The shock is wearing off a little bit, but I am not done mourning the profound injustice of it all. Somewhere in my mind there is a small child sobbing and wailing "it's not faaaaaaiiiirrrr!!" on the kitchen floor. I definitely underestimated how racist people are, or how many racist people there are, or how little racism is understood that so many people can make a mental distinction between "being racist" and "being completely unbothered by racism" as if they are different things. I didn't underestimate how sexist people are, or how many sexist people there are, but I did underestimate how many of them would be women. 53% of white women, to be exact. See above. I also deeply underestimated how much people HATE Hillary Clinton. I didn't fully appreciate the impact that 25+ years of the media and the GOP calling Hillary crazy, untrustworthy, cold, two-faced, incompetent, and any number of other overt and coded sexist attacks would have on our perception of her in the long term. I thought that was just some shit republicans tried to say in the 90s, but by now it's worked its way into common knowledge, conventional wisdom, for millions of people. There's a word for that in psychology--source amnesia? When you believe a thing but forget who told it to you. Among liberals in particular, I didn't realize how much voter turnout would be affected because of the idea that she is more cruel, more "bought," more colonialist than Obama, none of which would have had any traction if we hadn't already been carpet-bombed with sexist bullshit by the GOP for years. (Before you correct me, I do understand that there are legitimate policy reasons to dislike or not want to vote for her, and that 3rd party voters are not responsible for the election outcome, and that the VRA was gutted this year so no wonder turnout was low. That doesn't change the fact that we live in a white supremacist patriarchy, and it's much worse than I imagined, which is all I'm saying here.) Lots of people are saying that now is the time to organize, mobilize, get active, tackle the challenge. I'm proud of people who are ready to do that, but I'm not done grieving. And anyway, my brain is refusing to get off the kitchen floor.
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