We Can't Perfect This Union

"Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American Dream..."

Provocative and partial, yes, but an incontrovertible truth. Many will roll their eyes and cast my despair aside as an ungrateful rant, unnecessary grumbling. I do not write this with them in mind as the audience, nor am I able to muster any regard for their sentiments. Three days out from yet another consequential election, it is both a liberating statement and an honest personal reflection to posit the United States as both a prominent global power with great potential and a flailing, insufferable toddler. To adopt and paraphrase what many have said before me in their quests to rouse America to resolve of its fundamental contradictions, I love my country. It is precisely for that reason that I do not ask for permission to openly censure the manner in which we govern ourselves and treat each other. It is my right to do so and for all to see. It is also why, given our present condition, I have given up on the salience of the nation-state.

Today we can easily find a smattering of content lamenting the devolution of our political economy and the corrosion of our society. Yet no one piece describes accurately nor dives beyond superficial the symptoms that ail our Union. We know why: because Americans, at the coaxing of the system we ourselves fostered yet evidently are incapable of articulating to those who pointedly question it, have erected impenetrable barriers to substantively discussing pressing and present truths that make us uncomfortable. Paradoxically, we are now uncomfortable in the extreme, and it shows in every way. The void left by our inability to confront our past -- our present, really -- is often filled by varying strains of anti-intellectualism.

Birtherism

Let's take a closer look at that birth certificate.?@BarackObama?was described in 2003 as being "born in Kenya." — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)?May 18, 2012

I was 15 and confused when I read tweets calling into question the citizenship of a U.S. President. At my Catholic high school, my white classmates snickered or openly repeated these narratives. Our teachers were either indifferent or circumvented the controversy entirely. Many of my friends, colleagues, and peers of color will remember this episode. They might also remember that this was not the only instance when birtherism reared its head on Twitter -- in fact, the former President, then a civilian, tweeted about it more than three dozen times and propagated it several times on national television. To whom was he speaking?

It came and went for others, and then society and the media moved on. To this day I periodically raise the topic with some of those white friends I am closest to, just to reconfirm their callous indifference to the casual racism and deliberate self-harm this country inflicts upon itself. It goes without needing to explicitly mention that one's reading of the birther issue depends on their perspective, derived from their experiences and the experiences of others they surround themselves with. For some it was indisputably true, others thought it warranted further investigation, and then there were those who believed such an obfuscation would have no bearing on the electorate or subsequent policymaking years on.

I found it profoundly offensive and today it is at the root of my disaffection with a portion of my compatriots and probably an equal proportion of my friends. For a Constitutional Republic that had known nothing other than 43 white males as Commanders in Chief in its first 232 years of existence, the presence of yet another male, but of a different complexion and identity, was so clearly a point of irritation and an outrage that I began to wonder openly whether some of my white compatriots actually wanted their fellow Americans to climb the socioeconomic and political ladders.

It was at this point in high school when I jettisoned the myth that society is, in large part, segmented between those who work hard and those who do not. It is, and always was, a monstrosity of a lie. The data have always attested to it, but never before has it been so clear, concise, and easily accessible. I revisit the birther issue whenever an ostensibly unrelated national conundrum so clearly is tied to race, such as the most recent presidential election, when several large cities and counties, where Black voters turned out in droves to vote early, were baselessly scrutinized over their vote counting processes.

Race

The topic of race is seen as such a tinderbox that strenuous efforts are made to seal it off from the very spaces where we need to be the most energetic and productive version of ourselves, the grassroots where input and rectification should be in focus. The complexity of the issue is apparent in the smallest of our everyday interactions. It has permeated all of the jobs I have held, every day of every year I was in school, and my personal life. It is an elephant in everyone's room, even for those who believe they have built out a sufficient echo chamber. It is not the only pressing issue though, and I can only imagine the extent to which the gender, sexual orientation, physical characteristics and distinct culture of many others shapes their viewpoints on where this country stands, its progress or lack thereof.

I can only speak about this Union as a Black man, as an American from great privilege, and one who seized the opportunity to live beyond the confines of this country. What I learned about myself in other lands and societies foreign to me, startlingly, was that I was more comfortable as a resident there than I am a citizen here. My reasoning is perhaps an oversimplification: in those more homogenous societies, with their own unique historical traumas, the ignorance and prejudice I encountered was more of a known quantity. To paraphrase a sliver of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's last speech before his assassination: those countries did not make specific commitments, on paper, around the themes of equality of opportunity, freedom of expression, and the right to self-determination. The United States did.

Those countries -- China, Belgium, Switzerland -- do not explicitly proclaim to be exceptional, of such a high order, the likes of which history has never seen. America does.

With this in mind, I have tried to make sense of our cognitive dissonance. How is it that those charged with crafting new policy and refining what is already on the books to meet today's challenges are able to get away with gaslighting the electorate?

I have come to the conclusion that societal forces are perhaps unwittingly trained to obstruct and delay the inevitable: the re-building of America's identity, of what it means to be an American first and foremost before I identify as Black. Doing so requires adopting an inclusive narrative, a humbling of how we see ourselves. Inevitable as it may be, I do not assume such an outcome will come to pass during my lifetime. I despair at the realization that, despite our best efforts, we may not arrive at said outcome without an eruption of profound and prolonged social instability, the likes of which the events of 2020 or worse, 1968, pale in comparison.

