-- 11/9 to 11/11/2016 --
*POLITICAL TRIGGER WARNING: This post discusses US presidential politics*
We
listened to the radio. We watched on our phones. We sat, trapped in
traffic as the US election results came in and my confidence that
Hillary Clinton would be the first woman president slowly evaporated. By
the time we got back to Auckland, the writing was on the wall.
Democrats had lost their chance at controlling Congress. The Republican
nominee had won 244 electoral college votes. Results for the few
remaining states were all leaning towards the right. I was so stressed
out I left my phone in the back of the car I got a ride home in.
In
my apartment, I learned that Pennsylvania had flipped to the
Republicans, giving their nominee 268 votes. We were watching the news
unfold on New Zealand television, which seemed to be about an hour
behind on the results. They were only just announcing that Trump won
Pennsylvania when I checked my laptop and saw that he was already giving
an acceptance speech.
It's
been two days since then, and it's been so hard to focus on my PhD
work. People keep asking me about it. "What do you think of your new
president?" I answer them. "Why do you think I'm buying this bottle of
alcohol?" They wonder what happened. I wonder what happened. We talk
about what this means for America, for New Zealand, for the world. And
as far as I can tell it all comes down to demographics. Euroamericans
are projected to lose their majority status by 2044,
and, apparently, white people overwhelmingly voted for Trump in an
attempt to hold on to their perceived privilege, or restore the
privileges they feel are owed to them.
Often,
people remark that I'm lucky to be here, and that it's a good thing I
won't have to return to the United States until 3 years have passed and
hopefully the country is ready to elect a new president and undo
whatever mess Trump has gotten us into.
That does nothing to reassure
me. I
feel like I should be back over there, working hard at the local and
state level to do something, anything to support the rights of all the
people that are about to be royally screwed by the new federal
administration. I want to be on the ground,
talking with people who don't share my world view, trying to exchange
experiences and find common ground that I can use to explain why people
who identify as LGBTQ+, people of other races, religions, and
ethnicities, other cultures, and women deserve to have the same rights and opportunities as white Christian men.
I want to get into archaeological work in the United States and do everything
I can to protect the nation's cultural and historic resources, which
business-cozy Republicans are traditionally happy to see destroyed in
the name of corporate profit. Those sites are not just collections of
stones. They record the lives of the people who came before us, and many
of them are sacred to living people today.
That record of the past has powerful significance today. We need look no farther than the ongoing struggle by the members of over 300 Native American tribes to protect the land, heritage, and religious rights of the Sioux Nations, the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Northern Cheyenne. The Society for American Archaeology has condemned the Army Corps of Engineers for not following the legally mandated consultation process by which all federally permitted projects assess their impact on cultural resources and seek to mitigate the worst impacts. Instead, increasingly militarized police forces continue to assault and arrest peaceful protestors, who are rightly concerned about the destruction of their ancestor's remains and burial sites, the pollution of their land, and the ongoing violations of their sovereignty.
But I'm committed to my program and finishing my PhD. So I'll have to find a way to help support human rights movements in the USA from overseas. Maybe I'll find a way to support human rights movements in New Zealand. Māori people enjoy stronger indigenous rights than any group in Australia or the United States, but they are still treated as second-class citizens by the majority of European New Zealanders. Women also face extreme levels of sexism in everyday life here, the likes of which haven't been seen in the United States since the 1970's. New Zealand politics have been characterized as a 'jock-ocracy.'
And somehow, I'll find a way to get through this program in once piece, get back to the United States, and vote again four years from now.
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