I’m Asian American and I have always been proud of my heritage. I was never worried about safety, never even gave it one thought until four years ago on November 3, 2016. I watched the votes come in and saw the number of states turning red, and I knew that the security blanket of mine was gone.
I was scared to go back to school the next day. For context, I grew up in a small town in Virginia, and this town is very conservative. Already knowing that people at my high school were racists, I was scared to walk those halls… I did not know how my peers would react to me, an Asian American. Did they still see me as a peer or did they see me as someone who did not belong?
Eventually, I learned to live with the fact that Donald Trump would be our country’s president for the next 4 years, and by the time 2020 came around, he would be voted out.
Up until 2020, I never once talked about how I felt about Trump on social media or discussed it with my peers. However, this year, I realized how important it was for me to not only voice my opinions but to also do my part and vote him out.
With the spread of the Coronavirus and the subsequent rise of a global pandemic, I saw his true nature. He blamed us, Asians, specifically Chinese people for everything that went wrong. He called the Coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” and showed no remorse for calling it that. He never once condemned those who beat Asians on the streets all because they were Asian. I was disgusted by the fact that he did not care about what happened to us. I began to wonder, how can you make this country “great again” if you can’t even protect the minorities? The very people who help this country?
All these reports soon caused me to worry about my own safety and my family’s safety as we are a minority in this town. This only solidified my desire to speak up.
And now, with the results of who our next president will be still up in the air, I am shocked by the amount of people who still voted for Trump. These same people who I interact with on a daily basis, my neighbors, voted for him again. I do not know their reasons for doing so, but it breaks my heart that they are so willing to disregard the facts that have been laid out in front of them for so long.
The election this year means so much to me, a person of color.
How can I stand there and watch a man who spreads xenophobia to the point that he begins to think that it is correct? How can I just stand there and watch him not condemn white supremacy on national TV? Why do my people have to be blamed for the spread of the coronavirus when research has found that it wasn’t the strain from China that was brought into the US?
I can only hope that someone out there thought about me, thought about my people, and voted against Donald Trump.