Election Day, 2016
The moment I woke up I could just tell that Election Day was a legal holiday. Sun was streaming through my bedroom windows. There was none of the sound of doors opening and closing all over the apartment building. I had the distinct feeling that people were sleeping in. Nevertheless, I chose to avoid the morning rush to our polling center and put off voting until after lunch.
I like our polling center; it's in a brand new, city-built construction, officially a part of the public housing project across from us. Empty for the first couple of years of its existence, it was shrouded in mystery. Even after it was opened, very few passing observers could tell what it was built for. From the outside it looked like it could have been anything from a school cafeteria to a library. Then, one evening in the dead of winter I could see through the sheer curtain of light that formed the top story, a basketball shooting across what was clearly the upper portion of a cavernous room. Repeated sightings of the basketball and of a spinning class on the ground floor confirmed, over time, that this was, in fact, a recreation center.
The gymnasium is a vast improvement over our former polling center on the ground floor of a neighboring apartment complex. Now, there was plenty of room to wait on line indoors rather than out in the cold. And, that curtain of glass across the top windows was a perfect source of sun and sky. "They can't lock us out once we get in here.", I remember thinking to myself. There had been articles in Slate and other websites about whether a polling place could close so long as there were people standing on line. As a matter of fact, I think it was Trump who raised the issue.
Ah, Trump.
It's interesting. The people from my building that I met while waiting on line were not worried so much for themselves. It felt like we personally had very little skin in the game; we were well-off compared to the people just outside the gymnasium walls. Nevertheless, the mood was grim. We were mostly concerned about the direction of the country. Who were these Trump supporters and why is this election so damned close?
This was my second time using a paper ballot. Gone were the old-fashioned, mechanical machines with their moveable curtains. People were perfectly comfortable filling out their ballots while waiting on line for the scanning machines. It had all the charm of another day at the motor vehicles department.
About an hour after I got back home, Kelvin called. He'd left work early ("Too black to take a sick day" became our meme for the entire conversation.) We talked about Trump and his supporters. He clearly knows a whole lot more of them than I do. He has co-existed in the Bizarro World of the white working class for the better part of his adult life, or as he would put it, "Ever since they integrated the schools." He is nearly always the only Democrat at whatever company he goes.
Contrary to their popular image, these are not poor people. They are people with good jobs. They wear white shirts and ties "nice clothes" to work every day. They are good at math.
One thing that sets them apart is that, by and large, his co-workers were their first in their families to attend college. Kelvin can't call himself a First-Gen: both his parents had college degrees even though his dad was a tobacco farmer well into his forties. Education was just something his grandparents and mine thought was important for their children to have.
Education is probably not enough to explain, however, why, out of his group of 10-20 co-workers, Kelvin was the only one who would vote for Hillary Clinton that day. The level of misogyny is also pretty high despite efforts to keep it outside the radar of HR. Every once in a while Kelvin will mention a story involving a female protagonist, but, more often than not, his most frequent encounters are with other men. And, a lot of those stories involve marriages that are under stress.
None of this is new to Kelvin. In fact, none of it is particularly limited to white men. I can remember vividly a talk I had - one of the rare ones - while riding the #7 train shortly before Mom died. It as the early afternoon, before the schools were about to let out and there were plenty of seats in this particular car (the hospital where Mom died required exiting from the rear of the train rather than my customary perch in front of the window of the front car.) A young Mexican man, maybe pushing thirty, met my gaze and decided to change his seat in order to sit next to me. He might have been a little bit under the influence, but was lucid enough to hold a conversation. It was about Hillary and his reluctance to vote for a woman president. He kept repeating it as a rhetorical question "Should I vote for a woman?"
I like our polling center; it's in a brand new, city-built construction, officially a part of the public housing project across from us. Empty for the first couple of years of its existence, it was shrouded in mystery. Even after it was opened, very few passing observers could tell what it was built for. From the outside it looked like it could have been anything from a school cafeteria to a library. Then, one evening in the dead of winter I could see through the sheer curtain of light that formed the top story, a basketball shooting across what was clearly the upper portion of a cavernous room. Repeated sightings of the basketball and of a spinning class on the ground floor confirmed, over time, that this was, in fact, a recreation center.
The gymnasium is a vast improvement over our former polling center on the ground floor of a neighboring apartment complex. Now, there was plenty of room to wait on line indoors rather than out in the cold. And, that curtain of glass across the top windows was a perfect source of sun and sky. "They can't lock us out once we get in here.", I remember thinking to myself. There had been articles in Slate and other websites about whether a polling place could close so long as there were people standing on line. As a matter of fact, I think it was Trump who raised the issue.
Ah, Trump.
It's interesting. The people from my building that I met while waiting on line were not worried so much for themselves. It felt like we personally had very little skin in the game; we were well-off compared to the people just outside the gymnasium walls. Nevertheless, the mood was grim. We were mostly concerned about the direction of the country. Who were these Trump supporters and why is this election so damned close?
This was my second time using a paper ballot. Gone were the old-fashioned, mechanical machines with their moveable curtains. People were perfectly comfortable filling out their ballots while waiting on line for the scanning machines. It had all the charm of another day at the motor vehicles department.
About an hour after I got back home, Kelvin called. He'd left work early ("Too black to take a sick day" became our meme for the entire conversation.) We talked about Trump and his supporters. He clearly knows a whole lot more of them than I do. He has co-existed in the Bizarro World of the white working class for the better part of his adult life, or as he would put it, "Ever since they integrated the schools." He is nearly always the only Democrat at whatever company he goes.
Contrary to their popular image, these are not poor people. They are people with good jobs. They wear white shirts and ties "nice clothes" to work every day. They are good at math.
One thing that sets them apart is that, by and large, his co-workers were their first in their families to attend college. Kelvin can't call himself a First-Gen: both his parents had college degrees even though his dad was a tobacco farmer well into his forties. Education was just something his grandparents and mine thought was important for their children to have.
Education is probably not enough to explain, however, why, out of his group of 10-20 co-workers, Kelvin was the only one who would vote for Hillary Clinton that day. The level of misogyny is also pretty high despite efforts to keep it outside the radar of HR. Every once in a while Kelvin will mention a story involving a female protagonist, but, more often than not, his most frequent encounters are with other men. And, a lot of those stories involve marriages that are under stress.
None of this is new to Kelvin. In fact, none of it is particularly limited to white men. I can remember vividly a talk I had - one of the rare ones - while riding the #7 train shortly before Mom died. It as the early afternoon, before the schools were about to let out and there were plenty of seats in this particular car (the hospital where Mom died required exiting from the rear of the train rather than my customary perch in front of the window of the front car.) A young Mexican man, maybe pushing thirty, met my gaze and decided to change his seat in order to sit next to me. He might have been a little bit under the influence, but was lucid enough to hold a conversation. It was about Hillary and his reluctance to vote for a woman president. He kept repeating it as a rhetorical question "Should I vote for a woman?"