Certainty
I watched this VICE documentary called The Young Black Conservatives of Trump’s America,
and I kept running into the same wall: these people were real, they were serious, and I didn’t understand them.
The setup felt obvious to me. Trump says racist things. He’s crude, reckless, probably not smart in any way that matters. I grew up reading that narrative, and it seemed airtight. So when I learned that Black voters not only put him in office but stayed loyal through every scandal—the wall, the shutdown, the pussy-grabbing tape, all of it—my first instinct was to assume they were either ignorant or performing for their white conservative friends. But the documentary shows something different. These are people who’ve thought about this. They chose it. They’re not confused; they’re just operating from a different logic than I expected.
What gets me is how much I was relying on a simple story. That Trump is obviously bad, so obviously Black Americans should reject him, so obviously anyone who supports him is either lying or trapped. But that story doesn’t account for actual people with actual reasons. Some of them hated what Obama represented. Some of them care about different issues entirely—the economy, religion, something else that matters more to them than the offensive shit everyone else is focused on. None of that makes them stupid. It just makes them different from what I assumed.
The documentary doesn’t try to convince you that Trump is actually good or that his supporters are right. It just lets you sit with the fact that politics isn’t as legible as we want it to be. You can have a moral position and still not understand why someone disagrees. The world works in grays even when we’re looking for black and white.
I think about this a lot now—how much of my certainty is actually certainty and how much is just the comfort of thinking I already understand. The documentary didn’t change my mind about Trump, but it messed with something deeper: my confidence that the reasons behind things are as simple as they feel.