Civility Won’t Save Us

In the view from outside my window the trees in my backyard sway from east to west. The meteorologist said this was going to be a “big one” by which he meant that in a few hours debris would turn the concrete streets into a mess, littered with whatever the storm has brought upon it. I am watching my children watch Paw Patrol. “Grab the cable and pull him up,” Chase says to Rocky. My children, Asa and Ava, are sitting side by side, intently learning lessons of help in the time of trouble. The power surges. They look right to left. “That was weird,” my son says. “It’s just the storm,” I say back to him. “No storm lasts forever.”

This is both true and false; some storms last longer and do far more damage than others, I think. Some storms ruin us. Some storms leave wreckage behind. And some storms bring us closer together.

America currently finds itself in a storm. A dreadful, at times unbelievable storm. A storm so dire and visceral that it seems to be the stuff of fiction and fantasy. From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, the questions that aren’t being answered, the throwing the fist in the air, the Democrat fumbles and internal shambles, to the continuous bloodshed in Gaza, to an airmen burning himself alive, to students being tear gassed just days before graduation—everything is hard. We are tired. And each day, as we watch the clouds form and move closer this way, we feel a sense of impending doom and dread. We are not okay. Nothing feels safe. And I am praying for us, truly, because what’s ahead will be far worse than what’s behind.

In times of crisis, be it the 1870s, 1960s, or the 2010s—each era some form of racial and political reconstruction to their name—there was always the question of what type of country would we be “after this.” At all of these points, the American experiment—for that is what this country has always been—has been rocked and challenged to its core.

And yet, there is something about this moment that seems different. "We in a rut, we been in a rut, we’re going backward,” my 90-year-old grandmother, who is a Black woman born of the South, told me in a recent conversation as she sat across the grandfather clock with an American flag enclosed in its compartment. Ninety years is a long time to be in a place and to have seen its bloody and at times glorious metamorphosis. Ninety years is a long time to be Black in America and to have seen America wrestle with your existence, when so many try to deny it or control it. Ninety years is a long time to have seen wars and deaths and wins and losses and terrors and joy and days and nights.

But the question I wrestle with, as I look out on our country, my children, and the moment we are desperately trying to find answers in: what are the lessons? If, as the poet Robert Frost says, “the only way out is through,” then how might we live together in the boat as we so anxiously wait for the storm’s arrival?

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“We need to be more civil this time,” I hear the voices crying out. “We need to be more unified,” they say. “We need to come together,” they lament. What a bitter irony: the people think that politeness or courtesy will save us. “No!,” I want to shout from the bottom of my belly. I cannot be civil and sympathetic with people who act as if we are not being corroded. I cannot be civil with people who want to take rights away from others, who believes only one group deserves power at the expense of the humanity of others.

I cannot be civil. We are not the same. We do not have the same type of salvation in mind. I can be angry and filled with dread, but I will not be civil because civility will not make us free and safe.

Now is not the time to call for civility, unity, and sympathy. It is time, always the right time, for courage, solidarity, and honesty.

At this present hour, we are faced once again with the hard fact: we have always been teetering on the brink of collapse and call it luck or grace, somehow time has been bought again and again. There is a danger in this though; a danger rooted in a collective pessimism about our future, and the inability to imagine something different for us.

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This is what has made me so angry about this moment. There is a kind of pessimism that wants us to believe that we must just give up, that the “Game” is over, that since we know the storm is coming, we might as well give up before it does. To this, I want to say, especially as a Black person in this country: this type of pessimism will not save us.

That kind of pessimism, an American pessimism—the kind that will blame and resent others because of fear, ban books, rob human beings of rights, make it harder for people to find home in this nation, continue sending unjust aid, link arms with the most hate-filled and despairing—is destroying us. It fails to be honest about who we are and what we have inherited, and who we have inherited it from. It resigns the system and the functioning of the country to the worst kinds of dreamers, those who created laws that made others second class citizens, who burned and lynched, who created bombs in secret, who lied to the everyday person just to get money or votes, who harm in the name of God and country. This pessimism steals, kills, and destroys us, and not to mention, it disempowers us to affirm that something different can be done for us, and that all of us—ancestors and inheritor—deserve to living in a better future than the one we were handed. If there is anything to be learned, it is that one must always challenge this American pessimism that corrodes us from within.

My ancestors taught me that the authors of our destruction cannot be the architects of our liberation. That their nostalgia—in that dramatic and fantastical language of, “We’re losing, this is our last best hope, to restore what was lost” — is the fuel of their ignorance and that we must not fall in love with nostalgia like those who are despairing of a changing country, a redefining of itself, its expansion to be more inclusive, it’s becoming what it has never been. To be sure, those who got us in this mess do not deserve to be those who tell us how to get out of it, nor should we give them the power to make us believe “it is what it is.” No. It will be what we make it.

There has never been a time in our nation’s History where we won a better future by being civil and unified with those who wanted to drag us back to a racist past. When tragedy strikes, for what human can avoid it, we were not sympathetic, conjuring up performative prayers for their well-being. We were too aware that when time passed, they would return back to who and what they were. They would fire up their base through conjuring fear, making promises that they are the messiahs, who will save the resenting from losing everything in the end. My ancestors taught me to be skeptical, not sympathetic.

They taught me that the powerful cannot be trusted—not with the words “democracy”, “justice”, “unity”, or “greatness”, or “ America” or “past” or “present” or “future.” They taught me to be careful when people who come from hate try to tap dance in the name of love. As Maya Angelou once said, “when they show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

They taught me that the powerful will even use those who look like you to do their bidding, to increase their power, their money, and their plans. They taught me to question who people tell me to be afraid of, what and who they tell me to hate, and what they tell me to grieve—to be wary of the sympathy people try to create in the name of unjust causes. They taught me to question our addiction to avoidance, why the things we are told to be silent on are the things we are told to be silent on, to look at who is not around when I'm in a room, to steer clear of Oppression Olympics. To know that none of us are free, until all of us are free.

They taught me—and my God this is something so many in this country could learn—that every human is still a human, and even the worst humans are still humans and they deserve the recognition as such. My ancestors taught me that whatever you must do to protect humanity and protect yourself and others against the lies that they are less than human, that they deserve less power than you, that they are taking things away, then you must do it.

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They taught me to grieve when humans suffer, when things don’t make sense, when chaos reigns, to grieve when bad people become and do bad things. They surely taught me not to act as if bad people aren’t bad people, but to call them out for who and what they are—be they doused in a MAGA flag, yelling “you will not replace us,” or “let’s make America great again,” or they be in a suit, saying they are the party of justice while conveniently sending bombs, arresting protesters, and being everything they so claim to hate in others. They taught me that when the storms come, move closer, dig deep, and find a way to survive together.

The choice to help everyone see reality again for another time—to undo the damage that has been done to the words we use to describe ourselves, to speak up, to challenge our despair and powerlessness—is imperative. It is a choice to fight like hell for a just world, and know that in the end, when the sun cracks the sky a little bit, you have done your best and that your best is enough. With that truth, the people have survived wars and depressions and famine and despair and storms and confusion and death.

“The world is before you,” James Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows My Name. “And you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

There is not much hope there. But there is something there that keeps me determined not to just wait out the storm—but to protect us in it.