“I had to sit and listen to these women talk about what a terrible person Donald Trump is. I kept my opinion to myself, until the one woman began speaking of her African research assistant. She said,

‘My African research assistant actually suggested that if Trump were elected he might be able to straighten the country out if he ran it like a business.’

“I was very interested in this turn of conversation, as I have friends who are African—decent, educated, classy people with traditional family values—not what we have here in the U.S. with our willfully stupid, violent African Americans.

The other woman said, ‘I hope you straightened her out,’ and the first woman began describing how she spoke in ebonics, like an African American hip hop personality, to her assistant, even calling her ‘girlfriend.’ It was shockingly disgusting to see this level of ignorance from a scientist. African Americans prey on Africans, hate them, share none of their values. To talk down to this woman like this was disgusting. So I said, ‘You may want to consider that Africans have entirely different viewpoints and values than African Americans, that they do not share the same culture.’

“They looked at me with a kind of dreadful astonishment. The next order of business was to begin discussing why this Trump person—who I know nothing about—was so terrible. This largely focused on him being evil for having money, which is an understandable prejudice, and is why I don’t trust any of these politicians, because they are all wealthy beyond my conception. What shocked me, and is something I will never forget hearing, was the key reason on which these women agreed that Trump was a ruinous presidential candidate. These two college-educated white women were most troubled by the fact that, and I quote, ‘He’s so white.’

“I recently stopped working in Baltimore because—ever since the riots—every second African American would look at me with a belligerent, palpable hatred in their eyes, and my black coworkers would harass me for the crime of being a white woman. And these stuffy suburbanites, working in their lab and living in their elite white community, think that we need more of that, that we should live in a gangster rap nation, with all of the attendant criminal values and base, violent morality?”

-Melody B.