{"id":258284,"date":"2023-12-06T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-06T12:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=258284"},"modified":"2024-01-16T13:43:50","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T18:43:50","slug":"before-2016-i-dated-republicans-without-much-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/before-2016-i-dated-republicans-without-much-shame\/","title":{"rendered":"Before 2016 I Dated Republicans Without Much Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As I watched Donald Trump win the presidency on November 8th, 2016, I didn\u2019t know that it meant my days of sleeping with Republicans were over. Why? For a start, it took me a few days to even accept the election results. Furthermore, I\u2019d never sought out Republicans for intimacy-related reasons\u2014it was one of those things that just happened, from time to time. But if I\u2019m being honest with myself, the real reason is that I didn\u2019t even realize a line in the sand existed until someone else articulated it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before 2016, I dated Republicans without much shame. I didn\u2019t agree with them politically, but I subscribed to the mathematically-sound belief that the wider your net, the more likely you are to get a boyfriend. Besides, I thought politics was private; how we vote is anonymous, after all. However, on a date in early 2018, when a man told me his only deal breaker was that he wouldn\u2019t date a Trump voter, I responded with, \u201cwell, of course<\/em> I wouldn\u2019t date a Trump voter.\u201d And I meant it. Which meant that somewhere along the way, something had shifted.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I hadn\u2019t fully understood why until I read Cecilia Rabess\u2019 phenomenal novel Everything\u2019s Fine<\/a><\/em>\u2014the story of Jess, a young, liberal Black woman and Josh, a young, conservative white guy. They meet in college, get to know each other on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs, and begin dating while she works for him at a hedge fund. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything\u2019s Fine<\/em> was flooded with bad reviews before<\/a> it came out. Readers found the premise\u2014that a Black woman would date a racist white man\u2014racist. I\u2019m a white woman; it\u2019s not up to me to decide what\u2019s racist, but I don\u2019t condone reviewing a book before reading it. At the same time, I can<\/em> conceive of a book description so<\/em> racist that the book itself should be discredited\u2014which is why this controversy made me curious. So curious, in fact, that I bought the book.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m glad I did, because I loved it. The criticism isn\u2019t unfounded; Josh makes insensitive and ignorant comments about race throughout, which qualifies him as a racist. And yet, I\u2019m of the opinion that all white people in this country (myself included) have made insensitive and ignorant comments about race at some point\u2014and in this case, I thought it was fair to leave it up to Jess to choose whether or not to forgive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jess, for her part, isn\u2019t perfect either. She feels guilty walking by Occupy Wall Street protestors on her way to her Goldman Sachs job every day, but she changes nothing. She benefits from Josh\u2019s wealth and tolerates his behavior for years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I related to Jess\u2019 dilemma. Like her, I often find myself torn between an opposition to capitalism and the necessary acknowledgment that it benefits me. And I related to her romantic predicament: existing in a relationship that looks terrible from the outside (Jess\u2019 friends describe Josh as \u201ctoxic\u201d and even question if it\u2019s ethical for Jess to date him), while knowing there\u2019s something there my friends can\u2019t see. But as Josh continued to offend, and as her political views developed, tested by the inequities of the so-called real world, I began to wonder: was she ever<\/em> going to draw the line with him?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Readers found the premise\u2014that a Black woman would date a racist white man\u2014racist.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

She reaches the end of her rope in Summer 2016, in a moment that\u2019s very specific to their relationship, and yet so glaringly familiar. Searching for a lost item in their apartment, she discovers Josh owns a MAGA hat. And then, Jess is done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as she\u2019s breaking up with him, Josh snaps too. He says aloud what Jess has been fearing for years: that she\u2019s a hypocrite. He claims she\u2019s a beneficiary of the same power structures she theoretically opposes. He\u2019s not wrong, but at the same time, Jess is also a victim of these power structures\u2014she\u2019s the recipient of routine racism and sexism on Wall Street. Rabess asks us not to oversimplify oppression\u2014a person can be on both ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More convincingly, Josh says it\u2019s unfair for Jess to hold his Trump support against him, as he\u2019s never hidden who he was. She already knew he was a registered Republican, that he\u2019s always voted for Republicans. He voted for Mitt Romney, he works at a hedge fund, he owns a $4 million apartment, and he\u2019s opposed to most social welfare programs. He hasn\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s once again not wrong; given everything we know about Josh, his support of Trump is expected. Here, I recognized the innate hypocrisy of my own line. Is a Romney voter much better than a Trump voter? They are largely the same people, and I mean that as a statistical truth, not a moral assertion. Most Romney voters voted for Trump, and the ones who didn\u2019t<\/a> were largely educated wealthy white professionals. Republicans vote for Republican candidates; that\u2019s one of their defining qualities. To this very day, 91 charges later, 70% of registered Republicans are still with Trump<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all like to think we can influence our partner\u2019s political views, and sometimes we can.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And yet, even if Josh\u2019s support is to be expected, even if it\u2019s in line with everything he\u2019s ever done, and even though I remember exactly what was happening in Summer 2016, I still gasped when Jess found the hat. But why? Why was it different? Why was this Jess\u2019 line? Why is it mine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, it\u2019s obvious. Because it\u2019s Donald Trump<\/em>. Trump is and was so blatantly racist and misogynistic that no Black woman should have to explain why they dumped their white boyfriend for supporting him. Nor any woman in general. Even though Josh was a Romney voter, Trump is so much worse<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, when Josh voted for Romney, he wasn\u2019t dating Jess. Perhaps Jess wanted to think Josh had adjusted his views merely by osmosis, even though he never caved during any of their arguments. Here, again, I related strongly. We all like to think we can influence our partner\u2019s political views, and sometimes we can. In 2014, I successfully convinced my conservative investment banker boyfriend that his time was too valuable to waste voting. That was the only time, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Jess didn\u2019t dump Josh when he told her he was voting for Trump, she dumped him when she found the red hat. Josh tries to argue it\u2019s \u201cjust a hat.\u201d But of course it\u2019s not just the hat, it\u2019s his show of enthusiasm the hat represents. As Rabess writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net\u2026.and Josh\u2014now it makes her think of Josh.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n