The old guard Republican senator who keeps getting reelected. The Chinese real estate tycoon buying up property after property in the US, speculating, therefore causing the price of housing to become exorbitant and unaffordable – and he doesn’t even live in the the country. The lawyers in the firm that has too long a name because they have to include everyone who made partner. The entertainment star, a household name, who bullies her staff and pays them too little despite being one of the highest earners in the world. The magazine editor who promotes Eastern European teenage anorexia-chic as the ideal body image, and so Madison Ave sweeps up her aesthetic and spreads it around the globe. The Black man who headed a leading health insurance company (though 12% of Black Americans are still uninsured, according to the Kaiser Foundation) that is now headed by a man who himself endured serious injuries and feels sympathetic to customers, but the company pulled out of the healthcare exchange in many states. The tech CEO who reveals publicly his homosexuality with the hopes of encouraging others to feel it is ok, but heads a multi-billion dollar company that exploits workers overseas.

See a pattern here?

It is power. Or rather, the abuse of power, the misuse of power, by people who have too much. And this, like any sort of psychiatric pathology, cuts across cultures. Granted, we have to indeed admit and work on the sad fact that minorities face disproportionate discrimination in America, and the statistics don’t lie. A Black male has much lower odds of succeeding – even surviving – in this culture compared to his white counterparts. This intersection of class (meaning a disempowered class) and race is a continuing problem that we have seen increase over the years, and now it is heightened under the Trump regime. We cannot ignore race, especially as racial tensions and violence are increasing.

But if we look at race alone, we are not seeing the rest of the problem. We need to start looking more at class and disempowerment. This angle will allow us to see what we had been neglecting for years: disempowered white people, often from Appalachia or rural areas (the very voters who elected Trump, even after electing Obama). It will allow us to have more constructive dialogues about class and power. A white male running a Wall Street bank is not the same white male who’s a third-generation Polish immigrant working in an auto plant in Detroit. Asian minorities who are highly educated and well to do, living in wealthy suburbs, are not the same as inner city Asian minorities (such as Chinese in Chinatowns) or Asians who grew up in more rural or less-populated areas. I noticed this difference when I went to Stanford: I came from a small Midwest college town, from very modest means, the daughter of a professor, compared to most other Indian-Americans who were wealthy and from big city suburbs.

American society is becoming increasingly, and alarmingly, class-stratified. This is the elephant in the room that drives the problems that then get played out in race. We often talk about racism and racial violence, but we don’t talk enough about poverty. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice show that people at or below the poverty level have more than twice the rate of violent victimization as people in high-income households (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf). How much more proof do we need?

Political crusaders like Bernie Sanders have fought hard to address this problem. So have grassroots movements like Occupy. But still, too many Americans suffer not only from poverty, but powerlessness. We are forced to pay exorbitant fees, deal with unjust financial institutions, be cheated by our healthcare system, and receive no basic benefits such as maternity leave or quality education. The message from the last election is clear: both sides, the left and the right, are powerless compared to those who are controlling the institutions in our country.

The difference is, those who elected Trump failed to realize that social change has to happen systematically and institutionally, not willy-nilly by a madman with no political experience, who says what people want to hear in the worst manner of a demagogue. And thus, not only are the anti-Trump people disempowered by those in control – we also are also suffering from disempowerment by those who elected Trump, people who have no understanding of how to effect social change.