November 8, 2016 - 23:54
I'm flipping through my copy of Between the World and Me and I'm looking for something I can write about but I can't bring myself to turn away from the horrible unreality of the election. I'm shaken and I'm fearful of what tomorrow might look like. I'm speechless but I'm somehow not surprised...yes, America is proving herself to be just as fundamentally, cruelly racist as she always was. The sharpness of the moment hits me as I'm scrolling through multiple feeds on different media platforms, through posts about election coverage and the DAPL and BLM and SJP. The pain of the fact that social movements like BLM and protests against the DAPL can happen alongside the rise of D*nald T*ump is very real. A part of me thinks that this is just the way things are. America is racist, but racism is American thing. It's American and it persists: old prejudices are not just reproduced, they are reinvented, reconfigured into more insidious forms for future use. As Black people and Native people lay claim to their power, beauty, and agency, white people are growing more insecure in whiteness' ability to maintain their place at the top of a social heirarchy. There is so much power in this moment.
Coates writes that he is "convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free...To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans" (143). This seems especially relevant and striking to me, on today, of all days. He writes, "Should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them," acknowledging that people of color, and especially Black Americans, are inevitably going to be caught in the collateral damage inflicted by white America whenever the full force of its racist past is called back into focus in the present (150).