In my childhood in Yaoundé, Cameroon, adults had the exasperating habit of speaking to us children in metaphors. It was rare to have a conversation without them using images. Most often, they were metaphors relating to the world of animals. The turtle, the fox, the crow, the lion, the panther and the pig were the main characters, leaving us unable to understand. This did not discourage adults from continuing to sprinkle their lectures with these metaphors.
From their point of view, they were communicating something important to us; they were preparing us for life; they were teaching us; it was almost a parental duty to speak to us in this way. It was part of learning, they thought.
For us children, these metaphors were only proof that they were old. We brushed them aside. We had an expression we used: “goes in one ear, and goes out the other,” with a gesture towards the sides of our heads. So, we let them talk, but we never made an effort to understand what they meant.
To sum it up, we and the adults did not speak the same language. They thought they were transmitting wisdom through images. But we children had our ears covered. On the surface, we were talking to each other, but in reality, we did not. In order to talk to each other, we had to first understand each other. The thing is that the adults, who believed that they were instilling wisdom in us through their metaphors, never realized that we did not understand them. They never really listened to us.
It was therefore not surprising that the adults were horrified when, one evening, a playmate of cousin Cruz came to announce that Cruz had been arrested by the police and was in detention. Given the two-tiered administration of the local justice system, cousin Cruz ran the risk of being tried and sent to prison within the week.
“What did he do?” the adults asked in unison.
“He was part of a group that stole the phone of a woman that was found murdered,” replied cousin Cruz’s friend.
“Murder?” exclaimed the adults, who looked at each other, realizing the seriousness of the facts.
This was followed by swearing in dialect.
“We have done everything to ensure that this would never happen,” uncle Etoundi immediately got angry.
“He is always with thugs,” added uncle Amougou. “He never listens.”
For him, their advice expressed in metaphors was supposed to prevent one of us from getting into trouble. But did we get it, he should have asked himself. They had not asked themselves the question. The worst thing was that they continued to wash themselves of all reproach, convinced that their metaphors should have guided us in the real world.
The distorted relationship between the adults of my childhood and us children is similar to what has been happening for several months now between the Democrats and some minorities that were their loyal constituencies until Kamala Harris’ defeat by Donald Trump on November 5. Some Black men and a significant portion of Hispanic and Latino voters, both men and women, as well as Asian men supported the former president, despite his racist statements and anti-immigration rhetoric. This support allowed him not only to win the electoral college by a wide margin but also the popular vote that had clearly eluded him during his first victory in 2016 and, as expected, during his defeat in 2020.
To better understand the Democratic debacle, we must look at the city of New York, a Democratic stronghold that had declared itself as the resistance, after Trump’s election in 2016. The former President, now President-elect, received 100,000 more votes compared to 2020, while Harris lost more than 600,000 votes compared to Joe Biden four years ago. Alarming, some will say. A clear indication that the Democratic party needs an aggiornamento. But no, liberals believe that some Black and Brown folks are just ungrateful.
Since November 6, after Trump was declared the winner by the media, I have been witnessing absurd scenes. White progressives do not understand how they lost in such a humiliating way, after having surrounded themselves in a bubble in the last few years. They played a tune that sounded good in their ears, thinking that it was what their constituencies wanted to hear. But when something else sounded on November 6, they did not do any introspection. Instead of listening to it, they simply chose to unplug the speaker. They refuse to listen to another tune.
“I can’t believe it,” one of my liberal female friends practically assaulted me on the phone these past days. “They’re a bunch of machos who can’t accept the idea of a woman president.”
“There is undoubtedly an element of that, but it is more complicated,” I replied. “Some men I talked to, during my trips to swing states, are overwhelmed by the speed with which certain social progress has been made…”
“They’re misogynists. That’s all,” she cut me off. “Do you know how long women have been facing discrimination? Do you know how long women have been put down by patriarchy? Stop telling me that some men feel emasculated in today’s world.”
She began to tell me about her own experiences of gender discrimination and of being bullied by men, with which I did not argue, because I have witnessed it many times. The issue is not about who is the most victimized or who has suffered the most. My friend did not even listen to what I had to say. She believes that those who voted for Trump, minority men in particular, were motivated by only one thing: their desire to dominate women. The rest is just false excuses. She only wants to hear one tune. I realized that what she wanted was for me to align with her assumptions and not contradict her in any way.
So, I kept quiet.
