leaving this right here…
you’re still bigoted if you’re indifferent to the pain and suffering of people different from you though.
it’s not just “i hate Brown/Black/lgbt/Muslim/Jewish people”; it’s also “I’m able to turn a blind eye to their suffering because i don’t consider it important. i only recognize and care for the pain of others like me”.
See…why would this be the conversation we choose to have about this?
The OP isn’t, y’know, wrong. If you just don’t care about the suffering of racial-minority groups or sexual-minority groups or whoever, if you’re willing to dismiss Trump’s bigotries as irrelevancies, that’s bad. But if we’re going to make this about an empathy gap – there ain’t no high ground there. Certainly not for the identitarian Tumblrite left. Because the Trump voter then just says “well, I’ve got to stand by my own people, because it sure looks like you don’t have any fucking empathy for us.” And she’ll be right. It wasn’t Trump voters who decided that #KillAllWhites and #DieCisScum were funny ha-ha jokes and not the casual endorsement of murder that they appear to be. It wasn’t Trump voters who decided that it was Totally OK for Stupid Christian Republican Crackers to be the butt of every joke on every comedy show, in a way that we’d never tolerate for any other group.
(Yes, you could say that the situations aren’t 100% parallel, and that hierarchical privilege is a real thing, etc. etc. Maybe you’d even be right! But after you’ve spent five minutes explaining why it’s totally different when we act like hateful shitlords to you, no matter how good your argument is, you’ve kind of lost your ability to stand up and say that Empathy is the Most Important with any kind of compelling power.)
And the hell of it is that this empathy thing isn’t the best argument that the left has to hand! Not even close! How’s about “Trump is not your populist champion, he is a plutocrat and a pathological liar, he will give you approximately 0% of what you want from him?” How’s about “no, seriously, we know you hate us culturally, but our policies are still going to help people in your exact situation, here’s how?”
There were people saying those things. There still are. I applaud them.
But there were and are a whole lot more people who just kept saying, “Your feelings are bad! Have better, more liberal feelings!” And, for like a million reasons, that is not a conversation that is ever going to go well.