He had White co-workers who flagrantly used the n-word and made racist comments to him, and he came to enjoy their shock when he told them to cut it out.
“It was disgusting that people might think I was okay with that,” he said. “I decided I wasn’t going to just let it slide. Because if you let it slide, you become complicit, and complicity turns into guilt, and guilt turns into shame, and shame turns into fear, and I don’t want to live in fear.”
He came to see the Trump movement rising all around him as built upon exactly that kind of fear, and when 2020 came around, he remembers his wife telling him that all his philosophizing meant nothing if he did not take action. He remembers how it felt to vote for the first time.
“There was this well-dressed fellow,” he recalled. “He was pleasant, and as we were leaving, he said, ‘We’ve got to keep them demon Democrats from stealing the election.’ He thought he knew how I was going to vote because of my skin color. I said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Nah. And just so you know, I just canceled you out. So, suck on that.’”
He had been part of a minor uprising against Trumpism all across the country — a revolt of contrarians and others who defied expectations of pundits, polls, and even the Democratic Party itself.
Sometimes he and his wife discussed how the Trump movement had ever taken root in this place they loved, and sometimes hated, and nonetheless had chosen to make their home.
“The hardest part is the juxtaposition of knowing these are good, kind, loving, caring people here,” Johnson’s wife would say. “It’s like they put their morality in a box.”
To Johnson, though, it was less about other people and more about the kind of person he wanted to be. And so when it was time to vote again — this time in Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff for the U.S. Senate — he got into his pickup truck and headed to Beulahland Baptist Church one more time.
He walked across the parking lot, past other pickup trucks and cars with Trump stickers, and through the door. And then a 33-year-old White man from northwest Georgia voted for the third time in his life.
He voted against the Trump-backed candidate, and as he saw it, he voted against all the politics of Trumpism that had been expected to work on somebody like him — white nationalism, grievance, bitterness, bullying and, perhaps most of all, fear of a changing world.
“I have relatives who retreated rather than adapted,” he said, thinking of the life he left behind. “I think of it as, I left the mountain to come into the world, to go out into the world. It’s something I’m kind of proud of.”
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