“Damn all of them. Let’s see how their lives improve under Trump,” she concluded in a defiant voice.
“Have you seen whom he is appointing to his cabinet?” another friend of mine exclaimed this week on the phone, without even giving me a chance to ask him how he was doing. “Matt Gaetz in the Justice Department? Are you kidding me? Anti-vax RFK Jr. as health secretary in HHS? I won’t even discuss that Fox News guy in the Pentagon. All weirdos and yes men. I can’t believe it!”
“It’s no surprise,” I replied. “Trump said he would surround himself with loyalists and promised retribution to his enemies. He repeated it during the campaign. He never hid it. Why are you surprised?”
My friend launched into an anti-Trump rant, identical to what he has been using since 2016 about the 45th and now the 47th President of the United States. It was the same anti-Trump rhetoric that we hear on MSNBC, CNN and in what some pejoratively call “the mainstream media”.
Trump is a nightmare for my progressive friends. The question my friend should be asking is why Trump and his allies no longer scare men of all colors. But he is unable to do so. For him, if you are Black, Hispanic/Latino or Asian, you should be afraid of the President-elect who has promised to be a dictator for the first day of his new term, which will begin on January 20th.
By being locked into an outdated frame of mind without any introspection, my friends have failed to understand that for many minority people, the country is now divided between the United States “of the Top” and the United States “of the Bottom.” Liberals and progressives are part of the former while Black and Brown folks consider themselves part of the latter. And in the United States of the Bottom, Trump is seen as the person who hears their suffering and who can and will do something to end it. At least he will try, they believe.
Let’s take immigration for example.
It is one of the biggest problems for the United States of the Bottom. Contrary to what my friend believes, Black and Latino folks are not buying Trump’s 2015 rhetoric version, suggesting that all Mexicans coming to the U.S were “rapists.” They are, however, buying the 2024 version, claiming that illegal immigrants are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” Ignoring the fact that the comment associates lower-paying jobs with minorities, people of color are frustrated with the preferential treatment given to illegal immigrants, while they and others are struggling and have difficulty making ends meet.
New waves of immigration have led some municipalities, such as New York City, to house them in city-funded hotels at the taxpayers’ expense. The city also provides other financial assistance, such as debit cards to 2,600 migrant families to buy food. A family of four with young children is receiving $350 per week for a month, according to city officials. This benefit can be renewed. New York City, which has seen the arrival of more than 200,000 immigrants in two years, has spent $3.6 million on this program alone.
“We see it ourselves, man,” my barber told me on November 14. “The city gives them everything. We are here, we suffer. There is no money. Life is hard, but for them, they are illegal but the city takes care of them, man. But the city doesn’t give a s*** about us, bro. We are struggling.”
There is probably some exaggeration in what my barber says, but his sentiment is widespread among minorities and many men who cling to this “injustice” to explain their social downgrading. They expect politicians to take care of their own before others; to protect their poor before turning to the poor of other countries.
My barber is not against immigration. He is an immigrant himself. He is against inequity, he told me. He told me that when he and others arrived in the country, they had to fight to survive. They did not receive help. Why do we help illegal immigrants now, he asked. Why them? (New York City announced, on November 7, that it was ending the controversial debit card program.)
It is this same sense of inequity that is fueled by the aid to Ukraine, and has turned minorities against it, as I have heard from many Black and Brown men. For them, the Biden-Harris administration prefers to help a foreign nation, thousands of miles away, even though there is a great need here. The problem is that the United States of the Top continues to trumpet that helping Kyiv is necessary because it is about the survival of the democratic ideal and the Western world as we know it. To oppose aid to Ukraine is to embrace autocracy, the United States of the Top argues. Once again, another conversation but two different languages and tunes.
Universalism versus isolationism. The humanist ideal versus our immediate needs. Take care of us first, minorities seem to say, before you help others. Help your people first, before you help the people of other nations. Do White Liberals even listen?
As this presidential election showed, if White Liberals continue not to listen, they risk seeing minority support continue to shrink. The common point between MAGA and the minorities who voted for Trump in 2024 is that they all come from the working classes and are those who suffer the most from immigration and economic shocks. My White liberal friends live in a bubble which the sound from the outside world cannot penetrate.
“They are bigots,” my friend said, referring to minorities voting for Trump.
The way it looks right now, the divide between the United States of the Top and the United States of the Bottom will continue to widen. How does the Top expect to appeal to people, if it makes no effort to understand them first?
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.