You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…
–Lee Atwater, Advisor of the Reagan Administration, 1981
It has been a few short weeks since Donald Trump was sworn back into office on what may be the most oxymoronic—if not completely awkward—commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day; there are no fires burning down the horizon line; the sun still rises every morning and we are still spinning helplessly around it; as far as I can tell, each of Newton’s laws of motion still governs the forces of the universe as they always have. People are upset. People are grieving; people are celebrating and others are restless with confusion. Still, a resounding, coherent silence echoes throughout the country, penetrating each of us with a sense of clarity. I think that’s because we all understand each other this time—for better or worse. It was not like this last time.
I was an eighteen year old college freshman when Donald Trump first trespassed into the Oval Office—and I say the word “trespassed” very intentionally, not to imply that he “stole the election”, but that his presence in the Presidential office felt on either side of the political curtain, in a certain sense, uncomfortable. I remember the preceding moments before we discovered the winner of that election; it was a chilly, November night in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. My first college girlfriend, a Jewish girl I’d met during my orientation week—let’s call her Helen— was sitting intently in front of her laptop screen counting electoral votes for states. If memory serves, it was 11:00 PM and it looked as if Hilary had a slight lead and yet I found myself utterly uninterested; while Helen scoured the internet for developments on the election, I pulled the sheets and blankets over my head and formed a cocoon of sorts to block out the world from what I knew was coming.
“How can you just not watch?” Helen inquired, hurling a pillow at my makeshift fortress.
“Because he’s going to win,” I responded. “And I’m trying to accept it now.”
“Dude, you’re being paranoid. She’s ahead by so much…”Helen went on to explain that there were only so many more key states left and that many analysts were confident that she had this thoroughly in the bag. But Helen had grown up in a liberal county in El Paso, Texas and she was, to some degree, I think, sheltered from a certain system of reality, one that I had been forced to learn early on to survive. I was born in Oklahoma and raised in Georgia where patriots fly billowing Confederate flags proudly in the wind. I knew the white men and women of the south; whenever I went home for breaks I could hear their resentment for the status quo in their whispers and see their conviction in their banners; I had known, since the Republican Primary, that we’d lost.
WEB DuBois once argued that the Black American is “gifted with second-sight in this American world”, a certain “twoness” resulting from irreconcilable identities—that of a Black person and that of an American. Because I am Black, I am able to see the world through the perspective of my culture, but because I am American—in some sense—I understand the way that my white countryman sees Black people. I see myself as I truly am, a Black person, a writer, a son, and a brother; I see myself through the distortion of American propaganda, a potential threat, thief, or criminal. Any Black person unable to master this dual sight, the ability to recognize how he is seen by his peers, will die; it is that simple. In this way, Helen lacked the tools to predict the election in the way that I could; she does not have the Second Sight and she, thankfully, was not raised in such close proximity to the American bigot and therefore was not aware of his ire.
Unfortunately for me, my entire life, up until this moment, had been intentionally carved, shaped, and molded by that very bigot in ways that I could not hope to fully understand until I became a teacher nearly a decade later. As a young Black boy growing up in Georgia, I never had a Black history teacher or English professor; all the people who filled my head with the narratives of the past, until my college years, were white. So I did not know DuBois or Hughes or Hurston; I knew Malcolm X but only through the lens of white educators who feared the notion of X without having listened to any of his message. I had never read “The Fire Next Time” or “Black Judgement” and no one made any effort to spell out to me what it was Ralph Ellison was getting at when he referred to himself—and therefore myself—as an invisible man! But I did know Kafka and the Bronte sisters and the compulsory American mythologies like Washington and the cherry tree. I memorized those legends with such vigor that I was awarded a special designation in middle school: “gifted”. This special title meant that I was plucked from the classes occupied by twenty-five to thirty Black children and allowed to study alongside nine to twelve white students instead; I was a Black boy left adrift in a raging storm of whitewashed pedagogy and so when my classmates and teachers called me nigger—and they did—I was left without a history or narrative to corroborate a rebuttal. By the time you are a young teenager, say aged thirteen or fourteen, you come to realize that those glittering stars stamped across Betsy Ross’ flag are symbolic of the opportunities in America; but you also realize that while those stars may indeed glitter, they will not glitter, specifically, for you.
The entire world around me believed that I was a nigger and I had never read or heard anything to the contrary. I suppose this may be a bit hyperbolic of an explanation of my experience of an education in Georgia’s public schools, but only in that we were provided a very detailed explanation of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent philosophy. And so, as far as I knew, the reason we never studied Black History is that I emerged from a people who had no history. White people had kidnapped what were essentially a band of monkeys and forced them through their fields and, incidentally, by way of the Good Book, one good negro, Dr. King rose through the benevolence of the White Man’s Burden and rose out of the barrel of monkeys as a true American; further, we should all—Black Americans, specifically—aspire to be like him.
I say this all to outline that I knew even without knowing who DuBois was, what it meant to have dual sight because even though I am not a white American, I used to believe all the same things they did. You, my teachers, believed that Black people were loud, incessant, and thuggish and so I painted that reality across the faces of my father and his father and all our cousins. You, my former mentors, believed Black people to be less capable and so I constructed low ceilings around my expectations of self and my future.
