How Does This All End?

These are my thoughts on voting and the upcoming election. It feels as if it will truly answer the question: what America do we live in? Every time I think of November 3rd, I can’t stop my heart from clenching.

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I have a vivid memory of my mother bursting into tears in front of the television as the final results for the 2012 presidential election poured in. Awkwardness consumed me as I nervously patted her shoulder. 

“Mama, why are you crying? It’s not that big of a deal. He won again, that’s all. He was gonna win anyway.”

“It is a massive deal, Madison,” mama explained through her tears. “This has never happened before. Your grandma’s and my generation never thought we’d see something like this, ever. This is history.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand how Obama’s reelection was ground-breaking. Bear with me now, I was under the impression the world thought blackness was as great and beautiful as I thought it was. I did not yet realize the world framed blackness in opposition to whiteness--that it would try to convince me to crave such whiteness. I knew 2008 was huge, but winning a second election? How?

Looking back on that memory, I cringe, realizing how much of the hate directed towards people like me hadn’t sunk in yet. Perhaps it lay on the edge of my consciousness, a realization that something about me threatened certain people. Perhaps it was the secret truth behind my existence, that my struggling arms held up the whole American dream, along with others like me. 

Sometimes I wonder if that moment in 2012 ever happened. If I dreamed up the fact that a Black woman and man sat in the White House and ran the country. 

I’m very careful when I think back to then. Though I’m tempted to idealise that time of “openness” and “diversity,” what I perceived as a “better time” was actually a reality shrouded in naivete. The hate and malice that dogs the surface now has always been there, a lot of people just pretend its shadows died off long ago. 

Flash forward to today, where on my morning walks, signs such as “Vote Christian and Republican” and “Vote Trump Pence” scream out from the sidewalk. Each one is a reminder of how close white supremacy and hatred lurks beneath the surface. Each one is a reminder of how deeply entwined this power is in the machinations of this country. I think that’s why this election feels so foreign, as if there is something cataclysmic at stake. As if the wrong choice will rip the floor out from beneath our feet. 

I won’t let fear speak to me, but I hear its voice regardless. 

Confronting the arrogance of white supremacy daily exhausts me. The fact that there is no quick solution, that every path to real change requires a years and decades-long unearthing and revamping America’s systemic bias against black and brown people, drains me even still. 

But still I hope. 

My hope speaks through a vote. 

We’re all tired--at least the people who care are. The people who want to tear this rotted system out from its roots. But please vote. I’m not sure if I’m preaching to the choir, but if I am, just know you got this--we got this--and whatever happens, we’ll face it together.