Member-only story
Not Every Trump Voter is a Bigot
Not allowing politics to kill friendships
I grew up as an immigrant kid in New York City. Now I live in Texas.
While I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Queens, it was very diverse — people from China, Colombia, Greece, Ireland, Pakistan, Armenia, Guatemala… these were my neighbors and friends.
When we first moved to Texas, it was to live in a small town several hours from a large city. The neighborhood might also be classified as working class, but the demographics were very different. Most of my neighbors and friends were white.
One of my dearest friends was quite a bit older than me. In her 70s at the time, she was an Air Force trainer back in the 1970s. She was a pioneer. She was also a life-long Democrat. Yet she had a rifle and knew how to shoot it. She’d grown up on a ranch, you see.
I also made some D&D buddies. We played at the home of a local cop. These guys were definitely Republicans. Yet they weren’t racist or sexist. They welcomed me, an Indian-American woman, into their group. One of them had a Native American mother. Another had a Thai ex-wife and two inter-racial children. At his wedding, to which I was invited, the matron of honor was black.
