Clifford Thompson confronts race and indifference in the Trump era

<p>Writer Clifford Thompson had made a sort of peace with being a black man in America. Then white people, and the Electoral College, made Donald Trump president.</p><p>Perplexed by that turn of events, Thompson looked for a way to fathom what had happened. He was inspired by the example of writer Joan Didion to employ memoir and reportage. He started by interviewing three Trump supporters at length. He compared what he learned from them to the experience and writing of other black Americans.&nbsp;</p><p>The result is his collection of essays What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues. In it, Thompson comes to the partial conclusion that the main problem isn’t ignorance and bigotry, but indifference.</p><p><br></p>