I have voted blue for my whole life, but didn't in this election and it had nothing to do with racism or sexism. It makes me sad that so many people claim that this is what drove the election results - it's an easy answer that allows the Democratic Party to not look inward and see where they have gone so very wrong. I hear the same from so many others like me. I won't go into all the issues that made me vote the way I did, but I hope you keep an open mind about what really happened. Maybe read and watch something from the other side. Here's one video that will help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99uL8KYxBI4
I certainly don't think that every voter who voted for Trump is sexist or racist -- that's something I mentioned both in this post and in my two newsletters last week. People voted for Trump for an array of reasons, and some had nothing to do with the fact that he is a white man. Still, I believe sexism and/or racism shaped *some* votes. And given how and why these biases develop, Trump's win could serve to solidify kids' burgeoning racist or sexist ideas, so I believe it's important that we talk to our kids about these issues regularly.
It's a long video but I would encourage people to skip around and see if you're comfortable endorsing it as the evidentiary basis for a comment you hit like on.
Kim, you say that your vote had nothing to do with racism or sexism. However, you were willing to vote for someone who is openly racist & sexist. To me, the fact that Trump’s belief system didn’t automatically disqualify him for you means that you made a choice that was both racist & sexist. That may not have been your intention, but it is the result.
If we have taught our kids to be kind, it’s a really simple path to talking about not being cruel. They’re smart. When they see somebody who is mean or hateful, who tells lies over and over, who bullies, who mocks with petty nicknames, who says truly awful things about women and disabled people, people with different skin color or people who immigrated here from other countries — kind kids know in their hearts it is wrong.
Whether it is a teacher, a friend’s parent, or a political leader, kids identify it the same way.
Your kids’ concerns say a lot about their values and how you have raised them, Melinda. May they do better than the adults who I believe have failed them.
Melinda, my kids are the same age as yours, except my daughter is my first born at 13 and my son is 10. Something that keeps me up at night is how to communicate with both of them about gender and politics, especially all of the signals that this election is sending and reverberating throughout our culture. Back in 2016 there was a big “who runs the world- girls” thing and we read all of the children’s feminist books with my daughter and then she wore the pink pussy cat hats I brought back from the woman’s march in January 2017. I know I have been personally crushed over the past 8 years over the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape without any retribution, the Kavanaugh hearings, Dobbs, etc. etc. But having a son really makes me think long and hard about how to channel action and redirect my rage. I’m grateful that more popular culture is more evolved now, there are more strong female role models like Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, and my daughter is far more confident than I was at her age and is much more aware about the patriarchy. I want to raise a feminist son, but I am kind of terrified about this pervasive toxic masculinity. It may be just his age, but my son does see things so much more black and white than my daughter does. (Separate but related- He has been asking since the start of the Hamas war who the good guys are? How the hell do you explain that to a kid?) I have friends with college aged sons who are now shunning friends on social media because they have been taken in by the “Joe Rogan effect.” I do not see progress as something that takes away from others, and we do talk about this in our house that just because you give rights to other people it doesn’t diminish the ones that privileged people already have. In fact we have a responsibility to help those who do need help. But as soon as he leaves our house, I’m really sensitive to the fact that there are so many men who don’t share our worldview. And my son’s tendency to want to be a part of a team or root for the team that wins scares me even more. Are there other books/resources out there? My husband quite frankly isn’t very helpful on this front, he thinks I’m overthinking it all. Blergh.
I'm in almost the exact same boat, with a 12 yo daughter and almost 10 yo son. I'm also not as worried about my daughter, who is very sure of herself and where she fits in the world (though obviously, there are forces in our country who would prefer she wasn't). I'm simply not as worried about her falling into the conservative girly-pop, trad wife traps. But my son is also a black and white thinker, and the manosphere/Joe Rogan/Andrew Tate/Nick Fuentes just make me so nervous because it seems that's where teens and young men are moving to en masse. I try so hard to instill kindness and curiosity and respect of women and minorities, but how does that work with his peers in the future? My husband also is unhelpful in this, which is hard because I think his role modeling is an important part of this.
