Trump comes to town

Tonight, the president came to Eastern North Carolina, to Greenville. He held one of his campaign rallies. I thought that Greenville was the perfect place for that. I had moved to Greenville in 1989, but Greenville was locked in the 1950s. I saw a town that was segregated, blacks on one section of town and whites in the rest. Only the newer parts of town were integrated, the parts where all the non-native lived. Greenville is a college town, it has a medical school and some large manufacturing facilities that employ highly educated people. And it had migrant workers farming the tobacco fields living in abandoned shacks. None of the locals thought much about it. It was how it had always been. The blacks had their place and stayed there. The migrants were like the dogs they kept in their backyards. It was the outsiders who tried to change things. But many of the outsiders were from the middle of the country. Midwesterners who held the same con‐ servative position as the locals but did not have the same history as the locals. But their brains were wired the same, to fear the "other" , the stranger, change. True, they didn't have slavery in their history but they thought just like those who did. They came from communities without minorities. The black and brown people were the other, speaking a foreign language, worshipping differently, a different culture than theirs. When I moved here, I think some thought I'd be like them, having grown up in the white suburbs of America. But I grew up 20 miles from Manhattan and had been taken there often by my parents. My dad worked in Newark until I was in college. My mom and I would take a bus to shop there and then meet up with dad , maybe have dinner there or come home. We would also take the bus to Paterson to shop as well. We would walk around downtown, have lunch at Woolworth's or a corner luncheonette. I saw and interacted with all sorts of people. Many of the people my dad worked with were black. My doctor was Middle Eastern, Lebanese to b