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It’s 10:00 p.m. and I am a white woman in a red Prius driving through South Los Angeles on my way home from a teaching gig. Heading north on La Brea, I see there’s notification of a sobriety
checkpoint just ahead. Traffic slows, the story of my life. As I prepare to enter the queue I am instead immediately waved through by an LAPD officer. Glad to bypass the checkpoint, I glance at the line of cars waiting and am disturbed to notice that each driver is Latino or African American. When I arrive home I make a Facebook post about the egregious racial profiling I had just encountered. My post receives many likes.
I feel I am the kind of liberal who calls out oppression from an admittedly comfortable position of privilege and safety. I feel a little guilty about this, but maybe I should. Similarly, my patient James is the son of good, conscientious liberals like me. James, however, voted for Donald Trump and is delighted that he is our president. How can this be?
James is autistic and possesses an intellect of the highest order. As a young child he failed to connect socially or academically in the private, progressive schools to which his parents sent him, the very same schools my own children have attended. Instead, realizing that James required special education services (although at that point his diagnosis was not clear), his parents felt they had little choice but to enroll him in their local public school when he entered second grade.
Forced integration of this particular school district in the 1970s was followed by white flight to private schools, a situation that remains to this day. Racial resentments have been quietly brewing in this school district now for decades. Consequently, James was one of only a few white students in his entire school. Vulnerable because of his social skills deficits, he was bullied relentlessly. When this occurred he was told, “Just walk away!” When he would defend himself against physical violence the adults would say, “Use your words