Talking in New Orleans in the Age of Trump

[KamaAina]

http://lithub.com/talking-in-new-orleans-in-the-age-of-trump/

In New Orleans, where we came from, we had a saying: “we making.” This was a utility phrase, a conversational Swiss Army knife. Instead of saying we were at the supermarket purchasing food, we often said “we making groceries.” In other cities, if a person inquired about your family, you might respond, “fine,” a paradoxical reply because it contained no content. But in New Orleans we sometimes responded, “we making.” We making meant you were okay. Not perfect. But striving to perfect your life. This exchange was related to Louis Armstrong’s idea that friend’s shaking hands and saying “how do you do” was semaphore for “I love you.” Our inner city chit chat was small talk with large implications. It implied an innate humanity and the capacity for empathy.

But in Trump’s America we soon discovered we had lost our humanity. We lost the ability to tell our stories, and, yes, we lost our bodies, too. We learned we were the other, and the other was a shadow of yesterday, a past best buried under desecrated ground. Don’t get us wrong. It wasn’t Trump who destroyed our bodies or our language. As it turned out, we never had them. We all knew our ancestors were boxed up and shipped from an African coast. We were drug from South Carolina and placed on a block with mules and fine dining china. Eventually, we were told we had a three-fifth’s vote. But this was an accounting trick. We couldn’t vote. The Three-Fifth’s Compromise, which was spoken into existence during the same discussions that created the Constitution, simply explained that if you owned one of us then you had your vote and then some. And if you owned bunch of us, you were a boss....

We were wrong about Trump. The 90 percent of us who voted against him were misguided and ill-informed. We saw him as an object is perceived through the wrong end of a telescope. He was outrageous—a bigot!—we thought. But Trump wasn’t far away. Like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, he was right behind us the whole time. He was next to us. He was in front of us. We were surrounded, because he was in the hearts and minds of people we called friends. He was even inside of people we loved....

But there was one thing we did not clearly understand until the Age of Trump: we Criminal-Americans were supposed to be ashamed of ourselves. Because the inner city was hell, because we spent all our time killing each other, and because we had nothing to lose, we needed to once and for all understand that we were not great. The products of our community—the music of Chuck Berry and Beyonce, the antics of Baby Esther, the words of Dr. King, the actions of Rosa Parks, the journalism of Ida B. Wells, the fearlessness of Serena Williams, Shirley Chisholm, Michelle Obama—did not belong to us because our bodies did not belong to us. Our creations belonged to Real America. Let Elvis play our rhythm and blues. Let the alt-right use Dr. King’s words to justify police shootings of unarmed black men. Let Caroline Wozniacki parody Serena’s body because after all Serena’s body didn’t belong to her.