Where Do They Keep the White People?

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

I try to rise up each time the pits of Trump fears and anger draw me down. Many people speak of the tangle of old fears and new, past traumatic times bleeding into these times now, like a ruined watercolor painting – liquid stress muddying what needs above all at this time to be crystal clear. Friends talk of their inability to read the newspaper, watch television news or go to social media. “I listen to music, read a book, take a walk,” each one says. I do the same, but then we reverse ourselves: we must stay informed. How else to prepare for the inevitable struggles ahead?

I remember the models and lessons of past resistance, the times and ways people fought back, within ourselves and in the streets. In every memoir by an African American writer, I have told generations of students, there is a moment – early, maybe when the writer is five or six years old – of racial consciousness: what skin color means besides being a shade of tan or brown. I am Black – and from that moment on, the necessity is entrenched: to fight against assaults on dignity, on freedom: I am happy to fight all outside murderers as I see I must, wrote Alice Walker, a battle to ward off invasion of the inside. “We have lived through worse,” my African American husband of nearly 50 years has said repeatedly since the election results left many of us first in a state of shock, then of horror. Recalling years of growing up in total segregation in the Jim Crow South, he says, “It was hard, it was very oppressive, but we got through. And we will get through this.” Dubiously? Courageously – speaking of the threats to democracy we now must face, the spectrum of vicious hatreds at the center of a vicious campaign, reiterated in the inaugural address.

Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around.

The civil rights movement, in both philosophy and strategies, gave birth to all our movements for liberation, here and across the globe, and O