Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

PaulDavisThe1st

About a year after Trump's election, I found myself thinking along similar lines. I mean, his administration made very little difference in my life, or the lives of anyone I know. Yes, I could be empathetic towards people whose lives I mostly just read about. But realistically, I had no actual evidence of any impact.

Then I met up with a very old friend of mine. Successful SV VC guy. Incredibly smart. Incredibly human. Probably reads Hacker News (actually, scratch that). Happens to be of Indian ancestry, though he grew up in Davis, CA. Very wealthy thanks to a few good choices made after he dropped out of his PhD program. So yeah, maybe he didn't have my middle class white anglo privilege going on, but if there's a ladder, I had always assumed he was only 1 or 2 rungs below me, at worst.

As it turns out, no. Trump's election had made him adopt a policy of no longer engaging in any business travel to anywhere in the USA except major metropolitan areas. Was it paranoid? I don't feel equipped to comment. But that was the verdict of a guy that I respect enormously for his intelligence and his decision making processes. He felt too unsafe in Trump's America to visit mid-size towns in Iowa.

So, when you say:

> I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.

I'd advise checking in with some brown people you know (or don't know). Some immigrants not yet moved into citizenship. Someone in any group that Trump verbally attacked. Because I felt the same way until my friend gently but forcefully told me that I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about if I was trying to generalize from my own experience.

>Trump's election had made him adopt a policy of no longer engaging in any business travel to anywhere in the USA except major metropolitan areas

So not because of any negative experience with these areas, just because of some bigoted stereotype? Sounds like the parent post was right, nothing in daily life really changed, except perhaps the perception of some increased danger. Perhaps brought on by the way that Trump was reported on in the media?

The fact that people feel something does not imply that it exists. Humans are notoriously unreliable witnesses.

> The fact that people feel something does not imply that it exists.

I absolutely agree.

Nevertheless, to hear that an intelligent, savvy, world-travelling person could now feel unsafe in many parts of the USA was, to me, indicative of a type of change that is as real as them actually being unsafe. Which is to say: I don't know if they were actually in any more danger than they would have been before, but they now perceived American society as if they were. That didn't happen because they ate the wrong thing for breakfast.

The fact that the "overton window" of the visible culture seemed to have move enough after Trump's election that this person now felt unsafe, regardless of whether there was an actual change in their safety, seems really notable to me, and no doubt even more notable to the people who live with this shift in perception.

What actually made midsize towns in Iowa unsafe to visit for persons of Indian descent in Trump's America? Did the Iowans suddenly get more racist? Was Dubuque declared a "sundown town"? Have the Iowans calmed down now that we live in Biden's America?

I think my friend's explanation was that he felt that people who might potentially feel inclined to verbally or physically harass him now felt less inhibited after Trump's election. That is to say, there was no actual shift in attitude but a shift in the likelihood of public behavior based on those attitudes. I have not checked in with him since the last election, but based on conversations we've had in the past, I would guess he does not imagine that Biden's election has changed things much. The genie escaped from the bottle; putting it back is much harder.

So essentially the people in mid-size towns in Iowa were and are mostly racist (and not "implicit bias" racist but "shouting racial slurs and engaging in physical aggression" racist) but the national attitude during 2008-16 was holding them back from verbally and physically harassing people of color as they wanted to do, because they knew Obama would crack down on them like a ton of bricks.

After Election Day 2016 the formerly mild-mannered Iowans (a state so racist that America's first Black president won a majority of votes there in 2008 and 2012) decided to drop all pretense of being nice to people of color.

I'm sorry but it sounds frankly ridiculous.

That feels like a more or less willful misreading.

Let's suppose that my friend crosses paths with 100 Iowans during a business trip there. Let's suppose that 1% of Iowans are racist or bigoted enough to at the very least yell some abuse at this particular clearly non-caucasian individual. Before Trump's primary campaign and electoral win, social pressure kept the 1 person my friend may have encountered from acting on that impulse, but afterwards, that person felt much freer to just speak their mind (or worse).

Such an analysis says nothing about Iowans in general as people. It says that it's easy to be worried that the general attitude had shifted enough in Iowa (but not, say, in NYC or Chicago) that the tiny percentage of people who might act on their racist/bigoted impulses are now more likely to do so, changing my friend's risk exposure by visiting.

It's not for you or me to judge whether that's sufficient reason to avoid Iowa now. That's an individual decision to be made, and I do not sit in judgement of those who decide one way or another.

But you're also missing the deeper aspect of the point I'm trying to make. You don't have to believe me, but I'm telling you that my friend is a hyper-rational, highly intelligent, well informed individual. The fact that such a person could move from "I have never worried about being brown when moving around the USA" to "I will not visit anywhere outside of large metropolitan areas" - that's the change. You are free to argue that it is is irrational, or even "ridiculous" as you put it, but the point is that the state of American society pre-Trump left this individual feeling safe, and the same state post-Trump left them feeling anxious. If they were a person prone to irrational, emotive decisions or generally over-reacted to anything, then I would be inclined to dismiss the change in their sense of their own safety. If they had always worried about this aspect of life in the USA, I would be inclined to dismiss the change. But they are not and they did not, and so I take this change quite seriously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com