You're fired!

Too soon?

I originally wanted to title this post:

Why I’m Voting for Trump

However, I did not title this post, Why I’m Voting for Trump, and I did not vote for Trump. I merely wanted to employ clickbait. Yet because I believe clickbait and media sensationalism are pervasive reasons our country is in the position it is, I figured it wouldn’t be as humorous as I first thought.

Then I wanted to title this post:

I Voted for Hillary Because I’m Privileged

However, I, again, did not title this post, I Voted for Hillary Because I’m Privileged, but I did vote for Hillary, and I am in fact privileged. I am a postgraduate student studying in London on a federal scholarship grant. I am white. I am straight. Although I am a female, my existence has never been questioned (well, excluding some times in middle school). I am formally educated. I have a passport spotted with stamps. I have support, in every essence of the word—financially, emotionally, spiritually. I have coffee. I have dance. I have the power of choice.

For a while I struggled with the idea of adding my voice to the murky milieu of self-ascribed editorial writers, but Desmond Tutu’s voice rang above all:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

So here I am, collectivising my thoughts.

Undoubtedly, there have been fallacies flung from both sides of the partisan swamp. Nonetheless, one fallacy that irked me after the election was the sore loser spiel. Those who were on the side of ‘victory’ belittled those who were not.

“Grow up,” they said. “Stop complaining,” they patronized.

It was not a matter of growing up. The people who cried from fraught vocal cords did grow up—in oppressive conditions—and that is why they cried. That is why they cry.

At the precise moment Hillary conceded the election, I felt as if I was watching the end of the movie, Selina, in IMAX or as if all the premonitions in the chain emails I never forwarded growing up were coming true. It was as if I had learned that I don’t have an anxiety problem after all, I just have literal ants in my pants.

Donald Trump was the President of the United States of America and nothing seemed real.

Even days after the Inauguration, tears still pool in my eyes thinking about my first text conversation after Trump was hailed President-Elect. My fingers flew faster than the Tap, Tap, Revolution record-holder. (Does that person exist?) I wrote to my best friend:

But what scares me the MOST is that my best friend was made a public enemy in less than 24 hours. I am frightened for you and that frightens me at my core. I have never wanted you to think you are less than you are, and now I cry realizing that the very sentiment of others being regarded as ‘less’ is a shared political agenda. That is not judicial, that is heartbreak. I love you.

Yes, my message was charged with emotion. I needed to assert that emotion was real and valid and didn’t constitute an extemporaneous growth spurt.

No, I’m not infatuated with Hillary Rodham Clinton. I wouldn’t eat a loaf of bread for her or anything. (That is only funny if you know I'm gluten intolerant.) And physically, I accept that Donald Trump is our 45th president; but I have my reservations.

Lately I’ve seen sentiments that sing to the tune of, “I voted for Trump, but I’m not racist, homophobic, misogynistic….”

To that chorus of opinions and consequential justifications, I plug my own: I believe you. But if you are white and were born and raised in the United States, you have an unconscious racial bias. It is not a reflection of your character per se, it is merely a reflection of learned, systemic constructs that suffuses your vernacular. I am white and I have racial bias. I have also cultivated a counter-lens to introspectively scrutinize the moments in which I lean on that bias. By positioning myself in communities and circumstances dissimilar to the ones in which I grew up, I was privileged with the means to craft that lens (#Lenscrafters), but I know that I still have work to do. Many others are not as privileged to see their privilege, or maybe they're TOO privileged to want to see their privilege? Either way, the inability to see privilege isolates us from each other and makes equality impossible.

Sometimes I can’t help but think that if we were more introspectively scrutinizing and more outwardly inviting then perhaps we would have collectively rejected a Flaming Hot Cheeto—a factory-churned product engineered to razz our pleasure centers but leave us unfulfilled and undernourished in the end.

Alas, the Cheeto is now the leader of the free world and we must drink the great American Kool-Aid. Or do we?

A friend and fellow Fulbrighter said it best:

There [is] a general sense of melancholy about rising nationalism and isolationalism in Western politics. Phrased differently, a room full of people who care about international relations feel discouraged about our current direction. To this I say: Make art. See art. Read things. Write things. Engage with real news. Visit museums. Learn something new about history.

I appreciate this particular call to action. It is the more eloquently-constructed reply to blokes who plastered a post-election-Facebook with views aligned with this:

Yeah.

Dear supremely insensitive dude who ACTUALLY clicked ‘post’ on that heap of rubbish: You need to make art. See art. And not believe that art has existed for centuries solely to thrill you.

The aforementioned Fulbrighter is a fantastically energetic human studying technical art history at the University of Glasgow. He and I have visited a couple museums together since first meeting. One was the People’s History Museum in Manchester. I’d think it difficult to capture hundreds of years of uprisings in the name of Western democracy in one go, but this museum sure packed it in. It was a stark albeit exhausting reminder that the future has always been defined by people and their free will. As the museum’s tag line professes, “There have always been ideas worth fighting for.”

So. The Women’s March that transpired on Saturday, January 21, 2017 in cities world-wide was not to reject Donald Trump as the president (because, as many of you have noted, that ship has sailed).

It was to reject national regression. It was to reject the normalization of hate and fear that underwrites proposed legislation and threatens already marginalized communities. It was to bring to the forefront intersectionality—the interconnected nature of race, class, and gender in systems of discrimination. It was to defend ideas and rights worth fighting for. It was to serve as an assembly for people to raise their hands if they have ever been personally victimized by Regina Trump.

Quite honestly, I was worried that my partaking in the march would feel like a personal contribution to the commodification of feminism—a purchase of a neatly branded t-shirt. Or alternatively, that my partaking in the march, much like participating in tap dance without the understanding of its origins, would feel like a gaudy appropriation of black culture.

But no, partaking in the Women’s March on London felt like the epic drum solo in the middle of Phil Collins’ "In The Air Tonight".

It was greater. It was good. It was love is love is love is love.

I finally decided to title this post, You’re fired! because if you’re reading this right now, you’re fired! You were supposed to keep me accountable for writing the things! It’s been five months and I only have one blog post to show for it. (But I also decided to title this post, You’re fired! because Trump, obviously.)

The revisions to the title of this post are less indicative of the change in importance I gave to certain issues, but more indicative of time passing—the proximity and relevance of nascent words becoming less taut with each day inscribed. I’ve been dallying with this post since long before Green Day was #woke (or, before September ended). But after marching on Saturday, the silence on my blog space needed to be broken. I’m a self-professed ‘interdisciplinarian’, but what the heck does that even mean if I don’t actively address intersectionality?

There is unrest in the world, there is uncertainty in the air, but there is fortitude in "We the People".

So while I can’t actually fire you for not insisting that I blog (I don’t blame you, I know I can ramble, it’s okay), I think there are a couple of divisive employees we can all agree to part with…

Fear and hatred, we’ve decided to let you go. Today will be your last day. Please see yourself out.

With love and blessings,

M

P.S. Stay tuned for my thoughts on the role art, explicitly dance, plays in both enabling and rectifying some social issues of our time. (And please, people, hold me accountable for this.)

EDIT (May 27, 2020): No one held me accountable to that.^