1. There hasn’t been a need for such collective healing:
I’m a proponent of action and as a community organizer, I seen it’s real effects. But yesterday, today and tomorrow I say, take time for you. Community organizer, parent, college student, whatever you may be. If you need to journal, to draw, to get a group of people and discuss and cry, then do it. Think this is dramatic? Go on to part two.
2. If you don’t feel the same pain other people are feeling, don’t shame others for feeling it.
Let’s be real clear here. A large portion of the nation is hurting because a man whose campaign was run on racism, prejudice, misogyny, xenophobia and outright hate has taken the highest office of the country. And some of his supporters feel so validated, hate crimes are being reported and directly linked with the election results. And specific populations are being targeted. So when people feel pain, maybe it’ for fear for themselves, their families, their children, their communities, their society… but it’s NOT DRAMATIC. People are grieving because we’ve lost the one thing we’ve been disillusioned into thinking we always had… security.3. Don’t say “he [Trump] can’t do ALL that” to try to comfort people.
3. If you can come to me with a Ph.D in political science, I’ll believe you. But otherwise, you need to understand two things. This nation has gotten away with unconstitutional policies in the past. The same hate we see in some people today is the same hate that propelled those policies, the kinds that forbade people from voting or being placed in internment camps. We are in no way morally exempt from that in 2016. And you can’t argue we are when states are refusing police reform despite black bodies in the street, when the No Fly List has names on there for no reason and you can’t do anything about it. Checks and balances is a pretty concept, it really is. But it still has holes. For example, how well will it work when the Senate and House of Reps are controlled by the same party the Executive branch is? That’s a shift of power we need to be conscious of. The second thing to answer is as of right now, a lot of people aren’t even afraid because of the policy, we’re a long ways from that (for now). What some of us are sincerely concerned about is the societal shift that has occurred. What was now considered shameful oppression is being normalized. People used to be EMBARRASSED to be racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc… Seems that’s not the case anymore. People are intentionally displaying their bigotry through vandalization, intimidation and violence.
4. We were asleep, but we're awake and we're woke.
The communities that have stakes are not taking this sitting down.They're taking it to the streets, they're building coalitions, they're offering spaces of healing, they're discussing, they're learning and they're moving forward. We may be burdened by the legacy of oppression in this nation, but that legacy is closely followed by a legacy of people who fight to overcome that oppression. So perhaps minorities and communities of color will need to be a lot more uncomfortable than before, That's okay, because in the words of Kendrick Lamar, "we gon' be alright."
So maybe (or maybe not) you're wondering about the title of the blog, "What Time is It," and what does it have to do with the blog itself. Quite simply, we tend to remove the struggles of the present from the context of all of time. No single time (be it a moment or a century) can be removed from the concept of time itself. When we do that, we either don't understand why problems are actually problems or we don't think problems can be tackled. For example, we see folks living in very poor conditions as "lazy and not hard-working" because we ignore the decades and decades of systematic oppression that contributes to their plight today. Or we those same people and we think "they'll never conquer their poverty" and we don't remember the people who fought the good fight to empower the dis-empowered. So with all that said, I ask you with our history and our future in mind... what time is it?
If you want to continue the conversation, need advice on community outreach post-elections, have more questions on my personal thoughts, you can shoot an email by clicking the Contact button at the top of the page.
H. Al.
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