Fyi, if you go to koala.sh (I know nothing of this site, but the first few search results for "YouTube summarizer" wouldn't handle the length of the video I tried) put in a YouTube link that is probably cherry-picked, unscientific propaganda and you can get a summary and save yourself a lot of time.
People are uninformed and disinformed. And money in politics is always the underpinning problem. The billionaires want someone who will make them more billions and protect their billions. They can afford to get their version of information--namely cherry-picked, unscientific propaganda--into the eyes and ears of those who are dissatisfied, and want change, but don't know who to blame (and the billionaires definitely don't want you to blame them).
Public education is being gutted. The rich don't need it. There is a ton of privilege in being able to go to college and increase your critical thinking skills. A ton of privilege to then graduate and have a desk job and not have to work 18 hour days and feel so wasted by the end you'll let the algorithm feed you whatever dopamine releasing videos it wants. To learn history, science, and civics. To understand the potholes on your road are not fixed by any one election and within any one term. That things can be terrible now because of decisions made over four years earlier. That if things didn't get better since then, it could be because there was party opposition, but without party opposition and that person from over four years ago, they can now get much, much worse. Understanding this is a luxury. Because it has been made a luxury. As we really could have an educated population that has access to all this information and we could have guardrails against the rich making their "information" more prevalent.
I blame Reagan mostly for this flywheel, feedback mechanism of money in politics which has lead to insane levels of wealth-income disparity. Not sure if there's a good children's book on that. Even if there was, not sure I'd want to read to my children. "Oh this is what you want me to read you to help you sleep? 'Reagan: Screwing You from Beyond the Grave?' Oh, look at this picture, this person represents the disenfranchized electorate. They're not wearing a smile. Do you think they are happy? No, I agree, I don't think they are. Do you think they'll be happy by the end of the book? I don't know... Let's see..."
That's my opinion of what happened. Call me an optimist. I don't think half the country is just born stupid and incapable of being anything but. I think the ability to be informed is way harder than it should be considering how much technology has advanced and the increase in productivity (which has not kept pace with wages). And, conversely, disinformation and misinformation is just way easier than it should be for billionaires to use to buy elections. Because those race and sexism biases for resumes are based on identical resumes. Pretty sure if the resumes were clear and accurate, the average recruiter would probably not hire the felon even with his white and male-sounding name. They just aren't getting the real resumes or perhaps even time to read them, and probably will have even less time in the future, as their lives are made yet harder so the billionaires can make yet more money.
I remember the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinsky situation. Bill Clinton has his own wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_assault_and_misconduct_allegations . But I'll leave it to the reader, if they can stomach reading both, to determine which is worse. However, Bill Clinton's revelations came out /after/ he was elected. (Lewinsky bothers me particularly as it is a case of abuse of power. You cannot / should not have a sexual relationship with someone who is your employee/subordinate, full stop.)
We should be saying this is absolutely insane that even after the "Grab 'em by" comment, and the stream of new/credible information after, he got elected. Twice. We should be saying it's completely unacceptable for Trump, Clinton, (Musk,) any many men in power to do so. And we should be saying this even if we voted for any of them. We don't, because cognitive dissonance kicks in, and we think that might make us bad people. It might! But regardless, it's bad us of not to say this is really, really, really wrong.
I just had to add this because anger is valid regarding this.
I appreciate most of the recommendations in this article and see the relevancy with the recent election; however, I am wishing the title didn't reflect an oversimplification of: race in America, why Kamala lost, and how we should be voting. 75 million people voted for Trump, whom you label as incompetent. Are they too incompetent? Trump had to have some competency to win the Presidency twice, especially after losing once. It was an electoral trounce, that required some competency. The point being that if we are to have and encourage healthy conversations about race and gender, then that should translate to people with whom we disagree with or dislike as well.
What does a healthy conversation about Trump look like? Or is it ok for kids to be assholes when it aligns with my belief system? Can we encourage kids to befriend those of whom their parents voted differently? It seems like we are falling into the same trap as sexists and racists. Name-calling, mischaracterizations, misunderstandings, and a lack of empathy. This whole article is about raising kids to not do that and it seems as if people upset about the election are doing just that.
