F L A N N E L

People are talking about a miracle. I’m hearing about a nightmare. It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids, “Don’t be a bully.” You tell your kids, “Don’t be a bigot.” You tell your kids, “Do your homework and be prepared.” And then you have this outcome, and you have people putting children to bed tonight, and they’re afraid of breakfast. They’re afraid of, “How do I explain this to my children?” I have Muslim friends who are texting me tonight saying, “Should I leave the country?” I have families of immigrants that are terrified tonight. This was many things. This was a rebellion against the elites, true, it was a complete reinvention of politics and polls, it’s true. But it was also something else. We talk about race, I mean, we’ve talked about everything *but* race tonight. We’ve talked about class, we’ve talked about income, we’ve talked about reason. We haven’t talked about race. This was a whitelash. This was a whitelash against a changing country. It was a whitelash against a black president, in part. And that’s the part where the pain comes. And Donald Trump has a responsibility tonight to come out and reassure people that he *is* going to be the president of the all the people who he insulted and offended and…and brushed aside. Yeah, when you say you want to take your country back, you’ve got a lot of people who feel that we’re not represented well, either. But we don’t want to feel that someone has been elected by throwing away some of us to appeal more deeply to others. So, this is a deeply painful moment tonight. I know it’s not just about race, there’s more going on than that. But race is here too and we’ve got to talk about it.