I wasn’t supposed to ever forget the day because it was my son’s ninth birthday. In the middle of a pandemic, we still thought it best to keep this tradition. On the news, anchors kept reiterating that the day’s proceedings wouldn’t normally get this much attention if not for the president’s consistent obfuscation about the proceedings. One by one, he and his cronies started speaking on a podium in DC in a small picture-in-picture set-up on the bottom right corner with no audio, but the events of the day weren’t supposed to get much coverage other than a demonstration and a confirmation.
Then, the insurrection struck. Just then, the America so many of us knew came into HD view. Rogue recusants made their way with ease up the Capitol steps. The crowd thought to have dissipated after Election Day had intended on discrediting the process by any means necessary. The idea that the United States of America had ostensibly descended into a “third-world banana republic” – whatever that means – seemed to flummox many of the anchors and correspondents witnessing the red caps slide through Capitol Rotunda. The “blue lives matter” chants were not to be found as they trampled and passed by Capitol police while flashing badges of their own. As the velvet ropes widened, it became more evident that many of the police in charge of maintaining security would watch along with us, unabated and unconcerned about drawing guns the way they had at the Black Lives Matter protestors all summer.
My son, nine years old and a hundred years wise, wasn’t surprised. While no person of color belongs to a tight-knit monolith, our experiences in this country allow us to see things in this country that it doesn’t see in itself. We know to tell the truth to our youth long before they’re supposedly ready for it, lest the truth reveals itself before we get to. This is one of those moments when “I told you so” doesn’t hit the mark. Even saying things like “Black people constantly have to save white people from themselves” puts so many of us, again, on the defense, as if we didn’t see how the Trump administration wouldn’t scale back norms in the name of white comfort.
Our country will insist on teachers telling the fable of America in all its exceptionalism and destiny. It’s bad enough that the last few decades of education reform have relegated social studies to a second-class elective. We also have a myriad of textbooks downplaying slavery, course maps that never trace to Native American genocide, and singalongs that herald Columbus as a hero. In the last four years, we’ve heard America should be a “marketplace of ideas,” never reckoning with the idea that white supremacy and fascism are awful ideas that inevitably get offered in such a market.
Our kids learn that choice here, too, is deeply connected to a matrix of elements, much of which is out of their direct influence.
It’s not enough to have an anti-fascist (antifa?) teacher much like one teacher of color isn’t enough to erase a student’s internalized racism. Teachers are certainly important in this calculus. As agents of the state, teachers have a prescribed set of standards and content we’re asked to impart on children, stated or otherwise. Students in this country spend a significant time of their childhood in front of teachers, all great opportunities to ensure these students have the tools by which to negotiate the world. But the “one teacher” dynamic oft espoused in movies elides the fact that so many of the “truth-telling” teachers get summarily marginalized, ostracized, and fired from their schools, especially if they’re of color.
Even as we speak, a large segment of Congress is working to subdue notions of impeachment, the most effective governance tool to remedy the Inciter-In-Chief’s incendiary comments and actions. Part of what this does is absolve America from having to remedy the centuries of oppression, suppression, and dereliction of its duties to espouse the very beliefs they hold on paper. Holding onto this idea of America as a world leader in democracy obviously negates its own attempts at inference in countries across the world, but, just as importantly, it keeps its own citizens from suggesting that America isn’t living up to promises it made to its own people. If anything, everything Trump has done up to this point suggests his advocates have made anything he does part and parcel of what America does.
Fine. But this also means those of us who’ve been racially marginalized and oppressed by the same set of ideals can be rightly unsurprised by all of this. Rather than call for the dissolution of America since it can’t seem to get beyond its own racist, xenophobic, colonial past in truth and reconciliation. Nevermind what we tell children about America. What do adults tell themselves about America? What does “normal” mean for us? Are our definitions of “normal” the same?
When we teach, what does “hope” mean? Because there’s a vast majority of teachers who walk into the classroom defining hope as a linear function of historical progress and a smaller set of us who understand these “setbacks” as part of America’s core. Trump attacks America by appealing to outwardly delegitimizing the rights and humanity of people America has also deemed second and third class. Some of us go into teaching because and not despite that fact. We weren’t overreacting back then and aren’t overreacting now.
Surely, I wouldn’t wish for America to have a repeat of what we saw on Wednesday, but if those most responsible for correcting course let this moment pass for fear or for political aspiration, we’ll never see the peace we purport to seek. Many of us read between the lines when a country founded by white male landowners was able to trample on millions of other human beings in such linear fashion. As Timothy Snyder says in this excellent piece, “this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.” The past hasn’t passed.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, my son’s birthday went on as planned. Trump wasn’t about to take this day from us, too.