Panthea Lee:

Because I don’t have Olympic levels of empathy. I’ve just interviewed enough people that society deems broken or unsavoury to know that everyone has a story behind why they do what they do. I’ve just facilitated enough efforts around intractable problems to know that if we can’t level as humans first, we’ll never make it out the other side. And I’ve just lived enough life as a dismissible demographic to understand what people are capable of when they feel like no one cares about their existential pain.

(...)

Who does it benefit if we focus on race and not class? In many powerful media outlets (owned by obscenely wealthy white people), if a person votes Trump, that’s the only part of their identity that matters. In liberal media, profiles are superficially searching and hardly complex — the driving question is not “who are you?” but rather “how could you?” Many liberal outlets treat the Trump voter as aliens with views to ridicule, not humans with grievances to address