When your relationship with your country is full of red flags

I recently discussed what it feels like to be a person of a certain demographic to a coworker. I said we are all given these vehicles (our physical bodies), and the way we present ourselves to the world is represented first by these "vehicles" we are driving. Sure, you can do some things to modify your vehicle, but overall appearance and first impression is of the color, make and model of this vehicle, one you had no choice in selecting. People may treat you differently based on the vehicle you're driving, and they may treat others better based on their personal vehicle preference. My main point to this coworker was, we can know these things are happening, but we can not definitively prove it's because of their bias. This is what microaggressions feel like. This is what not getting a job might feel like. This is what Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measures were intended to alleviate.

We are experiencing a presidential administration that might as well say, "We're going to play in your face and there's nothing you can do about it." This is a place where the base assumption is, if you're not a white, Christian (let's add the quiet part here: Nationalist), heterosexual male, you didn't earn your high ranking position. The default assumption is that you aren't qualified, and this is why so many of us harbor symptoms of impostor syndrome and feelings of not belonging. We are witnessing things occurring that, if Barack Obama had done any of this, he would have been impeached immediately, and removed from office. Why can't we prove it? Because we also know if Barack Obama had arrived as as a candidate the way 2016 Trump had arrived, he would not have been a candidate. We wouldn't even have known his name because he would never have reached any scenario for public consideration. Again, we can't prove this, but we know it.

We are witnessing that all of the hand wringing over caring about the Constitution, while showing that our rights don't matter. We heard cries for "merit-based" selections that were bullshit, a ruse to show us this argument was a mere distraction, a way to get people buy into the story that unqualified people were unfairly taking jobs and preventing submediocity true talent from succeeding, while we watch a slew of clearly unqualified people stepping into high level positions without any of the ever-important merit we've heard so much about. It's frustrating to watch, but whenever these things happen, as a black woman, it feels oddly validating. Everyone sees what we've suspected all along.

My 19 year old often feels despair about all of it. She sees a country that doesn't value its citizens, or care about equality, and in fact the lack of equality is the point, and serves as the foundation of so much of our country's prosperity. We have conversations about the need for a reckoning that we know will never happen. We can see it in the burning of a plantation and the memes that followed. On one Facebook friend's wall, she posted about it, explaining there was no need to rebuild, and that she didn't feel bad for the owners. It was her wall, and her opinion. Even with this, a (white male) friend commented, judging her for her lack of sympathy over the property damage. Despite paragraphs of explaining there would be no sympathy for people who knowingly bought a property with a history of the atrocities that accompany American slavery, and turned it into a wedding venue; that the human suffering represented by that structure far outweighed someone's loss of property. Why is this so hard to understand? Why do so many feel entitled to request empathy from us, when they have no capacity to be empathetic towards us regarding our country's history, regarding the way people are so eager to seek a reason to explain or justify when a black person is murdered by the police, or to insist when our president, who happens to be black, was not born here.

I know Trump was elected as backlash to having a black president. I sometimes ask myself if it was worth having eight years of an Obama presidency when it meant we've gone through three election cycles with Trump on the ticket, and two terms. I don't have an answer, and I don't know if I ever will. I remember the hope and excitement when Barack Obama was elected. I remember my mother's joy as she said, "I feel like he's my son." I remember how rosy and optimistic I felt. This past November, I felt despair, fear, and like I had been duped because I bought into the ideals we use as a selling point for our country. At nearly 50, I have to accept and believe the darker reality -- the same way we face the truth about relationships that aren't working for us. You can't fall in love with potential.

At my job (and many other people's jobs, I'm sure), we are urged not to talk politics. Again, this is part of the problem, isn't it? Not talking about it, going along to get along. The culture of this country encourages behavior intended to avoid resolving the root problem. That funny thing happens -- the thing you're familiar with if you've ever been in a relationship where an issue keeps rcurring without resolution, to the point that the issue becomes old and beyond the statute of limitations -- you become the problem for bringing up that "old shit." It's all old shit -- the racism, the class disparity, the need to subjugate women in a way that does not allow them to have bodily autonomy -- all things intended to get us back to giving lipservice that we value equality, while setting the stage to cultivate the opposite.