Y'all Feel That?

I have a very tender heart, but I am not overly sentimental. I am easily brought to tears by stories of confession and overcoming, both publicly and privately told. I’m a sucker for a anything puppy-related and almost every online appeal for a dog who needs a forever home “right now.” I show up for the fortieth reunion—but not the tenth or even the twentieth—because I have a place in my heart for fond memories but not a speck of room for nostalgia. As if we can choose exactly what we make room for in our hearts, after a good bit of research, I believe being nostalgic is primarily a biological trait. Pardon all the specialized medical talk but a 2019 National Institutes of Health study found that, “nostalgia proneness is heritable because [at some point in the past] the [individual’s] serotonin system has been associated with sensitivity to negative experience.” This is not a character judgment but a scientific validation. In a significant number of people, nostalgic proneness becomes a genetic coping strategy in response to dealing with negative experience.

This makes me wonder about all the MAGA folk who seem to embody the very definition of nostalgic. That is, having “wistful affection for the past.” And we can’t stop there because this definition only becomes fully clear when we remember that “wistful” means “a feeling of vague or regretful longing.” So, to all the Trump supporters, the big question is, what is this vague and regretful longing you suffer? What kind of negative experience has you swimming in the deep—and too often deceiving—pool of nostalgia?

If you have any confidence in the thinking of James Baldwin (as I do), then you’re likely to agree that a deceptive nostalgia is what has MAGA panties all in a bunch. In his 1964 essay, The White Problem, Baldwin said of the earliest Americans:

“The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t anything else but a man. But, since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they had come here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed.”

The MAGA movement is a direct descendent of this foundational lie, the “G” in MAGA referring all the way back to the time when black people were constitutionally less than human. Tales of black people with tails, racist rationale for separate-but-equal, and current “widespread beliefs among White medical residents and lay people “that blacks have thicker skin” and feel less pain than whites stand among a plethora of proofs. While I fear most of us missed it the night of the presidential debate, we were served yet another proof of Baldwin’s indictment when Trump told the bald-faced lie that “They are eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Every clear-thinking viewer recognized this as racist, but Trump’s intention was so much deeper, so much more malicious. Like a creepy hypnotist, Trump repeated lies-as-truth for the sole purpose of manipulating MAGA minds, signaling to them permission to stoop to the lowest lows, even as he stood next to the dignified Vice President Kamala Harris. Already vulnerable to or bent by his malfeasance, MAGA minds absorbed Trump’s aim to dehumanize immigrants and people of color as justification for othering hate, hateful policy and, yes, even hate crimes. In the aberrant minds of Trump strategists, this triumvirate is perfectly acceptable. The animus and fear it engenders could mean more votes on November 5^th.

In the timeless hit On & On, the inimitable Erykah Badu asks a question whose profundity is found in the context of challenge and change. “Damn. Y’all feel that,” she inquires after questioning America’s claim that it is a Christian nation and asserting the dignity and divinity of black people. She says:

If we were made in His image, then call us by our names

Most intellects do not believe in God but they fear us just the same

Spittin’ this truth—her very own lyrics—creates a shift and Erykah feels it beneath her feet. I think I felt something similar when Trump told that ugly lie about the Hatian men, women and children who fled violence in their native country and are making a new start in Springfield, Illinois. Yeah, Miss Badu, I felt that. And plenty people before me have felt it, including the 1967 striking sanitation workers in Memphis, who were famously captured by Civil Rights photojournalist Earnest Withers in the immensely moving photo above. Daily facing dehumanizing working conditions and wages, these African Americans, their families and non-related kinfolk felt the movement beneath their feet, indicating both the instability of evil and the promise of a coming prevail.

I am not a political writer but a spiritual seeker and essayist, interested in personal transformation and the journey toward wholeness—and I cannot hold soul-concerning propositions in my country as discrete from my journey, nor that of other Americans and immigrants who come to call this place home. Like James Baldwin, I believe my task as a writer is “to bear witness to what life is, does, and to speak for people who cannot speak.” Without suggesting that Baldwin’s assessment is in anyway incomplete, I would add that I believe my role as a writer also includes speaking for those who can, but, for illogical or spineless reasons of self-preservation, refuse to speak. And so, I want to know if you felt it. Did you recognize Trump’s scheme to dehumanize people of color? Or are you wallowing in willful ignorance?

If you will bear with me, I’ve got one more James Baldwin quote. Speaking in the voice of America, Baldwin warned, “Our dehumanization of the Negro is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for this.” In today’s not-so-United States, see Baldwin’s prediction in poor whites who have become confused about their caste and politically aligned with those who consistently work against their interest. See it as Christianity has been usurped by the cult of evangelicalism, making the New Testament imperative for justice a non-conversation in the contemporary church. See the loss of identity in the collapse of modern conservatism, leaving the Republican Party a sad and sorry semblance of itself and recognize that our country has become a laughingstock in many parts of the world, with the most sinister foreign leaders appealing to their gods for another Trump win. We must feel it. We must get out of our heads and into our bodies—the somatic place where our souls reside. We must feel the movement beneath our feet and vote like our lives depend on it.