This week, this country has elected a egotistical bigot to become the next president of the United States. I am saddened, scared and sobered by it but I am not shocked. This country was founded on favoring white male landowners. The founding fathers were racist slaveowners who though the only men who should be seen as their equals were white, landowning men. I was not included as equal in their vision of the future of this country. This is the country where in 1915, Woodrow Wilson showed the racist film Birth of a Nation at the White House. Jim Crow, segregation, Japanese internment camps, immigrant quotas and exclusion acts, and the like were not that long ago. There are people still alive who lived through those times.
I am not going to pretend to be shocked that this country could elect someone like Trump. It feels surreal. It feels like a reality TV show and it makes sense he is now the leader of this show. But as Colson Whitehead said in The Underground Railroad, America was built on a delusion. It is a grand delusion, built on white supremacist, patriarchal ideals, like manifest destiny. I am not going to pretend otherwise. The mask has been uncovered and we need to accept it in order to move forward. This is what we are dealing with still.
I want to keep moving forward. I want to keep that spirit that kept my ancestors moving forward. Because despite all that history of them telling us we did not deserve a future that we wanted, we are still here. Maybe I am delusional as well, just like Valentine farm in Whitehead’s book, but sometimes we need to fight delusion with delusion, myth with myth. That is why I will continue fighting, continue writing stories that reflect who we really are and can be, not who they tell us we are and can be, continue having this platform to share voices who advocate for alternative presents and futures. We are not going to aid in making American great again for the select few. As Jay Smooth said, the only glimpse of America’s true greatness was our resistance and through that resistance America has reached closer to its ideals. We will continue to fight to create a new vision for America, one that lives up to its ideals, as we have always done.
And I leave you with this line from Parliament’s “Mothership Connection:” “You have overcome because I am here.”
We are here.
(BTW: The My-Stery series title is now changed to The M(N)STRY.)
Sherese Francis: Futuristically Ancient 