I was listening to an NRP story on Maya Angelou when I heard about this concept. The story included a recording of Maya Angelou reading her poem, "Still I Rise."
I found this NPR story to be comforting because I felt like I was on the verge of despair. Day after day, we hear about some new unqualified person that Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet or made some important adviser and I find myself wondering: How can we put up with THIS when we could have had THAT?
There's not even a comparison for how much more qualified Hillary Clinton was and is than Donald Trump, and the irony is that the electoral college, something meant to prevent people like Donald Trump, dangerous populist demagogues, from assuming power, may be the very thing that allows him to assume it.
I find this all to be incredibly disheartening and discouraging, and I am perhaps at least as infuriated by the fact that some people want to spend this time trying to understand white racists. Um, I think I get it. You're white and your racist. You lost your job or you don't make enough money, so you blame the black people or the Mexicans. You think Donald Trump is going to wave some magic wand and bring you back to those good old days. It's not happening, and I don't think there's all that much to understand.
Instead of trying to understand racism (I think we call it sin in theological terms), I want to understand the things about the world I do not know, read the books I have not read--learn about jazz and blues and read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, learn about Mexican history.
There's so much about the world I don't know, like the names of all the providences in Canada or what all the rivers in Africa look like. I'd rather learn about that than about all the shades of hate and resentment.
The Blue Nile River pictured below:
We all have a lot to learn, but I think we all know how populists rise. What we need to counter it is not to learn what makes people hate but what makes them love.
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