This is a letter to those of you who have stayed. Please: listen to me, before it’s too late.
I’m writing from the city of Vancouver, BC. The Canadians have been welcoming to the thousands of us who have fled across the border in the past seven years: immigrants, Muslims, dissenters, and those of us who are GLBT. The Canadians have accepted all of us, as far as I know. Do not believe President Trump’s incendiary anti-Canadian rhetoric. On this continent gone mad, Canada has become the last refuge of democracy.
At first, I intended to stay. Like so many other Americans, I intended to commit civil disobedience and fight the racist policies of Trump—and of his chosen vice president, Ted Cruz. When Trump and Cruz were sworn into office in 2017, I was an English teacher at a large high school in Denver, where many of my students were Muslim. Within weeks of the inauguration, Trump had ordered the National Guard to shutter all American mosques and to enforce “anti-terrorism codes” against praying to Allah, wearing identifying clothing, and quoting the Koran in public. To this day, Trump claims he has not banned Islam; people continue to be free to practice their religion in the privacy of their own homes, he has said, “just as they are free to engage in all manner of adult activities in their own homes, if you know what I mean.” But the new codes sanctioned harassment and intimidation. In many instances, Muslim people were beaten, fired from their jobs without cause, and ostracized from their communities. I joined several teachers at my school in creating secret safe spaces for our Muslim students to pray in private, and for Muslim families to meet to discuss their options. It felt right to disobey the injustice of Trump’s policies, and to act.
At first, I intended to stay. Like so many other Americans, I intended to commit civil disobedience and fight the racist policies of Trump.
But then, in early 2018, Trump and Cruz unveiled their plan for mass deportations of immigrants. Most of the students in our high school were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Suddenly, our classes began to shrink: immigrant families were forced to slip away into hiding or risk becoming “disappeared.” Stories abounded of children who woke in the morning to empty houses, their parents deported in the night. Our small group who had been supporting Muslims now risked greater civil disobedience: we offered entire immigrant families refuge in the basement of our school, in our houses, and in our churches. We used Facebook to set up an underground railroad, but Trump blasted through it all, creating the Foreigner Watch in the fall of 2018 and ordering the arrest of anyone who aided or abetted the millions of immigrants he intended to deport. People kept disappearing, including three of my teaching colleagues who served in the underground railroad with me. A fourth teacher I knew was arrested and held for months in jail. For some reason, I was never caught, though several of my students lived hidden in our basement laundry room for months. Every day, the deportation buses growled south toward the gates in The Wall at the Mexican border.
Suddenly, our classes began to shrink: immigrant families were forced to slip away into hiding or risk becoming “disappeared.”
Finally, in 2019, Trump and Cruz turned their hatred toward me and all other GLBT Americans. Their Supreme Court overturned the gay marriage decision that year, and the states followed obediently, declaring our union illegal and our child “endangered by an unnatural family situation.” In every speech either of them made, Trump and Cruz railed against our immorality, our “sick” desire to live outside of “normal” relationship, our “sinfulness.” They made no new laws, and yet their vitriolic words fueled their supporters’ loathing for us. By the spring of 2020, countless gay, lesbian, bi- and transgendered Americans had been fired from jobs, barred from entering public places, beaten, and in some cases killed. I lost my job at the high school. The official letter said I had been “released from duty for moral turpitude.” My wife lost her license as a psychologist. Two friends—both women—in San Francisco lost custody of their biological children after a school social worker investigated their “unnatural circumstances.” In a few short years, our government had bullied us back into the closet, slamming the door and locking it behind us. Conservative preachers gleefully praised Trump and Cruz’s “morals.” “America has suffered,” one minister told a crowd at a reelection rally in 2020, “because we have permitted such abominations, but now we are on our way to greatness.” The crowd roared its approval.
Meredith and I knew we had to leave. We were in danger. Every day, we were afraid someone would come and take our daughter from us. And so we fled north. Here, to Vancouver. We had to.
In a few short years, our government had bullied us back into the closet, slamming the door and locking it behind us.
America is no longer America for me. Maybe you don’t care about this. Maybe you don’t care that my family and I will probably stay here in Vancouver, where we are safe: where our marriage is honored as legal, our daughter is protected as our own. In the composition classes I teach at this university, my immigrant students breathe easily, unafraid of deportation or state-sanctioned discrimination. Canada is not perfect, because it is a government by people, who are ever flawed. But here, people still believe progress means moving toward embracing all kinds of people, recognizing the rights of all people to live free of fear.
