What A Difference A Day Makes, Or, Re-opening My Eyes to Hard Truths

After sleeping on the terror-fying reality of four more years of an unstable egomaniac occupying the White House, I tried to face the day. America has once again proven that misogyny is something even racists can agree on, and I have zero interest in laying blame and talking ad nauseam about who didn’t do what. So in the absence of any kind of morning-after pill, I had to take to my bed again, like a delicate antebellum flower with the vapors.

Before the election, I was drunk on hope and joy; led my GOTV postcard group, Anita’s Peach Corps in the writing of 20K postcards to Georgia, which is red again. After my nap, I woke spitting mad with a proper snake eye for the whole business. I don’t have a lot to add to this conversation, and mainly came to the page to share the link to a piece by someone much smarter than I with much more to say: Sherrilyn Ifill.

But I’m also here with a reminder. If you find yourself saying, “I don’t recognize this country,” consider that what you don’t recognize is your idea of this country; the idea sold by America’s original architects; the idea of freedom for all that’s been burnished and polished to shine like the Capitol’s dome, and is cloaked by the patinaed folds of Lady Liberty’s robe.

During 2016-2020, I was putting finishing touches on my debut novel, The Peach Seed, and research took me into the horrors of America’s Middle Passage enslavement period, Civil War, Reconstruction and Civil Rights. And now, I’m researching a different arm of the era for my second book, Headrag. It was/is extremely hard simultaneously walking around inside that history while witnessing it repeat itself over four hundred years later with modern day lynchings, disenfranchisement and oppression, aided by social media and AI and sanctioned by a wanna-be-dictator. It is gut-wrenching to read the narratives of enslaved people, while hearing the stories of current-day victims of the same injustices uplifted in speeches by our Democratic leaders and brutally mocked by Republicans.

This is all by design, a direct reflection of our past. The founding “fathers” were a group of crafty, white, domestic terrorists, I don’t use supremacists because there’s nothing supreme about them. They were wealthy enslavers, and brilliant marketing strategists devoted to the economic strength of the many institutions of oppression and disenfranchisement they constructed. America’s Charters of Freedom: The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were created to preserve those institutions with no eye to a future without them.

And therein lies the crux. Who are the rightful heirs to America’s promise of justice and freedom for all? In 2024, devout, self-appointed descendants of the founding terrorists stand by and stand ready to defend their rights to be the sole benefactors of that promise. They have a leader and they have a plan.

America is too afraid to pull back the curtain and face the hard truths of our democracy. We can’t expect a country legally born on the backs of enslaved and oppressed peoples to grow up to be anything other than what it is. In the 10% of this country’s socio-political iceberg, we have the Charters of Freedom and Washington DC, complete with buildings and monuments erected to all we allegedly stand for. Underneath, in the 90%, America is exactly who its always been; a nation where the scales of freedom are weighed down with extreme biases, hidden policies, corruption and lies that keep it from realizing the promise of freedom for all. Those of us who believe in democracy will never stop fighting to balance the scales.

And now, a new Republican regime is headed back to the White House. This iceberg’s 10% bulges with their egomaniacal puppet, and in the 90% lies their twisted plan for America. It’s called Project 2025. We know what’s in it, therefore, we know where we continue our work. As Coretta Scott King said, “Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.”

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We’ve had a day to whine and cry and moan. Enough. Time to keep the wagons circled around our families, communities and causes and stay focused on the work. Here’s a good place to start; Sherrilyn Ifill’s newsletter where she reminds us that out of the devastation of “sharecropping, convict leasing, lynching, wealth theft, and degradation, the Harlem Renaissance was born and Blacks built institutions, like the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (America’s first Black labor union), the Schomburg Center,” and many more.

Please read and apply accordingly:  https://open.substack.com/pub/sherrilyn/p/why-are-we-here?utm_source=direct&r=7iuh8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web