You, my countryman, saturated the broadcasts and news reports with the arrests and murders of scores of people who wore the very skin I call my own so that I normalized—and perhaps contributed to—the genocide. You could say that I have two minds, a black mind that I have had to work to reclaim and a white mind forced into my skull through the violent education of the state. I say all of this to indicate that I know white people—Americans—very dearly, and so I knew, all those years ago, that Hilary Clinton had no chance in hell at taking over the Oval Office (and even if she did, I do not believe that the conditions of Black America would shift substantially; after all, it was not so long ago that she too approved of the violent policing of the “super criminal”), but that knowledge did nothing for me on the night of the election except provide me the foresight to build that damn cocoon around myself, blocking out the entire world—including loved ones.
I would like to say that I stayed up through the night and comforted Helen as the reality set in that we would not, and perhaps never will, see a woman in the White House as commander-in-chief. But I had not yet learned to be a good boyfriend. More than that, I had not yet learned to be an entirely good person. I regret to say that whatever journey Helen began in reckoning with her country that night, she began alone as I had fallen into a deep, truculent slumber. For all the points I’ve made about the power of these Black prophetic eyes, it is only in hindsight that I see this selfishness—my selfishness—as the most significant contributing agent to the death of that relationship.
The next morning, I awoke to a world that had been ripped from its axis. Many students boycotted class—though the majority were cancelled anyway. Classes that were held altered their focus from academic investigation to dialogue. Students and faculty spoke quietly of their disbelief; it was like attending a vigil observing the death of someone—or perhaps something—sacred. Many of my teachers at the time were international and I could see from their red-rimmed eyes and choked voices that they were on the verge of tears. I know now that they feared that a country they had built their home in was going to close its door to them. Back home, my friends and family in Georgia were mourning in the faces of their celebrating neighbors and violence sparked across the country. But even though conservatives were celebrating, I think they too were mystified by the absurdity of the whole thing. I said earlier that everyone, regardless of political leaning, was uncomfortable with the results of the election. I would like to, for the sake of illustrating the problem of today, and more relevantly, the problems of subsequent tomorrows, elucidate on the confusion of yesterday.
For Republicans—and understand that I am demonstrating the utmost empathy and speculative imagination I have with the following conjecture—the 2016 Trump campaign was a desperate attempt to reassert control over a country (they felt was) spiraling irrevocably toward “radicalism”. In the eight years following the Bush Administration, Republicans were forced to accept a White House that recognized marriage as a civic right for LGBTQ+ communities and sympathized with low-income families who, in the past, had been characterized as welfare packrats feeding off the bosom of loyal taxpayers. Most egregiously, this campaign was audaciously led by a Black man (with a Kenyan name, no less)!
Further, Obama’s vision of America clashed violently with Reagan’s nostalgic portrait of the country, an America dogmatically— no, brutally—maintained with the instruments of “law” and “order”. But conventionally conservative candidates like Mitt Romney and John McCain had failed to secure the ballot against Obama’s charismatic, “liberal crusade”. The time had come for something more experimental, risky, and perhaps extreme. As a Black man, I tend to summarize the election of Trump in 2016 as a violent, counter-cultural tantrum waged by the spurned right. We had put a nigger in office; it would not stand. Then came Trump, a man willing to say out in the open the values of the conservative party without adornment, tact, or pretense. You are not hearing us! the American Conservative said. He then promised: You will.
On the other hand, while conservatives had become more or less united in their quiet, simmering anger, the American left had grown more divided under the Obama administration. While some were excited by the slow push towards inclusion welcomed by the Affordable Care Act and the protection of gay marriage rights under the constitution, others felt that Obama’s fixation on “backing the blue” and his fierce advocacy of mass surveillance were a direct insult to the constituencies that placed Obama in office in the first place. After the brutal murder of the 25 year-old Freddie Gray in April of 2015, the Black residents of Baltimore staged an uprising in defiance of the police. In response, Obama labelled the protests as “counterproductive” and doubled down by referring to the participants in the protests as “criminals” and “thugs”.
The older generation of democrats and many moderate conservatives applauded Obama’s approach to the incident while the younger generation—my generation—saw Obama’s “tow-the-line” attitude as an act of race betrayal, at best and outright minstrelsy at worst. I was seventeen at the time; I remember watching the CNN broadcast in which Barack Obama condemned the actions of a thousand Americans who looked like him and I wanted to put my fist through the television screen. “Change you can believe in,” I said with a bitter laugh. Just like that the Democratic Party had unknowingly split into two parties—one that craved a more radical, forceful presence in office and one that felt optimistic staying the course.
Half of the party viewed Hilary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign as the continuation of something sparked by Obama—the first woman in office following in the absence of the first Black man. It was almost something Biblical. The other half wanted to throw their own Hail Mary. Bernie or Bust, we said—and we said it with a certain conviction that America could change into the country that we wanted it to be. That divide, between the patient older generation who wanted to see Hilary take the throne and my generation, who wanted to blow down the door, is the fracture that invited Trump, a man with no political experience, who bragged about his ability to skirt the dignities of consent with his wealth, and who stands for all the inequities and humiliations that we thought we’d deposed, into the most powerful position on the global stage.
