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My soul looks back and wonders. The details are not hard to remember, at least some of them aren’t. They haunt and somewhere lodged in the cracks and crevices of the memories are indications of what was to come. Past as prologue, I guess, or as prophecy.
I have avoided returning to these lectures for over a decade now. Perhaps “the troubles” of the intervening years have corrupted my attention. So much has happened since those three days at Harvard in September of 2011. In between then and now, the horrors of this country and of our times pressed in. The excitement of the Obama years waned as the bodies piled up like the images in an Alexander Gardner Civil War photograph. Police killed black people at an alarming rate. Americans witnessed only a fraction of it on video, but far more than we could handle. Some of the images have stayed in my head even when newer horrors nestled up beside them.
The Tea Party ran John Boehner and Paul Ryan out of the halls of Congress. White supremacist organizations became increasingly dangerous. They rebranded themselves as the Alt-right and, like a virus, infected the body politic with a more virulent and shrewd strain of a familiar and native disease. They made themselves known in Charlottesville as they marched and shouted, “Jews will not replace us,” and left Heather Heyer dead in the street. More death would follow in El Paso and in Buffalo. Fear and panic grabbed hold of the country as demographic data revealed the “browning of America,” and white people, at least those who felt they could be nothing but white, clung to their gods and longed for the days when people who looked like me knew their place. The so-called racial reckoning sparked by protests around police killings waned as white grievance and fears intensified. Donald Trump was at the center of it all, but he was not the cause. This was the ugly underside of the United States. Trump simply turned the country over so that all could see the shit hidden…
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