Lastly, I wish you would have posted this article without any reference to the election. Those points remain as important as ever, and I think the title and first couple of paragraphs have taken away from something that would advance society positively. The attention grabber has given people an excuse to criticize your approach, even hypocrisy, rather than the content of your article (which is of vital importance). Are there people who can and do encourage racial and gender equality while still voting for Trump? If yes, then you've made them an 'other.' If no, then you are either misinformed and out of touch or we have a crisis on our hands, requiring more drastic measures than this article would indicate.
I agree that the outcome of the election is the result of a number of factors -- not everyone who voted for Trump is sexist/racist. But for some portion of voters, I am sure it played a role, whether they see it that way or not. And I worry about how the outcome of the election will affect kids' perceptions of gender and race, so I think the election is an important reason to have these conversations, no matter what one's political beliefs are. I am not advocating — and never will advocate — that we should tell our kids to be mean to other kids based on who their parents voted for.
Is calling someone incompetent not an asshole move? Does that attitude and action not encourage others, including kids, to do the same?
And I apologize for not being clearer the first time, if the focus of the article is to talk about gender and race, which is fantastic, then you've polluted it with your title, name-calling, otherizing, and hypocrisy. Respectfully.
I'd like to go a bit deeper on this - it seems that the democrat's strategy during campaigning was to claim that if you were a woman and not voting for Kamala, you were wrong. If you were a minority and not voting for Kamala, you were wrong. The democrats love to talk about equality, yet seem to be hyper-focused on race and gender - as if they color (no pun intended) everything. How is this helping? I remember growing up, thinking that once we can just judge people by their something other than their race/gender et al, then we will have gotten to a place of equality. I'm all for addressing kid's questions about race, etc - but I'm not convinced that incessant pointing out of inequality everywhere is the way to go if we want to make things better. I want to do things that work, for everyone, this is not from a place of not caring. It's from a place of questioning.
I appreciate this Kim and also I don't. I do not agree with the Democratic Party's strategy towards race, gender, etc. Setting that aside, I do think its important for society to address race and gender head on. Equality will not happen if we are not intentional. This is blatantly obvious for people who do not live in bubbles and privileged zip codes. I don't think not knowing is an excuse, its a choice. For a person who assumes we are all starting from the same place, I can see how it could be as simple as, 'lets just see people for who they are.' However, in country that has spent hundreds of years putting mechanisms in place to categorize and discriminate based on race (a history in which most people are not adequately aware, particularly in how it affects our present), it will require awareness, relationship, and commitment (borrowing from Jemar Tisby). If viewing people groups as inferior based upon physical attributes is inherent to our culture, language and our decision-making, it will take more than just platitudes to undo that, much less to make it right for the discriminations that have taken place. There are several resources to help shed light on the inequities in this country.
Kim, it may not feel intuitive to you, but part of Melinda’s point is that the research consistently finds that talking about racism & sexism is an important way to combat it. It’s also not what I was taught as a child — in a liberal town that was actively trying to work against racism & sexism — but the research in this area has progressed a lot since I was a kid in the ‘80’s.
Mostly we talk to our 5 year old daughter about skin color and noticing all the different colors both in her preschool class and in our family. She tells us that mommy is white and has light skin, Daddy is black/Japanese so his skin is more brown, and her skin is lighter than Daddy’s but it’s also brown because she is black/Japanese/white. She noticed that Granny’s skin is darker and asked if that was because she was just black (we answered yes). And Landon in her class looks more like her so is that because her mom is black like Daddy and her dad is white like Mommy (right again!).
So far she has really only been the recipient of some weird questions of “what is she?” and most people just tell me how beautiful she is or how she looks like such a combination of the two of us, so I don’t know what our conversations about racism are going to look like as she gets older.
