This is America, Today

Photograph by Grey Villet used in ‘At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance’ by Danielle McGuire.

A precarious tightrope where your feet are needles if your skin contains more than the accepted melanin. America today wasn’t a reality for me yesterday, or the week before, or the times when it’s become so blatantly transparent that there’s still a race issue in the country (segregation was, after all, less than 100 years ago). America today wasn’t my America yesterday or the day before because, perhaps, I’d been entirely oblivious to the pervasive severity of prejudice and imbedded ideologies that’ve long stood in this country before I’d been born, and before either of my parents had been born (and before their parents had been born, and so on).

Does the average passerbyer on the street look at me and see danger? Uncertainty? Before, it was a light knock on the walls of my mind that evolved into the defacing and dilapidation of it. I’ve got friends who’ve decided to vote for our new president- individuals who chose to do so based on idiosyncratic convictions that I can’t pin down with one summarization of words, but can summarize what it is they supported when they casted that vote. It isn’t necessary for me to list the innumerable sacrilegious ideologies that this particular nominee has and supports, but the question to pose is: what do these friends see in me when I sit down? Am I a danger to them? Do I make them as uneasy as the world makes me?

Does the average passerbyer see me and glance down at boiling skin that shrivels and evaporates when it senses or sees danger? Yesterday I wouldn’t have assumed such a science fiction but, in my most prosaic simplification, this is reality. I am a threat. All minorities- from Blacks, Muslims, Asians, the LGBTQ community, and much more- are already united in solidarity; the solidarity of threats. My America today, and yesterday, and for my 20 years of existence has always placed that red dot on my tongue but I never saw because I kept my mouth closed, be in willingly or out of obliviousness. It’s been the fact of my life, and the lives of minorities of all breeds that the average passerbyer is representative of a larger than life ideology that’s a result of words and actions passed down from generations and generations. The only thing I thought about when seeing the electoral college shift into a sickening red was a question: What’s my worth?

Are you what you say you’re worth or are you what other people say you’re worth? Similarly, are you what you say you are, or are you what other people say you are? I’m not a threat, but if that skin boils poisonous bubbles when it catches my sight, or my presence, is it on me?

I’ve been telling coworkers, close friends, and strangers alike to “be safe.” It’s a naturally inclined statement; it just somersaults flawlessly off my tongue, 10 out of 10 routine. It’s a daily comment that hasn’t been stripped of weight unlike the “I love you’s” or the “have a good day’s” that I have in my arsenal of gray, weightless resignations. What does it mean when I say “be safe?” I’m telling someone to stop the inevitable from happening; to stop a cruel world from bestowing cruel obstacles upon a pure soul. What I’m asking is impossible. You can’t be safe but it’s what you have to do. Just be safe.

Be safe when you walk out the door, be safe scrolling your newsfeed, be safe when you’re deliberately not being safe- out drinking, socializing with unknown and interesting individuals, and wherever else. Right now is the worst time to be apprehensive, and capitalize on your individual vices and say “this is what I’m worth, to me & to my country.” Election season wasn’t a fight, and I can’t even say the next four years is going to be “the real fight.” You fight your entire life.

There’s that quote that reads: “When you fall, you get right back up.” But life is a succession of trips. Life is one constant fall. It’s one thing one day, and another thing another day. Find comfort with the fall, and find solace with the fall. Never be apprehensive about when you’ll hit the bottom, because it’s only about the direction you’re falling in at that moment.

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