David Inoue
It’s been a pretty hateful few weeks from the news cycle. Constant messages against immigrants, whether it be the anti-Haitian immigrant lies spread by vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, schools refusing to play San Jose State’s women’s volleyball team because of a trans woman on its roster or, more recently, Donald Trump claiming that Jan. 6 insurrectionists are being treated as badly as Japanese Americans during World War II.
Given the title of the article, you’re probably expecting a treatise on the new commandment in the Bible from Jesus, telling his followers to “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Given that many of those promoting the hateful rhetoric are themselves Christian, and clearly in violation of this “second greatest commandment,” in addition to many of the original 10, this would be the easy message for me to write about. After all, who doesn’t love the exposure of blatant hypocrisy.
And that’s why that doesn’t make a great topic to write about. The hypocrisy of those who claim deep faith and then espouse hateful lies and rhetoric is something that doesn’t need any more exposure. It is so blatant, it can go without saying.
Amongst many of us who promote progressive values and stand up for social justice, we also engage in a similar toxic social division. We value allyship and stand with those who are targeted by the hateful rhetoric. But particularly in this election season, we accuse anyone who votes for the opposition candidate of supporting evil, failing to stand up to the worst just because they like the tax cuts, though every candidate for office seems to love tax cuts now. Everyone needs to pick a side, and if you pick the other side, you are endorsing everything that side might espouse on the campaign trail — all the lies, all the hate and all the fearmongering.
We need to find a way to separate the individual voters from the candidate they might be supporting. We are certainly not going to convince them to change their views if we paint them with the broad brush of supporting evil. Vance himself was once the darling of trying to overcome this divide with his book “Hillbilly Elegy.” Unfortunately, the only long-term lesson from that book is that the people described in that book should be exploited for their fear of changes in society and the economy that are leaving them behind.
I recall approaching Mr. Vance after he had spoken at an event about the book, hoping to find some common ground suggested that many of the challenges he describes in the book are similar to challenges faced by working-class minority families, particularly my own grandparents when they immigrated from China. Hoping for an enthusiastic agreement, I was met with a tepid response I would paraphrase as, “I guess so.”
Part of the challenge is that our neighbors are less likely to be from diverse backgrounds. We tend to aggregate and associate based on similar demographics and politics. In the city of D.C. where I live, it is an extreme, but illustrative with what will likely be around 90 percent of voters voting for VP Harris, whereas if I drive about an hour or two in nearly any direction to Virginia, Maryland or West Virginia, that ratio will likely flip in favor of former President Trump.
It’s easy to care about people living next door, but in these times, with the internet shrinking the world, we seem much more distant. We need to change that and think of those more distant but connected through means such as the internet as also our neighbors. We invoke this when we talk of our need to embrace immigrants coming to our country; we need to embrace it when we think of the divide between urban D.C. and rural Virginia.
Many of the more rural voters for Trump say that what attracts them most to Trump is that he gets them. Maybe we need to spend some more time “getting them” as well. If we dismiss opposing voters as being hateful, that same hate will come back at us.
One might see the upcoming election as the so-called “dumpster fire.” If it is, we don’t need to add gasoline to that fire and antagonize the other side more. We can call out what might be hateful rhetoric, but let’s also try to do something else: Forgive and open a dialog and get to the root of where that anger is coming from. Maybe then, regardless of the outcome of the election, we can pursue a path toward healing.
David Inoue is executive director of the JACL. He is based at the organization’s Washington, D.C., office.
