Red, Apathetic White and Blue

What will it take to get white people to care about the dismantling of our democracy?

Yesterday, my husband and I protested in our adjacent town’s Fourth of July Parade. We were part of a group of regular, peaceful protestors who had a spot in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire parade procession. The experience was a gut-wrenching reminder of white apathy and the amount of collective pain that will be required to snap people out of their privileged fugue state.

To set the scene, New Hampshire is an incredibly white state, and Wolfeboro is no exception. I’ve written about the town before. It’s an insulated, quaint New England town on Lake Winnipesaukee. Each summer, the town is flooded with an interesting mix of vacationers from the Northeast. You see everything from uber-wealthy hedge fund managers to working class families from the Boston area. What they all have in common is that they’re mostly white, like the enclave’s permanent residents.