Trump’s America has given racism a new lease of life by making a mockery of its diversity
Amy Wu finds she had been living in a bubble of a multicultural America, as she learns a few home truths on discrimination and the newly blurred divide between conservative and liberal states
I am a big city girl, having lived in New York, San Francisco, Washington and Hong Kong, all of them cosmopolitan, international, if not progressive cities when it comes to the arts, culture, gender and politics. Diversity, exposure and acceptance – whether racial, sexual, gender or socioeconomic – was, in retrospect, taken for granted.
Diversity was a given – my Caucasian, Indian and Latino friends celebrated the Lunar New Year and Autumn Moon festivals alongside me, while I celebrated Diwali, St Patrick’s Day and their children’s quinceañeras.
In Hong Kong, my colleagues included Britons, Australians, Filipinos, Indians, Singaporeans, South Africans, and people from many other countries. In coexisting, we learned about each others’ cultures and backgrounds. There were certainly cultural and linguistics barriers, but I was privileged enough to be exposed to such a diversity of cultures and thought.
Under this new administration, discrimination, and at times racism, seems to have reared its ugly head in everyday life
Maybe I had been a bit slow in noticing, since I had always lived on one US coast or the other. I hesitate to say I had been living in a bubble, but the bottom line is that it was a bubble. My friends in big cities called the states in-between “flyover states,” a way of saying these states were second-tier.
Many of us had never visited states such as Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Mississippi, and if pushed would admit that we had little desire to. And yet, the results of the election clearly showed that the majority of people in the “flyover states” were Trump supporters, and in many cases conservative in thinking.
