[As
usual, I’ll end
the year—even this most frustrating of years—by AmericanStudying a handful
of major stories. This time featuring a special Friday Guest Post from one of
the wonderful student papers in my Senior Seminar on 21st Century
America! Please add your year in review responses, thoughts, and airing of
grievances in comments.]
On two ways to
respond to a still unbelievably awful political moment.
I’m writing this
post on December 19th, the day that members
of the Electoral College vote all over the country to formally confirm
Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. I’m sure I’m not alone
in having spent the six weeks after the election in a vague and admittedly
nonsensical state of both denial and optimism, believing somehow that we wouldn’t
really get to this point. But we’re here, and while the results aren’t official
as of the moment I write these words [serious inside baseball stuff in this
paragraph and I apologize, but it feels relevant to the immediacy of this
particular post’s topics and moment], I don’t think any faithless
electors or emoluments
clause aficionados are going to stop or even delay the inevitable. Hell, I
don’t even think Joe
Biden will do the cool thing he could do in early January to confirm Merrick
Garland as a Supreme Court Justice, although that one seems to be eminently
fair and reasonable (and not just because it’s quite possible Trump will
nominate Judge Judy or Judge Reinhold, although also yes).
So we’re
entering the Trump era, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to respond to
that new political and national reality, in my public scholarly work as in
every other way. I would say that my first three post-election Huffington Post pieces—on Reconstruction/reconciliation,
Japanese
internment, and the Wilmington
coup and massacre—offer clear examples of one main response I’m determined
to pursue. In each case, I’ve tried to engage with under-remembered American histories
not only to contextualize present situations and debates, but also and most
importantly to express both fears about where we might be headed and goals for
how we just might learn from the past and move in a different direction
instead. I don’t believe that the present is simply an echo or repetition of
the past, but rather that many of the issues, narratives, and perspectives that
have contributed to our histories remain very much present and in play. And public
AmericanStudies scholars are in a particularly good place to help us remember,
engage with, and again learn from those histories as we move into a future that
is both uncertain and up to us to help determine.
So that’s one
thing I can and plan to do in the election’s aftermath and over the next four
(or more, although on that note I remain in that combination of denial and
optimism!) years. But I believe there’s another important way to respond, and I’ll
put it more briefly for obvious reasons: to listen to all those fellow Americans
for whom Trump poses a far greater threat. From Syrian
refugees to the LGBT
community, Mexican Americans to the young
Americans affected by DACA, incarcerated Americans to workers
in minimum wage jobs, there are countless American communities who will
likely bear the brunt of Trump’s policies and effects. I’m not going to pretend
like I know or can even imagine what that will mean—but I can and do promise to
listen to all these fellow Americans, and then to do everything I can to support
them in these battles. There are few, if any, more significant efforts we can
all undertake in 2017.
Next 2016 review
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 2016 stories you’d highlight?
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