Anti-Trump protest, Baltimore. Flickr/Elvert Barnes. Some rights reserved.New York City is a diverse community in which one of my weekly highlights is volunteering to counsel and mentor LGBT and minority youth, with a view to helping them overcome past bullying and redevelop self-esteem. For every one of us who has helped a young person overcome the effects of bullying and denigration, we suffered a setback with Donald Trump’s electoral win.
Over the course of her campaign, Hillary Clinton referred to my generation as “the most tolerant and generous young people we’ve ever had.” The urban generation that I see around me is defined by some key traits. Our values are transnational and intercontinental. Our identity is fluid. We are witnessing a new form of global integration actively take shape. The occasional shocks caused by nativist-driven victories actually seem to lead to a quickening of the process of urban integration. Cities from London to Dubai and New York to Shanghai are becoming increasingly interlinked in trade, transportation, and infrastructure. Above all, as interactions between global centres increase, we are interlinked in values.
These values define us as cosmopolitan children. Many of us are multi-lingual, we believe in science, and we advocate art. Our credo is curiosity. For many of us, the first Obama campaign was the first election we became involved with. We saw in him a mirror of the post-racial America that we experienced on a day-to-day basis, from our global cities to our college towns.