To be clear, I have no qualms about my identity. I am proud to be Black and always will be. But to be born and raised with certain experiences, to make a good living at a thriving Fortune 500 company with an exceptional culture, while raising a mixed-race family with a spouse who is not American, compels me to be cognizant of this country's fundamental contradictions in ways that torment my mind.

I have returned to my country with a more precise understanding of how our shared sickness is papered over and seen through the illusionary lenses of one's moral compass and individual responsibility. Our failure to even take stock of, let alone address, systemic problems continues to decimate already disadvantaged groups, the Black community in particular. Yet this country, in elaborate fashion, won the buy-in of those same groups into an 'American Dream' that, to the extent it can be achieved, provides no enduring benefit to its most fervent subscribers.

Our obsession with individualism and the castigating of any criticism of that cultural trait as an opposite extreme -- think asinine accusations of being 'un-American' -- has left us isolated from each other at a perilous moment in history, for which we will be judged harshly by future generations of Americans and are already being condemned for abroad. As the fallout from these and other ills worsens, we are likely to further scapegoat others and devolve into a form of bigotry masked as civility. We erect what we think are safeguards -- i.e. not 'talking politics' in the workplace, whatever that means -- in an attempt to put a lid on a social time bomb long enough to insulate ourselves from devastating, and looming, unrest.

If you are asking yourself what that blurb has to do with race, then I am on the right track. The answer is that these systemic troubles weigh most heavily on America's downtrodden generally, and on the Black community severely. For many of the latter, our country's abject failure to right some historical wrongs *in practice* hampers our ability to fully flush out what it means to be us in this country, to find our place with and among those who also claim to hold fast to our Constitution. One must consider the historical record, the fact, that from the outset when slaves were brought ashore, sold and traded, a chief goal was to ensure that their identities and sense of belonging were annihilated. Our foundations here, the starting point, begins as illiterate commodities, without a common language through which to communicate, nor a lack of familiarity with other cultures so similar to that between ourselves today and those from other countries or, dare I say, our fellow Americans. Our names were changed (no, I am not Irish) and countless women were raped and forced to birth the children of their slave masters.

In short, the forced and brutal assimilation of Black America into the mainstream was a resounding success, and not just culturally. Though I identify unequivocally as Black, my ancestors were also white. To paraphrase James Baldwin, place me next to any contemporary West African and a lesson is learned. It is only after thoroughly understanding the matter when one comes to the realization that, for most of Black America, historical consciousness and visibility into ancestral origins begin and end, respectively, with a bill of sale.

There's only so much one can pile on

Black Americans getting their free start in this country was delayed by hundreds of years. Those in the know understand that I am using the word 'free' loosely. Building a shared identity in a new land is an extremely cumbersome endeavor, particularly if one remains illiterate, knows only trauma passed through generations, and rejects what has been ascribed to them by their former masters but has only slight knowledge of their own history. Shockingly few know that this is the basis from which we started and the perspective through which we quantify and celebrate our successes. When people retort dismissively about slavery being long over, they do not touch on the ethnocide of the times because they know nothing of it, nor how traces of it are still apparent. That is naked ignorance and there are no 'appropriate' or 'comfortable' spaces through which these knowledge deficits can be made up for.

In secondary school I clearly remember a longtime teacher discount the racial identity of former President Obama, then a candidate, because he is of mixed race and was raised predominantly by the white side of his family. She did not defer to history, nor how Obama identified himself. Rather, she assumed authority in a room full of mostly white students to impose a threshold for what it means to be an African-American, in this case discounting the blackness of someone based on the on the immediacy of a white relative in the family tree. The same charge of a different variety was leveled against me: that I was 'white' because of the environment I grew up in and those I associated with. It is a trope that is as much of a lie as it is doltish. Others took the liberty to strip our ancestors of everything they had and knew then, and we should take care not to allow anyone to put us in a box now.

In conclusion

I personally have no interest in assailing white people over some of their ancestors' agency in building this country because many of them were equally destitute and subsequently taught to hate. I have no desire to lambast former President Trump, for he is merely a symptom of what ails us. Racism, prejudice, and the ignorance of 'tradition' are universal. The distinguishing factor for this country is where power resides, how it is wielded, and by whom. Until we as a collective are ready to have that conversation substantively, in all spaces, America will continue to flounder, toiling away at an economic fantasy and regularly projecting its insecurities abroad, while allowing a diverse and substantial portion of its population to languish in ways seen and and unseen.

Who is this meant for if not those wholly opposed to moving toward a more perfect Union? I don't know. Should it capture thirty seconds of someone's attention, it was worth the time. This writeup is not at all a threat, but a stark warning about just one of the growing pains which most of us in the U.S. are trying feverishly to sidestep in one way or another. We must do better, lest most of those we leave behind, in due time, have to reckon with the consequences of our inaction and a Union with its sights trained on our compatriots.

Power dynamics and the risk of burning professional bridges understandably preclude most from commenting directly on this platform. I have a responsibility to be respectful of the ideological diversity of my network, but not to be silent. I only wish to galvanize a nation to adhere to in practice what it espouses from the pulpit.

"...because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it." - James Baldwin, Cambridge, February 18, 1965