I have voted blue for my whole life, but didn't in this election and it had nothing to do with racism or sexism. It makes me sad that so many people claim that this is what drove the election results - it's an easy answer that allows the Democratic Party to not look inward and see where they have gone so very wrong. I hear the same from so many others like me. I won't go into all the issues that made me vote the way I did, but I hope you keep an open mind about what really happened. Maybe read and watch something from the other side. Here's one video that will help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99uL8KYxBI4
I certainly don't think that every voter who voted for Trump is sexist or racist -- that's something I mentioned both in this post and in my two newsletters last week. People voted for Trump for an array of reasons, and some had nothing to do with the fact that he is a white man. Still, I believe sexism and/or racism shaped *some* votes. And given how and why these biases develop, Trump's win could serve to solidify kids' burgeoning racist or sexist ideas, so I believe it's important that we talk to our kids about these issues regularly.
I watched enough of that video to know that it's filled with misinformation.
It's a long video but I would encourage people to skip around and see if you're comfortable endorsing it as the evidentiary basis for a comment you hit like on.
Kim, you say that your vote had nothing to do with racism or sexism. However, you were willing to vote for someone who is openly racist & sexist. To me, the fact that Trump’s belief system didn’t automatically disqualify him for you means that you made a choice that was both racist & sexist. That may not have been your intention, but it is the result.
If we have taught our kids to be kind, it’s a really simple path to talking about not being cruel. They’re smart. When they see somebody who is mean or hateful, who tells lies over and over, who bullies, who mocks with petty nicknames, who says truly awful things about women and disabled people, people with different skin color or people who immigrated here from other countries — kind kids know in their hearts it is wrong.
Whether it is a teacher, a friend’s parent, or a political leader, kids identify it the same way.
Your kids’ concerns say a lot about their values and how you have raised them, Melinda. May they do better than the adults who I believe have failed them.
Melinda, my kids are the same age as yours, except my daughter is my first born at 13 and my son is 10. Something that keeps me up at night is how to communicate with both of them about gender and politics, especially all of the signals that this election is sending and reverberating throughout our culture. Back in 2016 there was a big “who runs the world- girls” thing and we read all of the children’s feminist books with my daughter and then she wore the pink pussy cat hats I brought back from the woman’s march in January 2017. I know I have been personally crushed over the past 8 years over the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape without any retribution, the Kavanaugh hearings, Dobbs, etc. etc. But having a son really makes me think long and hard about how to channel action and redirect my rage. I’m grateful that more popular culture is more evolved now, there are more strong female role models like Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, and my daughter is far more confident than I was at her age and is much more aware about the patriarchy. I want to raise a feminist son, but I am kind of terrified about this pervasive toxic masculinity. It may be just his age, but my son does see things so much more black and white than my daughter does. (Separate but related- He has been asking since the start of the Hamas war who the good guys are? How the hell do you explain that to a kid?) I have friends with college aged sons who are now shunning friends on social media because they have been taken in by the “Joe Rogan effect.” I do not see progress as something that takes away from others, and we do talk about this in our house that just because you give rights to other people it doesn’t diminish the ones that privileged people already have. In fact we have a responsibility to help those who do need help. But as soon as he leaves our house, I’m really sensitive to the fact that there are so many men who don’t share our worldview. And my son’s tendency to want to be a part of a team or root for the team that wins scares me even more. Are there other books/resources out there? My husband quite frankly isn’t very helpful on this front, he thinks I’m overthinking it all. Blergh.
I'm in almost the exact same boat, with a 12 yo daughter and almost 10 yo son. I'm also not as worried about my daughter, who is very sure of herself and where she fits in the world (though obviously, there are forces in our country who would prefer she wasn't). I'm simply not as worried about her falling into the conservative girly-pop, trad wife traps. But my son is also a black and white thinker, and the manosphere/Joe Rogan/Andrew Tate/Nick Fuentes just make me so nervous because it seems that's where teens and young men are moving to en masse. I try so hard to instill kindness and curiosity and respect of women and minorities, but how does that work with his peers in the future? My husband also is unhelpful in this, which is hard because I think his role modeling is an important part of this.
I hear you on all of this! I really appreciated Ruth Whippman's book BOYMOM — I'd recommend checking it out.
Fyi, if you go to koala.sh (I know nothing of this site, but the first few search results for "YouTube summarizer" wouldn't handle the length of the video I tried) put in a YouTube link that is probably cherry-picked, unscientific propaganda and you can get a summary and save yourself a lot of time.
