Living in the beautiful city of New York you come across many different races, religious, and people with different gender identities and sexual backgrounds. As everyone knows New York is predominately Liberal state and to be anything else you’re scrutinized for it. I became interested in politics as soon as Obama was sworn into office as he was Black and I was too and he was a Democrat and I assumed I was too since I lived in New York. My family and I as well as members in my community struggled on a day to day bases living from pay check to pay check, dealing with constant violence not only from members of our community but from Police. With all of this I foolish thought that since Obama was Black he would be that one to come and “save” the African American community and help us be prosperous, clearly not the case.
Life went on as it usually did and as I got older I realized that this is exactly how it always will be because I not only had a Democrat president, but I also lived in a Democrat state. I’ve seen how Democrats needed us (minorities) when voting time came around saying “remember when I condemned the actions against the police against your people, remember those food stamps, the housing vouchers so you can get “affordable” housing, yeah remember come vote for me.” I’m at the point in life now where my mother and I live in the shelter for two almost three years now, I’ve lived in two – soon to be three shelters because I’m being transferred once again. The food stamps went from $300 a month, to $200, $100, and now $65 each of these being a month, people get paid more than this a week but we had to make this stretch a month. My mother just recently was able to get a job that pays $300 a week, but $200 of that goes into savings because we have to save up to able to get an apartment.
Now these vouchers we get we’re supposed to pay 30% of rent while the state (I’m assuming) pays the rest, we have to find an apartment whose rent is about $1240, if you live in New York you know how hard it would be to find an apartment at that price. Anyway we managed to fine 30 Real Estates who took our voucher, out of 30 one of them said they’ll take our name and number down and call us in a week (they never did), everyone else told us they had nothing available at the time. You could imagine how defeated we felt because we went in with the mindset thinking we would finally be able to find something. However, during the same day my mom called back one of the Real Estates we had already call, the conversation went as followed:
Real Estate: Hello, how may I help you?
Mom: Hello, I’m calling because I’m looking for an apartment.
Real Estate: Are you in a program?
*We decided to switch it up*
Mom: No.
Real Estate: Okay, well it seems like we have a few apartments available.
Mom: *CLICK, hangs up*
Now if you’re not from New York the law is that landlords are not allowed to turn you away if you have voucher, the way to get around it? Say you have nothing to offer. Some people don’t know that either HRA (controls public assistance as well as plays a role in the shelter system) and/ or DHS (controls shelter system) get paid based on the amount of people the live in the shelter, so as one family/person moves out I got another one moving in right after. Getting paid off of the misfortune of others, that’s what goes on under a Liberal state, which really isn’t surprising.
As I went through high school and went on my way to college I’ve had teachers express their Liberal views and why we (the students) should think like they do, I listened for the sake of my grade but when I got home I decided for myself. I was never the kind of person to follow along with what everyone else wanted me to, I like to decide things based on what I believe, so when this election came rolling around, this was mine time to have a voice.
I say all of this to say I voted for Trump and I decided to write this because I often hear people saying that all of his supporters are old, rich, white, and racist, and I’m clearing not any of those. I’m a young, black, poor, far from racist woman. I have Muslim friends, Hispanic friends, and have gay people in my family. I grew up in city where you learn to accept everyone and I come from a diverse family so I’ve experienced people with all kinds of different opinions, so when I see headlines like these I’m so confused because that’s not me. My decision was an economic based decision but BELIEVE me when I tell you, I know that voting for Trump most likely wont changed my situation, I took a chance just how we take a chance with any person we elect.
Since his election the DOW has been the highest it has ever been in history, and more people went out to spend on Black Friday and Cyber Monday than last year. Hopefully this is only the beginning of good things to come.
Racism and hatred already existed in this country and no matter who’s in office it will continue to be that way, people continue to associate him winning with everyone that voted for him being racist and sexist. You don’t know the story behind everyone’s reason for choosing him, you don’t know if these people are struggle or not. Democrats are supposed to be loving, understanding people but that all of a sudden went out the window.
Don’t believe everything you see in the media ask people yourself, all of these privileged people are out there speaking for me without even understanding how I really feel, they’re just assuming that I’m standing by them because I’m poor and supposedly all poor people are Democrats we want to keep that welfare check.
I decided to write this because I read a New York Times article where this White man was explaining why he voted for Trump even though he lives in New York and one of the comments was telling him his White privileged opinion doesn’t matter and that she would like to hear from a minority.