I’ve got board meetings and PTA meetings this week that requires 12+ hour days. My planned post thus won’t go up till the weekend. This post from the old blog, however, serves as a valuable companion piece.

I wrote this shortly after the death of my grandfather. He was the first in my family to pass away. After the funeral, I found myself constantly dreaming of death and history, of the end of my earthly existence and the events that gave said existence shape and limitation. In hindsight, his death began my mental degeneration that caused me to terminate the first blog.

The historical idea baked into the post, however, guides my latest thinking on the indictments Robert Muller has produced against 45. Give it a read for the political direction the next post will take!

I am a Christian right up until it comes to thinking about death because I fear we all deserve better than what we have coming to us. I often think of my grandfather’s funeral on a cold evening in East Elmhurst. My grandmother was veiled in black and my family—together for the first time since Thanksgiving in 2008—all wore black and their darkest greys. My wife was by my side. My grandfather’s hair was slicked back, and he wore his gaudiest watch—a rose gold, cubic zirconia monstrosity lifted from a rap video from the 2000s. He was gone and I was afraid he had left to nowhere where I’d see him again. I pondered that fate and pulled my wife close.

My fear is generally what pulls me toward history. To ease my existential fear, I spend a lot of time reading and writing about the American past. The election of the con man from New York halted that for a while because I lost faith in the point of it all. But I am rested again and feel I have to make a statement about the core problem of being an American—the pervasive problem of whiteness.

Whiteness began to arise in 1676 as a response to Bacon’s Rebellion. White indentured servants allied with black slaves in a revolt with economic and political origins. The Slave Codes of 1705 finally codified the colonial strategy for making sure white and blacks would not unify. By elevating whiteness to a politically protected status, colonial governments created a political, economic, social, and legal chasm between whites and blacks who had and should not expect any political power.

White people have behaved accordingly since.

I ultimately feel that 60 million Americans voted for the con man from New York due to understanding that whiteness, or accommodating themselves to whiteness, would confer the privileges and immunities white people have had since 1705. These people believe that freedom means nothing if some people are not free; that, just like the Romans, there must be a slave or oppressed class to make them feel good about not being molested by police, or to feel more pure about the remuneration they get from their work- for if black people were smarter or worked as hard as they did, or did not have to be compelled to work due to their biological deficiency, they’d be just like white people.

I know nothing in that last sentence made sense or is true, and that’s the point. Racial rationalizations are inherently illogical and bunk. They are only born from a political order established in 1705, and when we discuss the most obvious result of white supremacy—segregation—what we are discussing is the legal and political guarantees of people who believe themselves white versus the structures that prevents people of color from enjoying those guarantees. 

My dead grandfather was part of the Second Migration. He fled northward to try to live a life unmolested by the people who believed him less of a man. I am here now in Arkansas, with a wife in medical school, trying to do the same. As I said earlier, I am struggling with the old comforts of study knowing that my history will come marching strongly back on January 21, 2017. I am not under the illusion I will be unmolested, and the fear of the unknown I felt at my grandfather’s funeral and now replaced with a vision I can see clearly—a retread of battles long ago won and now having to be fought again, of people clinging to a notion of whiteness that implies that I must be severed from my political, economic, and social rights.