Race and sexism definitely had some impact on this. I remember reading this before the election and just feeling vague sense of dread https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/study-ais-prefer-white-male-names-on-resumes-just-like-humans/ in particular for the election.
People are uninformed and disinformed. And money in politics is always the underpinning problem. The billionaires want someone who will make them more billions and protect their billions. They can afford to get their version of information--namely cherry-picked, unscientific propaganda--into the eyes and ears of those who are dissatisfied, and want change, but don't know who to blame (and the billionaires definitely don't want you to blame them).
Public education is being gutted. The rich don't need it. There is a ton of privilege in being able to go to college and increase your critical thinking skills. A ton of privilege to then graduate and have a desk job and not have to work 18 hour days and feel so wasted by the end you'll let the algorithm feed you whatever dopamine releasing videos it wants. To learn history, science, and civics. To understand the potholes on your road are not fixed by any one election and within any one term. That things can be terrible now because of decisions made over four years earlier. That if things didn't get better since then, it could be because there was party opposition, but without party opposition and that person from over four years ago, they can now get much, much worse. Understanding this is a luxury. Because it has been made a luxury. As we really could have an educated population that has access to all this information and we could have guardrails against the rich making their "information" more prevalent.
I blame Reagan mostly for this flywheel, feedback mechanism of money in politics which has lead to insane levels of wealth-income disparity. Not sure if there's a good children's book on that. Even if there was, not sure I'd want to read to my children. "Oh this is what you want me to read you to help you sleep? 'Reagan: Screwing You from Beyond the Grave?' Oh, look at this picture, this person represents the disenfranchized electorate. They're not wearing a smile. Do you think they are happy? No, I agree, I don't think they are. Do you think they'll be happy by the end of the book? I don't know... Let's see..."
That's my opinion of what happened. Call me an optimist. I don't think half the country is just born stupid and incapable of being anything but. I think the ability to be informed is way harder than it should be considering how much technology has advanced and the increase in productivity (which has not kept pace with wages). And, conversely, disinformation and misinformation is just way easier than it should be for billionaires to use to buy elections. Because those race and sexism biases for resumes are based on identical resumes. Pretty sure if the resumes were clear and accurate, the average recruiter would probably not hire the felon even with his white and male-sounding name. They just aren't getting the real resumes or perhaps even time to read them, and probably will have even less time in the future, as their lives are made yet harder so the billionaires can make yet more money.
That is optimism, isn't it?
I keep thinking about this substack post, my comment, and other peoples' comments.
I just want to validate that the most appalling thing is the fact the US elected someone who has maybe credible accusations of sexual assault and rape. (This says 26 accusations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations ) He was convicted of sexual assault and as this rightly points out https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/trump-e-jean-carroll-verdict-rape-sexual-abuse.html -- if the jury considered her allegations of sexual abuse credible, then really they should have believed the rest of it.
I remember the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinsky situation. Bill Clinton has his own wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_assault_and_misconduct_allegations . But I'll leave it to the reader, if they can stomach reading both, to determine which is worse. However, Bill Clinton's revelations came out /after/ he was elected. (Lewinsky bothers me particularly as it is a case of abuse of power. You cannot / should not have a sexual relationship with someone who is your employee/subordinate, full stop.)
We should be saying this is absolutely insane that even after the "Grab 'em by" comment, and the stream of new/credible information after, he got elected. Twice. We should be saying it's completely unacceptable for Trump, Clinton, (Musk,) any many men in power to do so. And we should be saying this even if we voted for any of them. We don't, because cognitive dissonance kicks in, and we think that might make us bad people. It might! But regardless, it's bad us of not to say this is really, really, really wrong.
I just had to add this because anger is valid regarding this.
many credible, not maybe credible.
I appreciate most of the recommendations in this article and see the relevancy with the recent election; however, I am wishing the title didn't reflect an oversimplification of: race in America, why Kamala lost, and how we should be voting. 75 million people voted for Trump, whom you label as incompetent. Are they too incompetent? Trump had to have some competency to win the Presidency twice, especially after losing once. It was an electoral trounce, that required some competency. The point being that if we are to have and encourage healthy conversations about race and gender, then that should translate to people with whom we disagree with or dislike as well.
