Flashback: I wrote this in 2016 after the stunt queen of America was first elected...it's only gotten worst
back when his impending presidency was my number 1 feeling
A/N: The following are remarks that I delivered as a speaker at a round table panel in November 2016. The election of Donald Trump brought up the pain of #Brexit all over again for me. I felt a sense of statelessness I have not felt since I left the US. I channelled my feelings into my remarks. They reflect my thinking about the violence that white nationalism enacts on Black people, and how the very concept of white nationalism and identity also is simultaneously dependent on seeing Black people as objects through which to reassert white identity. Borderless and fluid, my reflections touch on Britain, the United States and Jamaica.
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18th November, 2016
The BBC is presently airing its #BlackandBritish season. A very good series of programmes, I encourage you to watch them. Also to question why it is that we do not have more home-grown, black-centred programmes, especially fiction, art, comedy, that is able to stake claim to this land through telling our (his)tories. Our labour and dehumanization helped usher in the process of modernity. And as professor David Olusoga showed in Black and British: A Forgotten History, our roots and contributions to this country go back centuries before modernity, back to Roman rule. The depths of our contributions have not been sufficiently excavated, circulated nor celebrated.
The very fact that there is such a thing as a #BlackandBritish season speaks to the general relegation and regulation of blackness in this nation. Even the denotation of ‘Black AND British’ reminds us that blackness is not analogous with this nation.
So much so that we need the conjunction ‘and’ to anchor us to the nation. It is similar in the US where the hyphen in African-American serves as the anchor. The inexhaustive racial drama we see coming out of the US often allows Britain to feel smug, and obscures how blackness is regulated inside its own borders. To define itself, nationalism depends on what and whom it excludes—both in the sense of geography and identity. You could possess the right passport and still not belong. This is the brutishness inherent in Britian and US nationalism (though they are not alone). The anchors are never permanent, as we must continually claim our right to belong here.
So why does the idea and reality of Black history matter so much to this nation? Erasure of identity, of culture, of history is a type of violence—a symbolic (and often literal) one—that when enacted on the peoples of African descent, it serves to strengthen white superiority, privilege and sense of “natural” belongingness to the nation. The picture gets painted for white people. Imagine if you grew up hearing, repeatedly, about the exploits of your ancestors that those exploits were framed as necessary, morally sound, and responsible for the success of Western civilization. Imagine, too, that all your life, your ancestors have been spoken of in terms of heroism, sacrifice, and service. Things that fill you with pride and patriotism, even unconsciously. Imagine again that what you are told of “the Others” is how they fought against your ancestors, capitulated to their superior might thus letting them exploit those people and their lands; depended on your ancestors to show them the “enlightened” way of progress; and that those “Others” later flocked to partake in the imagined goodness of this nation, escaping the hell of poor, corrupt lands that used to be under the rule and influence of your ancestors.
Earlier this year I watched US Congressional Representative, Steve King, in the presence of a Black pundit, remark earnestly on CNN that these “Others” have not contributed anything valuable to western civilization. That it is white people that we have to thank for that. This man is partly responsible for shaping the laws of a nation. He is not alone in his thinking. In other words, white identity is constantly being reinforced as good, as essential, as superiorly intelligent, clever, the definition of leadership, the gate-keeper of belongingness. The genius of it is done via exclusion. Leaving out the contributions of Black people’s significance in the architecture of this nation; framing our presence and role as subordinate or intellectually sub-par gives everyone permission to marginalize us as inessential to the nation. If one is inessential, then the message is that one’s life does not #matter. For Black people, this can promote shame in our own heritage. We have nothing to be shameful of.
In November, Ebony magazine made a short online video encouraging Black Americans to vote. In a powerful moment, the young lady in the video remarked, “We are the children of architects.” I swelled with pride because it was true. Because I never heard it put that way in a single history book during my schooling in Washington, DC, and not in a university classroom.
Our ancestors were architects and builders of a nation from which they are regularly excluded, jailed, killed, and othered. There is no more recent proof of this than the Black Liberation Movement, which encompasses #BlackLivesMatter. And how could I forget that we are entering a new Trumpian era where the violent rhetoric of white nationalism, and all the exclusions of belongingness upon which it depends, won an inept, mediocre white male tyrant the presidency? His entire platform was white nationalism. Advised, in part, by white British peddlers of the same, Nigel Farage, a key figure of Brexit.
Initially, I was shocked to wake up to a Trump win last week in the US. But then I thought of the rise of white nationalism under 8 years of a Black president, the Tea Party movement and white Republican obstruction that took a country hostage, and the shock quickly wore off. But I am still grieving. Many think of white nationalism as spray painting swastikas, the KKK, calling Black people ‘nigger’, really obvious things. But white nationalism is more insidious and, therefore, more dangerous than that. White nationalism is in the expectation that electing a Black president will absolve the nation of its racial crimes and usher in an era where race magically does not exist. “I don’t see colour; all lives matter to me” is as much an expression of white nationalism as the state-sponsored killing of unarmed Black people with impunity. Both deny the value of our existence. White nationalism sees a Black person rise to the highest office in the land, and has an identity crisis because the 43 presidents before Barack Obama were white men. They took it for granted. Much like unearned privileges of whiteness get taken for granted every day. Because whiteness is binarily dependent on the exclusion of blackness, when a black person inhabits a space in which they are not seen to belong, whiteness has to find ways to reaffirm its identity. And that is what happened this year: Britain and the US re-affirmed the legitimacy of their whiteness. Historically, whenever white identity needs to be reaffirmed, the consequences are detrimental to Black people. And so I mourn Donald Trump’s presidency.
I am an American citizen with no direct Black American ancestors. I am Jamaican, born of enslaved Africans and indentured Indian servants. My ancestors, with their labour and their bodies helped propel Britain towards riches and success, and when it was broken by a war, they came to help repair it. So I stake claim with my anchor to take up space in history, in your imagination, and in your reality. That is my birthright. A right I claim here in Britain and America. Or wherever my future takes me.
20th January 2025
This will be my one post centring on that man's presidency and his regime because this time around, my mental posture is different. The opposite of ‘love’ is not ‘hate’; it’s starvation of attention. That means I will not give American media outlets clicks and views for covering him, including social media personalities who have developed careers in opposition to him. I won’t be marching for shit (voting accomplishes more), and I won’t be giving commentary to journalists about moves by the regime. I won’t be accepting invitations to debate-style events that center policies of this regime.
I started this blog because I refuse to spend another four years with high blood pressure from anger and anxiety over something my fellow American citizens willingly chose, no matter how dumb. I feel sorry for no one who voted for him. Of course, I know those who chose correctly and must suffer through these next years are omitted from those feelings. I will focus on those I can help, principally my Black loved ones still living in the USA.
Thanks for reading.