Modern Day America- 8/12/2018
The air in Washington DC, the day of the alt-right, “Unite the Right” rally, only seemed to carry a small stench of resentment, hate, and fear. Despite the present political climate, I felt nostalgia, instead of anger, that day as small pockets of the city, if I squinted a bit, could be likened to it’s past namesake, Chocolate City. I believe that my immediate surroundings assisted me in conjuring up this fictitious setting as I brunched in a black owned establishment with 12 black Americans to discuss the book “Black Klansman,” while we geared up for the newest Spike Lee joint.
I wasn’t concerned with the alt-right rally. So, when my mother sent numerous text messages making sure that I didn’t attend as a counter protester, I found it tedious to explain how ridiculous and far reaching it was for me to be moved by such normalcy. Eight years abroad hasn’t been long enough for me to forget the threading of America. My recollections of her are still vividly etched into who I am as a black American woman, even as I wonder and wander. In all of America’s past “glories and greatness,” she has always been racist and hateful towards African Americans and other minorities. Her establishment derived on this very principal and practice.
Yet, as I stood just blocks away from the white supremacy rally, I made a conscious effort to take it all in. I wanted to be able to remember what was happening directly around me while hatred gathered a train stop away. I wanted to remember the hip hop music that blasted as guys danced in the hopes of gathering a crowd just steps away from our group as we huddled around the artwork of IG: @artgillumo as he continued to remind us that we could get two drawings for $20. I stared at a Black Lives Matter picture and wondered where I would place it in my house and how I would explain the purchasing of it to my foreign born, but black American, children. Would I be able to vividly capture this scene of “fuck Trump” graffiti on the glass of bus shelters and protest flyers against the Alt Right March plastered on the side of brick buildings? Of modern day pop lock dancers whose music made it hard for me to hear the gentleman with the t-shirt that read “White Supremacy is Terrorism” as he sifted through his friend’s 2 for $20 drawings all while being surrounded by white people in China Town where I waited to see the movie BlacKkKlansman just blocks away from a modern day Klan’s rally? Would I be able to explain why the abstract and colorful man holding a yellow sign that read Blacks Lives Matter sounded louder than everything else around me? Probably not. But as I head back to South Carolina I wish I would have gotten the piece just the same.
