Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara: What's next? A reflection as we wait for the presidential election results

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

- James Baldwin

It is not civil, polite, Minnesota-nice, or Rochester-right to talk partisan politics. So instead, we debate tight-lipped with controlled smiles about sundry ballot measures, budgets, parking, road construction, bike lanes, and tax levies. And don’t get me wrong, these things are vital and civic engagement on these issues and others like it are imperative. For it is often the least “sexy” political issues that creep up and inscribe inequality and disparity in our local communities while no one is watching—which is why local elections matter. From the local results, it looks like a new wave of leadership will be taking the helm in the city come January 2021. And what happens next is just as much about the newly elected leaders as it is about our continued engagement as citizens long after the polls have closed and the races have been called.

As evidenced by last week’s frenetic lead up to President Trump’s visit to our little Med City, it also appears we are a coveted battleground county on the national stage. So much so, that Trump has now visited twice since his election in 2016, after narrowly losing us to Hilary Clinton during his first run. The 2016 presidential election results from our county painted a starkly divided picture splitting us right down the middle in red and blue. So, as the nation waits with bated breath and mounting anxiety as our storied democracy is put to the ultimate test ensuring every single vote is counted, it is the turbulent national landscape that I want to turn our attention to.

While a winner has yet to be named, one thing has become crystal clear: America is deeply and perhaps, irrevocably divided. Perhaps, like me, you knew this already—were always keenly aware that the American myth and the American reality have yet to reconcile, that the innocent sparkle of our presumed unity and our democratic self-righteousness was more aspirational fiction than fact, that the true promise of America is still generations in the making. Or maybe, you woke up to this for the first time on November 4th as you compulsively checked the electoral results with its stark red and blue staining the map of our nation—the colors reducing familiar state borderlines to entrenched political camps carrying the heavy symbolic weight of all that those primary colors have come to mean over the last four years.

Those colors tell a story—for some, a chilling one. But they don’t tell the whole story. The blue along our northern border and coast lines belie entrenched schisms along class and geographic lines between metro and rural areas. The red marking our southern states won’t tell you about the multiracial coalitions who have been organizing for years to fight voter suppression. We must look closely. We must ask how we might hold space for political diversity and rich differences in perspectives, while also bravely and unflinchingly calling out and excising that which is breaking us, killing us, making us ALL complicit in actions and policies that endanger our health, threaten our well-being and affirm exclusion, hate, violence, and homegrown tyranny.

Perhaps, you have no idea what I’m talking about and have already written me off, already designated me to a particular camp. My true colors might be showing. But so are America’s.

The divisions in our nation have long masqueraded as mere political preference mostly centered on economic issues. We have long denied and evaded any suggestion that a toxic mix of racism and classism have underpinned these differences. Over the last four years, however, it has become nearly impossible to separate racial anxieties, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and—now with the COVID-19 pandemic—basic public health from the political crosshairs. There is no middle way, no neutrality to be had in such a context and silence becomes akin to complicity.

Now in November 2020, we find ourselves in crisis. The crisis goes well beyond a political dark night of the soul. We find ourselves in the midst of renewed struggles for racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice. Even as we, the People, find ourselves guilty of allowing family separation of migrant children and of the forced sterilization of women in detention centers. We have colored these issues in red and blue, laid them on the shoulders of one leader or the other, shifted blame or denied it all as fiction. We also find ourselves in the midst of an unrelenting pandemic that has claimed almost a quarter of a million American lives. Lives, which if this were a war or a terrorist attack, would have been unthinkable, unacceptable. When will we say those names and the names of those facing job, housing, and food insecurity due to the economic impacts of the pandemic? Instead, the death toll mounts and heels sink deeper into the ground of our respective political encampments.

As a black woman in America, I know that we can never fully vote our way to liberation. It is just one of many tools to engage, participate, and be present in an imperfect democratic system. Still, it is a critical tool and it is a privilege and an honor to vote. I voted this year as a future ancestor, as a mother, as a black woman, as the first-generation daughter of immigrants, as a native New Yorker turned proud Minnesotan, as a Rochester community member, as one voice among the multitude. As Adrienne Maree Brown states in her Election Day spell, “we show up for those furthest from power/those carrying the most of our burden/those we’ve already lost to hate in this pale time/we say no where it is the only humane word/ and yes where it is a way forward, another breath.”

No matter the outcome, a part of me will mourn (fitting for a year of pandemic and uprising already marked by so much death and loss). I will grieve a nation that four years later is still struggling to come together, still easily stoked by deep rifts in ideology that are costing us lives and a sustainable future for our children, a nation still choosing again and again to uphold individual comfort and privilege over true justice for those who need it most. No matter the outcome, there is work ahead of us. Work that starts at home in our local community. Work that I think our city is well-positioned to take on and facilitate before still more divisive lines cleave and break us apart for another four years, another decade, another century.

My vote was ritual, my vote was prayer. My vote was cast in the spirit of hope, not fear. But I do fear. I fear that we will fail to do the necessary work required of us for what comes next. For voting is not about relinquishing our power to a leader. It is about holding not only our leaders, but ourselves accountable. The work that lies ahead is about continuing to empower everyday people and the type of street and grassroots leadership and dreamweaving that makes real change happen alongside of and often, in spite of the policymaking and governance. My deepest hope is that this work—whatever it may look like—is restorative and healing… that it imagines new and creative futures and crafts new means designed for our community and our nation to live out the true meaning of its creed.

And perhaps, just perhaps, to forge an altogether new creed, one that is not rooted in the original sins of our nationhood, one that reflects an America that no longer hides behind a feigned innocence, but that rises from the faultlines and fires of its own making, wise to both its repeated failures and its persistent promise. And finally, at long last ready to say yes to forging a transformative and just way through and forward together.

Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara is a Rochester-based writer and anthropologist committed to community building, advocacy, and storytelling toward social justice. She is creator of the Rochester Racial Justice Toolkit.