What does a healthy conversation about Trump look like? Or is it ok for kids to be assholes when it aligns with my belief system? Can we encourage kids to befriend those of whom their parents voted differently? It seems like we are falling into the same trap as sexists and racists. Name-calling, mischaracterizations, misunderstandings, and a lack of empathy. This whole article is about raising kids to not do that and it seems as if people upset about the election are doing just that.
Lastly, I wish you would have posted this article without any reference to the election. Those points remain as important as ever, and I think the title and first couple of paragraphs have taken away from something that would advance society positively. The attention grabber has given people an excuse to criticize your approach, even hypocrisy, rather than the content of your article (which is of vital importance). Are there people who can and do encourage racial and gender equality while still voting for Trump? If yes, then you've made them an 'other.' If no, then you are either misinformed and out of touch or we have a crisis on our hands, requiring more drastic measures than this article would indicate.
I agree that the outcome of the election is the result of a number of factors -- not everyone who voted for Trump is sexist/racist. But for some portion of voters, I am sure it played a role, whether they see it that way or not. And I worry about how the outcome of the election will affect kids' perceptions of gender and race, so I think the election is an important reason to have these conversations, no matter what one's political beliefs are. I am not advocating — and never will advocate — that we should tell our kids to be mean to other kids based on who their parents voted for.
Is calling someone incompetent not an asshole move? Does that attitude and action not encourage others, including kids, to do the same?
And I apologize for not being clearer the first time, if the focus of the article is to talk about gender and race, which is fantastic, then you've polluted it with your title, name-calling, otherizing, and hypocrisy. Respectfully.
I'd like to go a bit deeper on this - it seems that the democrat's strategy during campaigning was to claim that if you were a woman and not voting for Kamala, you were wrong. If you were a minority and not voting for Kamala, you were wrong. The democrats love to talk about equality, yet seem to be hyper-focused on race and gender - as if they color (no pun intended) everything. How is this helping? I remember growing up, thinking that once we can just judge people by their something other than their race/gender et al, then we will have gotten to a place of equality. I'm all for addressing kid's questions about race, etc - but I'm not convinced that incessant pointing out of inequality everywhere is the way to go if we want to make things better. I want to do things that work, for everyone, this is not from a place of not caring. It's from a place of questioning.
I appreciate this Kim and also I don't. I do not agree with the Democratic Party's strategy towards race, gender, etc. Setting that aside, I do think its important for society to address race and gender head on. Equality will not happen if we are not intentional. This is blatantly obvious for people who do not live in bubbles and privileged zip codes. I don't think not knowing is an excuse, its a choice. For a person who assumes we are all starting from the same place, I can see how it could be as simple as, 'lets just see people for who they are.' However, in country that has spent hundreds of years putting mechanisms in place to categorize and discriminate based on race (a history in which most people are not adequately aware, particularly in how it affects our present), it will require awareness, relationship, and commitment (borrowing from Jemar Tisby). If viewing people groups as inferior based upon physical attributes is inherent to our culture, language and our decision-making, it will take more than just platitudes to undo that, much less to make it right for the discriminations that have taken place. There are several resources to help shed light on the inequities in this country.
Kim, it may not feel intuitive to you, but part of Melinda’s point is that the research consistently finds that talking about racism & sexism is an important way to combat it. It’s also not what I was taught as a child — in a liberal town that was actively trying to work against racism & sexism — but the research in this area has progressed a lot since I was a kid in the ‘80’s.
Mostly we talk to our 5 year old daughter about skin color and noticing all the different colors both in her preschool class and in our family. She tells us that mommy is white and has light skin, Daddy is black/Japanese so his skin is more brown, and her skin is lighter than Daddy’s but it’s also brown because she is black/Japanese/white. She noticed that Granny’s skin is darker and asked if that was because she was just black (we answered yes). And Landon in her class looks more like her so is that because her mom is black like Daddy and her dad is white like Mommy (right again!).
So far she has really only been the recipient of some weird questions of “what is she?” and most people just tell me how beautiful she is or how she looks like such a combination of the two of us, so I don’t know what our conversations about racism are going to look like as she gets older.