A Call to Action in Post-Election Day America
A speech I delivered for Carleton’s Annual Martin Luther King Celebration Dinner
Good evening, everyone. I am honored to have been invited to be on this stage by a faithful friend, but in all honesty, I was taken aback by the timing of their request. After nearly three years of stepping forward at every opportunity to be a part of a movement for social change that I envisioned with starry eyes, I was significantly less engaged in campus organizing last November. What’s more, I was certain that the outcome of the American election should NOT be a more resounding call to action than those of the past. These starting words may not be the ones you came to hear. If I offer you the messiness of my emotional response, though, I ask that you thoughtfully consider this as the critical juncture where we can choose what is familiar but normative, or choose what is uncertain but unprecedented and potentially transformative.
On Wednesday, November 9th, I was startled awake by the buzz of a text message that read, Will you protest today? The drop, that dread that I had imagined was the only appropriate response to such a call was swallowed up in emptiness, in a low hum that my body had fallen asleep to on many nights before the last. The news delivered to me in that text felt like… nothing as I looked steadily at the stillness of College Street from the dorm room window. My own blankness frightened me into a search for feeling or warmth or community, and it confirmed to me that the wave of emotion that would lift me out of my silence throughout the election campaigns would not come.
Without the words to respond to that text, I decided to attend the school rally to show the sender that I had heard them. Later that afternoon, I wove through a crowd of students, faculty, and staff gathered in front of Sayles, and was confronted by the scene that I had tried to distance myself from in the weeks leading up to this moment. Around me were somber students in tight embraces, with their gazes fixed on speakers who were using loaded terms, by claiming that we had entered an era of “totalitarianism” and “fascism,” and calling for “solidarity” and “resistance.” Students voiced their proud support for Hillary Clinton. Others expressed their helplessness and heartbreak. They’re voices broke midsentence. I halted far behind the crowd and looked before me, feeling the hum from that morning turn into an outburst I no longer had the breath to hold. What were we gathered here to mourn? What exactly had changed from one morning to the next? Their words held profound historical weight, but were without contextualization to the very real ways that each of us personally benefit from how racism, American imperialism, militarization, and economic stratification are insidiously embedded in the mechanisms that grant us personal, economic, and national security. Rather than a material and imagined America where these forms of security necessitate violence, it appeared to me that what had ruptured was a symbolic America, in which it was believed that our voices should be enough to tilt the system of governance toward good.
But what is good in America? Restless, I pushed my way through the crowd and gladly jostled those around me, in my clamor for a clearing. In the weeks leading up to this election, I imagined that this end could be necessary to expose the instability and precarity of our political system. However, the outcome of this election had also produced a scramble back to the promises of white liberalism, the same that had looked on passively when black people were disappeared in death or incarceration, when undocumented immigrants marked as “criminals” were violated in private detention centers, and the exploitation of laborers outside the United States bolstered corporate profit. All this and more took place relentlessly in the previous eight years of the Obama administration. With these thoughts, I backed away from the rally, questioning, What does it matter for you to be anti-Trump, when you do not actively try to exist outside these mechanisms? As I trailed away from the gathering, the speaker called on everyone to hug each other, and praised the sense of community they felt in that moment.
I stand before you now, with pressing questions that propel me into a more intentional commitment to engage with the work that will be done in the next year. Was it wrong for students to gather at this moment, even if there were more frightening things to fight before Donald Trump? Well, if the best time to organize was yesterday, the second best time has to be precisely now. But even with hopeful anticipation that the presidency will finally move Americans out of complacency, I caution you from falling for the enchantment of social movements. It could be easy to feel drawn to calls to action that promise a profound connection with masses of people, a fulfilled sense of social responsibility, and inclusion into the next great thing. Calls to action themselves can put forward a political agenda that preserves belief in democratic change, and they could get away with it by claiming to be the solutions of lesser evils. Instead, we must take on the gritty and frustrating work of practicing alternative solutions, even when our swells of energy and emotion are weak. If my starry-eyed past self were to ask me at the end of my life, what kind of activist did you become?, I want to be able to say that I took on a way of being of critical thought and creativity that was more sustainable than love for the romantic promises of change.
