By: Samantha Lindsey Guest Contributor
My labels include: 21-year-old, white, woman, pro-cannabis, pro-marriage equality, pro-choice, pro-universal healthcare, pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-border security, registered Independent, who voted for Donald Trump. I urge you to read on.
About two months ago, I was doing my homework in the Academic Learning Center, as I do most mornings. Across the room, however, the cubicles made noise. Employees chattered, sipping their hot, morning beverages. What I heard were the familiar sounds of scoffing and wonder: reminiscing shards of rhetoric regurgitated from the second of three presidential debates. Condescending banter, the kind that had made me silent for more than a year now.
In my time at university, I’d learned to keep my tongue pressed between my top and bottom jaw. These days, at a place that claims to accept all minds and opinions, those against the hive lose civil rights, and human dignity.
University made a promise to me, a promise that when you are in this environment, you will have your views challenged on fair and just grounds. Yet, in the last year, what should have been a healthy political debate, generated a persecution. I was labelled: bigot, sexist, racist, xenophobic, transphobic, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, woman. In the course of a year, I was called all of those names, and more, that can be generally embodied in the label: ignorant. Needless to say, I spent a year living in a country divided, in a community of like-minded peers where outliers were overwhelmingly unwelcome.
It was a year spent where I could not speak on a topic I care so deeply about and followed so closely. I could not speak freely, and when I did, my views on platforms such as the economy were dismissed and I was labelled. A long year was spent watching my white, 17-year-old brother, and my white, 23-year-old boyfriend be stereotyped as rapists and sexists because of their color and gender.
It was a year where professors would subtly mention Hillary Clinton in their lectures, as if everyone shared the same view, as if this election was a no-brainer. It wasn’t. A year where, if you weren’t solidified in your vote by the time the primaries were over, you were ignorant. It was the year I was too afraid to even speak to anyone in my community without being labelled a sexist, racist, xenophobic, transphobic, etc.
I was relieved on Nov. 8, 2016, at 11:43pm. Not because the candidate I voted for won. No, I was elated to finally re-stitch the part of my tongue that had been severed by my community, in order to prevent pronunciation of my political views.
I listened, for a year, and what I got out of it is that this society is much more biased than I knew before: from hot-headed-headlines condemning Mr. Trump, to being called a bigot by my peers, and being silenced. I wanted to be heard, yet nobody would sit down and listen.
When The New York Times admitted the need to embrace the mission of journalism again, it became clear this election was nationally ruthless. We were left in this burning dump-yard of a nation: where we no longer listen to one another’s views peacefully, rather, we persecute and stereotype. All I can hope is that we learn something: because four years from now, we vote again.
Contact the author at slindsey16@mail.wou.edu
