The intensity of my excitement in 2012 was replaced with a sobering disappointment for 2016. Trump’s desire to appeal to the so-called alt-right wing was troubling. His slowness to disavow the KKK was eye-popping. His insistence that more “law and order” is needed to address poor relationships between police and African American communities was sickening. His clumsy and ill-informed “outreach” to African Americans — which assumed we all lived in poverty, squalor and government dependence — was more insulting than uplifting. His decision to leverage African American apologists as surrogates such as Ben Carson and Mark Burns showed he was out of touch with the African American community and unwilling to change.
The 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland was a much different experience than Tampa. Against my better judgment, I attended, much less naive than four years before. The timing was critical — we were just a few weeks removed from the police killings in Dallas and the death of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. The nation was stirred by the violence and unrest. Cooler heads needed to prevail. The first-day convention speakers did the opposite. Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke praised those who acquitted the officers in the Freddie Gray case and blasted the Black Lives Matter movement with very little compassion for the pain felt by so many when unarmed African Americans are killed by those in authority. Speakers after him followed suit.
Unlike 2012, this time I noticed I was a stark minority in a sea of white. I hadn’t been conscious of it before — it had not even mattered. All of the sudden, I felt like an outsider.
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