I do not remember the four years of Trump’s Presidency in days or weeks or months; instead, it is easiest for me to recount those carking years in acts of violence, bloodshed, and outrage. In 2017, a white supremacist march, The Unite the Right Rally, consisting of Klan Members—yes, they came back in vogue so to speak—Neo-Nazis (also back), and Neo-Confederates (because the joke was not redundant enough), surged through Charlottesville, Virginia. Locals of Charlottesville, horrified at spectacle being made of their community, attempted to counter protest the event; in response, James Alex Fields Jr. battered through them with his car, killing one and injuring thirty-five people. President Trump remarked that there were “bad people on both sides” of the conflict.
In 2018, Nikolas Cruz blew through his former high school with an assault rifle in Miami, killing seventeen people and injuring another seventeen. Student survivors of the shooting organized the “March for Our Lives Campaign” in which dozens of schools around the country appealed to legislative bodies, senators, and all the forces that were to revise gun control protocols on a federal level. This was the first series of protests that I would participate in as a student; it would not be the last. In 2019, the House of Representatives cited two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for obstruction of Congress and the other for abuse of power. (Revision: In 2019, the common American citizen learns that impeachment doesn’t really do shit).
We all, of course, remember 2020, the year in which all of us, the global citizens of the world, were wrenched apart in fear of even a single breath from our neighbors. We vacated the parking lots, the schools, the living rooms and all the other common spaces; everyone was alone. Perhaps it is for this reason that we (and I mean, once again, my white countrymen; we Black people have never managed to rid the funk of that strange American crop from our broad noses) finally noticed the blood spilling all over these American streets paved by slaves and maintained by the chain gangs. The whole world watched as one officer kneeled on a Black man’s neck for eight minutes in Minneapolis; we watched again as three white men gunned down a Black man jogging through the streets of Georgia; and we watched yet again in Kentucky, as the police, draped in their blue uniforms and their badges, forced their way into a young Black woman’s home and forced their bullets into her body.
All of this happened and more during those four years of the Trump Presidency. This is not an arguable point; it is a matter of the historical record. I did not mention the Muslim ban which prevented many of my international friends from continuing their education. I did not mention the insurrection at the Capitol Building which managed to do what Jefferson Davis could not: bring the flag of the slave-owners into the US Capitol Building. I did not mention any of this for two reasons. The first contention is that this essay is not about Trump; it’s not even about Trumpism; Trumpism is just a name that my white countryman ascribes to a culture that has been thriving in the country well before Nixon. To call this phenomenon “Trumpism” is to fall for the very fallacy that MAGA advocates want to portray: that there is an America that existed in some nebulous time before now that “was better”.
And the second contention that dissuaded me from invoking all of the blood on Trump’s ledger is that these years, 2016-2020, were not just a record of Trump’s Presidential regime, but also a record of my coming of age. 2017 was not just the year in which the supremacists attacked Charlottesville; it was also my sophomore year and the first time I ever had a Black literature teacher. That year, I discovered the works of WEB DuBois, James Baldwin, and Nikki Giovanni. I read Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka and Alice Walker. In 2017, my post racial lenses cracked under the sheer density of the truth weighing down on them and I saw my country, if I can even call it that anymore, truly for the first time.
By the year 2020, I had started my Master’s Program. I’d torn into the canon of James Baldwin. I read Go Tell it on the Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Fire Next Time, Evidence of Things Unseen, and Notes of a Native Son. I was acutely aware of WEB DuBois’ position that all Black art must serve as a political propaganda for our people; concurrently, I also knew of Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal’s addendum to those Harlem Renaissance dogmas: now, art needed to be a weapon, sharp and concise, to cut through the fabric of the American mythos. I was no longer a pleading Black boy begging to see himself through the lens of American history; I now could see my own history and my fractured dual sight consolidated into something new and vibrant. I understood now, for the first time, that I was not ugly for being Black, rather the world around me had not yet caught up to the standards of beauty so effortlessly displayed through my ancestors, predecessors, and peers. I had not only come of age; I had come of race. When I was a teenager, Trump stumbled into office for the first time; I was an 18 year old student and I was learning the tools that I needed to combat the narratives around me, I responded to the injustice as an activist, with the spoken word and the picket sign and a lighter (I certainly burned at least one American flag in those rebellious years).
Times have changed; I am 27 years old and as of this Black History Month, Trump is only a few weeks into another four year tenure in office. I now have my own students perilously journeying up and down the Racial Mountain in search of their own answers. As a child, I responded with protest. I’m doing my best to, as a man, respond with pedagogy. Many of my students ask, with concern plastered across their faces, what is to become of their friends, teachers, and families who hail from other countries. Their eyes look wearily at a future plagued by an imminent climate crisis that our politicians seem reluctant to acknowledge and they hold grave concerns over the state of their inheritance—a country they can participate in shaping that respects their basic humanity. I can only hope that the lessons of the past, of goodwill, community, and mutual aid, will be enough to guide them.
