I had a fascinating, hour-long conversation with a 36 year old Venezuelan-American man in Georgia yesterday who is adamantly opposed to voting for Democrats. We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues but we had a respectful exchange, and I think his perspective is one progressives like me should grapple with.
A few takeaways:
- The man’s experience of seeing Venezuela’s decline and fleeing the country with his family made him hostile to progressive rhetoric around taxing the rich, nationalizing health insurance, and defunding the police. He said that he heard the same messages in Venezuela and saw how disastrous they turned out to be.
- He thought of racism solely in terms of interpersonal prejudice, not in terms of discriminatory policies and practices over time (ie structural forces). Accordingly, he didn’t believe that racism really existed today, and thought that Senate candidate Raphael Warnock was being racially divisive by calling for America to ‘repent for its worship of whiteness.’
- He was a big believer in the American Dream. Based on his own family’s experience, he sees America as a place where you can succeed if you work hard. He thinks poverty is a result of the wrong mindset, and blames public schools for not teaching values of perseverance and hard work to students (his kids go to public school and he coaches high school swimming).
I told him that I saw racism as not just saying racist things, but as a society that routinely gives advantages to people in some racial groups over others. I told him about how my family’s accumulated wealth over generations had helped pay for my education, and how things like highway construction and urban renewal had destroyed the assets of many Black and lower-income families. I told him that the American Dream isn’t equally available to everyone: people with Black-sounding names are less likely to be interviewed for a job and will earn less if they are hired than white counterparts with the same qualifications. I told him that given our meagre safety net and political climate, I didn’t think we were close to turning into Venezuela. I told him that as a white person, I wasn’t bothered by Warnock’s words, because this country does have a legacy of racist policies that we need to grapple with today.
At the end of the conversation, he acknowledged that he didn’t think all Democrats were crazy and that he agreed with some of their policies, even if he wasn’t voting for them. I don’t think our conversation changed either of our minds. But I do think it helped me understand what ideas resonate with people I disagree with politically. And I hope that it helped him see our society’s challenges in a more nuanced way and better understand how progressives are proposing to address them.
nathanarnosti.com 