living through a time when racism is spewing from the lips of the president of the United States — and in a place where so many people agree with his views — was not introducing ugly attitudes into my daughter’s life. After all, in the aftermath of the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that “a wave of incidents of bullying and other kinds of harassment washed over the nation’s K-12 schools.” The organization called it “the Trump effect.”

I worry that kids with same-sex parents are subjected to similar ridicule. I think about the children who are immigrants, and I can’t imagine what they hear from their classmates when they are out of the earshot of teachers.

Note: This article was published by a media organization labeled as an enemy of the people. Please weigh it accordingly.

[Momgonepostal]

1. Geez, that's sad nt

[oberliner]

2. Pennsylvania is considered a "red state" now?

Trump won the state in 2016 by less than one percentage point.

Prior to that the state has voted for the Democratic candidate for president in each of the last six elections, dating back to 1992 (Obama won by double digits).

The state has a Democratic governor who won election in 2015 by ten points.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

3. I had that thought as well

That said, the western parts of the state and the parts near the Poconos are pretty conservative. Maryland is like that too - the Eastern Shore and the Panhandle are very different than the Bal-Wash corridor.

[oberliner]

6. This author lives in the Lehigh Valley

Which I believe voted for Hillary Clinton (and every Democratic candidate before her over the last six elections).

[Algernon Moncrieff]

4. I think this was posted elsewhere in GD

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-white-supremacists-split-a-quiet-rust-belt-town/2018/07/28/15a7e414-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html

ULYSSES, Pa. — The traffic sign that greets visitors on the south side of Ulysses, a tiny town in rural far north-central Pennsylvania, is suitably quaint — a silhouette of a horse-drawn cart reminding drivers that the Amish use the roads, too. But on the north side of town, along the main thoroughfare, is a far different display: a home dedicated to Adolf Hitler, where star-spangled banners and Nazi flags flutter side by side and wooden swastikas stand on poles.

White supremacy has had a continuous presence in Ulysses and surrounding Potter County since the Ku Klux Klan arrived a century ago, giving the town — with a population today of about 650 — improbable national significance. In the mid-2000s, it hosted the World Aryan Congress, a gathering of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Klan members.

This year, after a sting operation, federal prosecutors charged six members of an Aryan Strike Force cell with weapons and drug offenses, contending that they had plotted a suicide attack at an anti-racism protest. A terminally ill member was willing to hide a bomb in his oxygen tank and blow himself up, prosecutors said. The group had met and conducted weapons training in Ulysses.

Neo-Nazis and their opponents here say that white extremists have grown more confident — and confrontational — since the rise of Donald Trump. Two months before the 2016 presidential election, the KKK established a “24 hour Klan Line” and sent goody bags containing lollipops and fliers to hundreds of homes. “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake,” the message read. A regional newspaper ran Klan advertisements saying, “God bless the KKK.”

[oberliner]

5. There are towns like that in NY as well (Ulysses, PA is about 10 miles from NY state)

But that doesn't make NY a red state.

Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi - those are red states.