Tell Us How Your Politics Have Changed Since 2016

[Brian Snyder/Reuters]

By Samantha Grasso

I was 22 when I covered the 2016 presidential election. The summer before, I graduated from journalism school in Texas, moved to New York, and found a fellowship opportunity with a feminist politics and culture site that’s since been flipped into a beauty blog. 

At the time, I wrote a lot about individual cases of discrimination that affected people who were very visible in our society: white women and middle-class women and women with political or financial power. This included Congressional interns, Black female doctors and other mostly liberal, professional people. These were people who knew how to make their stories public, or whose stories went viral online by virtue of public interest, an indication of the stories that people and algorithms deem “worthy” of sharing and supporting.

But I rarely wrote about the experiences of those who were less visible in the media. And my reporting didn’t much reflect the experiences of my own racially mixed, blue-collar, immigrant family.

But in the past four years, something has shifted. 

As movements for equality have grown in the U.S., I’ve interviewed disabled activists and housing activists, undocumented immigrants and advocates for Medicare for All. I’ve had conversations about abortion access and reproductive justice and police abolition. As I’ve covered these movements, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of the complicated ways that financial and political power works, and the role of class in shaping racism, sexism and other forms of marginalization. 

I see the forces that shaped my own upbringing described and challenged, and this has changed my reporting by changing my idea of where power might lie: at the margins rather than the center of our society.

I’m far from the only person who’s been changed by the rapid political shifts of the last four years. We want to hear from you, our readers, on how your perspective has shifted too:

How have the last four years changed your politics and your understanding of what’s at stake this presidential election? Please send us an email at subtext@ajplus.net with your first name and location (we can make your submission anonymous too). We may include your response in an upcoming edition of subtext.

You can also message us on Twitter @ajplus

---

You might also enjoy