There were white Americans who fought and died to end slavery and dismantle Jim Crow. Whites stood with Black activists during the Civil Rights Movement, risking their lives and reputations in the struggle for justice. But there is another, more sobering truth: the majority of white Americans have been indifferent to Black suffering. Most did not own slaves or craft Jim Crow laws — but they upheld the status quo with their silence. And that silence has been as deadly as open hatred, giving tacit permission for centuries of violence, exclusion, and oppression.

When Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016, the pundits rushed to explain it away. They told us not to “paint all his voters with a broad brush,” insisting that Trump’s support came from economic anxiety. Disaffected rural whites, they said, just wanted jobs and dignity after decades of neglect. The media, desperate to normalize the abnormal, spun comforting stories about “populist rage” and forgotten communities.

But I knew then what has now been confirmed beyond any doubt: Trump’s victory wasn’t about jobs. It was about race. It was about gender. It was about rolling back every social gain made by people of color, women, and marginalized communities. And now that Trump has returned to power, that truth is undeniable. His supporters — after everything they’ve seen and heard — have chosen again. They’ve proven exactly what I said they were.

Let’s be clear: to vote for Trump does not automatically make one an avowed racist or misogynist. But it does mean indifference — indifference to racism, indifference to sexism, indifference to the erosion of the very norms that hold our democracy together. And in a democracy, indifference is not benign — it’s fatal.

I once read that indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. Hate takes effort; it burns and consumes. Indifference does not. Indifference simply looks away. It shrugs. It lets evil grow unchallenged. That is why chattel slavery endured for 300 years. Why, after the Civil War, white Northerners abandoned Reconstruction and let the South terrorize Black Americans once again. Why, today, millions of rural whites have directed their rage not at the wealthy elites who truly abandoned them, but at immigrants, Black people, and anyone outside their tribe.

Trumpism thrives on this indifference. Poor and working-class whites have real grievances — but their suffering has been weaponized. Rather than build solidarity with Black and brown communities who share their economic pain, they’ve been fed a steady diet of scapegoats and lies. They’ve been told that tearing others down will lift them up. And many have chosen that lie.

Let’s also dispel another dangerous myth: that America will be fine because we’ve survived worse. This kind of fatalistic optimism is a luxury only afforded to those insulated by whiteness, wealth, or privilege. The people who say “it could be worse” are not the ones targeted when hate rises. They are not the ones whose rights are first stripped away when democracy recedes. Optimism, when untethered from vigilance, becomes indifference. And indifference is how democracies die.

Remember when Trump first ran? People like Jon Stewart tried to soothe us, saying Trump’s vulgarity just exposed what past leaders said in private. But that “silver lining” masked the deeper danger: that by normalizing Trump’s hate, we’ve made room for something far worse. We’ve taught half the nation to be silent in the face of cruelty, to tolerate the intolerable.

And so, we find ourselves here again in 2025. Trump back in power. The nation once again flirting with its darkest impulses. History, once more, rhyming with itself — the rise and fall of Reconstruction, the abandonment of civil rights, the cycle of progress met with fierce backlash.

If the majority of white Americans continue to choose indifference — as they have so many times before — we will not just regress. We will collapse into the very past we’ve fought so hard to overcome.

Indifference must never be an option. Not then. Not now. Resist.