I was thinking the other day about the presidential election – about the danger that Donald Trump presents and the hope that Kamala Harris represents. One candidate drowns us in the past; the other offers us a chance for a different future. Trump is who he is. Nothing much has changed about him or his supporters over these difficult years. Well…maybe the intensity of their anger and boldness. But the excitement around Vice President Harris’s candidacy strikes me as different. It must be different.
For much of this election cycle, with President Biden at the top of the ticket, it felt, at least to me, that the country was barreling towards the abyss. That we were losing the very idea of the future so central to America’s promise, because our past and its ugly ghosts (represented in the bombast of Trump and MAGA) were swallowing everything, including us, whole. The assault on women’s rights, on DEI and affirmative action, on immigration and the blatant appeals to fear and hatred, all were motivated by a host of assumptions that have haunted our democracy since the beginning. At its root was the old idea that ours must remain a white Christian nation, where everyone knows their place.
Harris’s ascendance to the top of the ticket disrupted everything. And the excitement around the country and within the Democratic Party (despite the hesitations in the run up to the decision) suggests that there are some among us willing to fight for a different, a better America. Some pundits reach for the excitement of 2008 and Barack Obama’s election to account for what is happening. But this is not 2008. Too much has happened to us in between then and now. We have been through the “noise and whip of the whirlwind,” and we have yet to reach the other side.
Fare forward, travelers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus
Think about it. Obama’s mantra of hope and change gave way to the vitriol of Trumpism. We lived through a pandemic and watched over a million of our people die. Loved ones. Friends. Members of our community. They are all gone, and they’re not coming back. All the while we found ourselves in the center ring of Donald Trump’s circus surrounded by monstrous, masked clowns who threatened the foundations of the Republic. President Biden’s election gave us a moment to breathe, but the whirlwind never stopped. And we are NOT ok.
We must understand the fragility of hope in this moment. Fragile because we are so vulnerable, and we have yet to admit it. Americans have lost faith in politics and politicians and, if we are honest, we have seemingly lost faith in each other. To reach for 2008 as a way of accounting for the hopefulness of the Harris campaign ignores what has happened to all of us. Underneath the hope and excitement lie desperation and exhaustion. Americans weathered by harsh experience and tragic choices. We know what happened during and after the Obama years (the false promise of a post-racial America) that makes this hope and excitement around Vice President Harris so fragile, vulnerable, and in need of careful tending. Don’t play fast and loose with it!
In the end, our hope cannot be bound up with the fate of a politician. No matter how historic she may be. The demands of politics and the set ways of the political consultant class are what they are. And we are left, inevitably, disappointed. Too much is at stake in this election for us to invest in that familiar cycle. We the people must gather up the pieces and do this work. We must take responsibility for the country’s future. We must tend to our hopes. Electing Kamala Harris as President of the United States is just the beginning.
How might we imagine this country differently? Where our differences aren’t weighed down by the hatreds of generations, but they become the source of a new national identity, a new way of being together. The tumult of the last decade has often left me bitter. I have wondered, in my darker moments with too much drink in hand, whether the American myths that give so much color to our national story still have power and whether, in the end, this fragile experiment will survive. But there is something about being born and raised on the coast of Mississippi that constrains the despair. A blues-soaked hope emerges, and I dare to imagine America anew. Reminds me of the last stanza of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again.”
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
I have been blessed with the opportunity to express my thoughts on television and in print journalism about the state of the country and matters related to race and democracy. But with “A Native Son,” I want to do something a bit more substantive and personal. I want to probe, through writing, video and audio formats, the tragic choices that have brought us to this moment and to help build a community of inquirers hell-bent on transforming our country. I want to curate conversations that bridge different spheres of American life: journalists and scholars, artists and politicians and everyday people talking with one another about what kind of future is possible for us. I also want to bring my full self to the table: public intellectual, scholar, teacher, commentator, Mississippi boy, wounded son. To risk being vulnerable on the page and with you; to build trust and community with love.
We will draw on resources from literature, history, politics, and culture that give shape to this fragile experiment and will inform our imaginative leaps. We will struggle with the ghosts of the past and grapple with the challenges of today all with an eye towards imagining a new America – a journey of discovery of who we can be. “Fare forward, travelers !” as T.S. Eliot declared.
Much of the content of “A Native Son” will be available to all subscribers. We are trying to build what I call “a community of the decent.” However, your paid subscription can help us grow in our collective efforts to build a better America. Paid subscribers will have access to NOTES, which serves as a platform to share my thoughts about current events, politics, or what I am reading. You will also have access to CHAT where I plan to host “Office Hours” on a weekly basis, where we can talk in real time. Here you can ask questions about my commentary or what we are reading together and express your concerns about the state of our democracy. The aim here is for us to engage in conversation regularly.
Still, much of the content of “A Native Son” will be free and available to all! You will be able to access opinion pieces, long form essays, and some video and audio commentary in addition to other archival content of mine (e.g., previous podcasts, appearances, and speeches). Our aim will always be to build community. I hope you will join me and, together, we will “make America again!”
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