Assessing the Secret of Joy [AAP #5]

TODAY in the African American Perspective at UMX feature we are gifted with an essay by Elle, the Southern sistorian whose blogging is always personal, openhearted, and real. (For those just tuning in, this special feature at UMX runs through to Sunday the 16th of November with a new post every day.)

Elle is a historian whose work centers the lives and labors of black women. she’s a single mama, an erratic blogger, and an assistant professor.

Assessing the Secret of Joy

I’ve been thinking about this post all week and, as usual when I’m preoccupied about something, I called my mom. She listened to me go on and on for a while about all my fears and concerns, all the worrisome things I’ve heard and read. Finally, she broke in to say, “Don’t let people steal your joy!” And I realized, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that is what I did.

I expected to cry if Barack Obama won the election—everyone who knows me expected me to cry. I even had friends who called and said, “Are you crying yet?” Admittedly, I dashed away a few tears, but I didn’t really cry. The joy I felt was overshadowed by worry. Already, I was thinking about the Obama family out there on that huge stage. But I worried more about, “oh-my-god-if-he’s-not-immediately-the-bes-tpresident-EVAR-people-will-freak!”

The worries got to me. More importantly, people got to me. The Thursday after the election, I walked into one of the offices in my department in which two white women (one a student, one a staff person) were having a discussion. They stopped immediately. Aware of my discomfort (and my inability to leave because I had to search for something), the student began talking again. The topic was the election. I knew the student was from an ultra-conservative background, but tended to be center right herself.

But the other woman? Bitterness poured off her in waves. She launched, loudly, into a speech about how Obama was not a messiah and she was tired of people treating him like he was a god and how it’s been proven he’s been hypnotizing and brainwashing people. She’d picked her friend up from work on election day, she said, and asked if the friend had voted. The friend nodded, but said nothing else for a few minutes, then finally spoke up and said, “I voted for McCain.” “I did too,” she told the student, “And I asked her, why should we be ashamed, you know? Why should we be ashamed to vote for a war hero?”

There have been very few times in my (relatively new) professional life in which I’ve felt I was targeted because I was black. I have no doubt most of that speech occurred because my black self was in that room. That shook me so badly that I went to my co-worker’s office and virtually collapsed. Then, I cried.

And I cried more, after my 12:30 class, when one of my young, white male students approached me, excited, talking about Obama’s victory. “He actually had a majority!” He was so happy and before I could do more than smile, an older student chimed in, “He didn’t win by that much.”

I am frustrated by all these efforts to discount, to downplay the political adroitness of the man. All the rooted-in-reality people, on the left and right, who are cautioning us misled masses not to get our hopes up. Why?

And why am I letting it get to me? I am in a part of the country that didn’t rejoice, didn’t laugh, and dance, and cry in the streets. I am away from family with whom I could have laughed and danced and cried. I think that is part of the reason I reacted so strongly at work—I mean, come on, the women in my department with whom I socialize are a bunch of “latte sipping intellectuals” or whatever, who were firmly behind Obama.

But I had to turn off that besieged part of me to focus on the historicity of this election. Obama’s election does set precedent. Voters are sending an African-American man to the most coveted home in the political world, a house to which, just a century ago, inviting a black man violated American mores.

Yet, in many ways, his victory was not surprising in the aftermath of the primaries. When Americans felt that President Herbert Hoover no longer cared about them, that he was ill-equipped (and unconcerned) with dealing with the realities of an unparalleled economic catastrophe, they sent him and his party home. When conservative Americans felt that the world around them was imploding, raining jagged shards of feminism, civil rights agitation, worker militancy, and anti-war sentiment upon them, they elected Richard Nixon. When southerners felt their cherished Lost Cause had been forgotten and fundamentalists decided they missed the days when women knew their place, they rallied with others to elect Ronald Reagan. After eight years of a bleak, warmongering, fearful, economy-destroying presidency, that the Republicans got the boot is not ahistorical.

Still, that Obama surmounted the obstacle of the election caught me by surprise. I wanted him to win. I wanted him to change things. But I had not yet formulated what I wanted that change to be, what I wanted his presidency to be. I have big ideas-end this hellish war, revive our economy, start the turnaround for public schools, acknowledge and address the civil rights crises that are still ongoing, particularly for PoC, for immigrants and the LGBTQI community, do something about the prison-industrial complex, about poverty, about healthcare.

But I have more intimate ones too. I’ve written before about how the image of 84-year-old Milvertha Hendricks, a black survivor of Hurricane Katrina, wrapped in the American flag, was jarring to me. I have been made to feel like something “other” than American—for my color and my beliefs—for so long, that seeing black people huddled beneath the flag gives me pause. So that is one of my hopes, that his presidency will be a progressive, and people (not money or corporation) centered one, one with which I can identify. That it will be one that responds to people, and not an extension of the imperial presidency (or vice-presidency) that the Bush regime embodied. That would give me the kind of joy that can’t be stolen.

I’m at a point in my life, or in my son’s life, I suppose, where he has become the philosopher to whom I listen most. So as I thought about this post, I consulted him, too. I asked him what he thought the election of Barack Obama to the presidency meant.

He didn’t have anything particularly wise to say this time, on the surface at least. His response was, “He said it was about change, Mama.”

“But what kind?” I prodded.

He shrugged. “I hope a good kind.”

That might just be what I hope most.