I know you think none of this applies to you. You think you are safe today in America because you are not Muslim, you are not an immigrant, and you are not gay. You think you are safe in America because you are a white American descended from Europeans, like Trump, a practicing Christian, a proclaimed conservative. You think you are safe in America because you cheer at the mandated Trump rallies in your town and dutifully pledge allegiance to him. When a majority of you Americans reelected Trump and Cruz in 2020, you showed the world you actually like his “moral” policies against people like me and my wife, his “pro-American” policies against immigrants, his “keep it here” trade restrictions, his unsympathetic crackdown on all forms of crime. But these are not political issues. They never have been. They are human rights issues. And now that you have begun to vote against the rights of certain groups of people, a day will inevitably come when someone will vote against you. And who will speak for you, when you have been so silent?
But these are not political issues. They never have been. They are human rights issues.
Trump and Cruz and their followers will tell you America never wanted people like me and my students, anyway. Good riddance. But listen in the darkness, Americans: do not burn every good intention of those people who wrote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “we the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Trump and Cruz have cranked open a rusty valve in America and let the ugliness that has long simmered beneath the country’s surface surge forth. That ugliness is fueling a new regime that only mirrors Adolf Hitler’s: certain groups banished, the triumphant tide of exclusion rising. Stand in the present darkness of your country, Americans, and remember history’s grave errors. The “great” America Trump and Cruz have made is openly xenophobic, homophobic, and racist. Its current actions—including the unapologetically brutal war America has begun waging in the Middle East—only echoes American “accomplishments” like slavery, the Indian Removal Act, segregation, and lynchings. How Christian you all are, you Americans, to exclude and deny and hate! Jesus would have done the same, I’m sure.
America doesn’t have to continue down this path. Once, we lumbered toward light: toward a more representative government, greater income equality, increased acceptance of every human, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnic origins.
Up here in Vancouver, my family and I have begun to make a new life. Some days, I don’t even care that America doesn’t want us. I feel relieved that we left. But then I think of everything I love—the Rocky Mountains, the open road through the high desert, the little towns in the Iowa farmland where I was raised; all the proud ideas of freedom and justice for all; all the hard work of progress American activists have achieved over the last two centuries—and I feel overcome with sorrow for my country again. America doesn’t have to continue down this path. Once, we lumbered toward light: toward a more representative government, greater income equality, increased acceptance of every human, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnic origins. Did you know the founders of America even imagined their created democracy would lead to peace? America could strive to be good and whole again. You could.
Close your eyes and remember 2016, seven years ago: you could have voted against Trump and Cruz. You could have chosen a different America.
You could have. And now—all the people forced to hide or flee, disappeared, deported, beaten, killed—all because of their origin or their religion or their sexual orientation or their unwillingness to praise Trump and Cruz—now it may be too late.
Solange Knowles may be Beyoncé’s younger sister, but that doesn’t mean she’s content to stay shadowed in a corner.
Yes, Solange may not be a household brand, but I can’t help but think that she prefers it this way. This level of celebrity allows Solange to directly critique anti-blackness and white supremacy in America without the fear of public backlash that could destroy her pop culture bankability.
Beyoncé, who rarely gives interviews, may not take a publicly vocalized stance on issues of social justice, but she often makes her support known through financial support. Earlier this year, Queen Bey and husband Jay Z donated $1.5 million to the Black Lives Matter movement, in addition to other civil rights organizations. In the beginning of the summer, she gave around $82,000 from her Formation World Tour to assist the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. People may criticize Beyoncé for not literally speaking out in a blunt, unapologetic way like the actor Jesse Williams is prone to do. However, this has never been a part of Beyoncé’s handling of her image as an entertainer or member of pop culture royalty.
In the case of Solange, she utilizes social media in a form that her older sister avoids. Her Twitter and Instagram, along with her website, Saint Heron, routinely confront racism and the country’s impulse to uphold white privilege.
In the case of Solange, she utilizes social media in a form that her older sister avoids. Her Twitter and Instagram, along with her website, Saint Heron, routinely confront racism and the country’s impulse to uphold white privilege.
I can only wish that I’d grown up with someone like Solange as a public figure who is so insistent on protecting Black girls and women. On her Twitter, Solange recounted an unpleasant and highly uncomfortable concert experience in New Orleans. Solange, her husband, and her eleven-year-old son, Julez, attended a Kraftwerk concert at the Orpheum Theater. The audience at the electronica concert was not diverse: Solange noted that the overwhelming majority of patrons were white. When Solange danced to a song, a group of white women told her to sit down. Solange refused, and the women threw a lime at her.
To be Black in white spaces means that you are suddenly blessed and cursed with hyperawareness…
To the naive reader, this story may seem nothing more than an unfortunate incident to be chalked up to rude and drunk concert attendees. For Black girls and women who understand what Solange meant by the term “white spaces,” it’s affirmation of a long-known truth.
To be Black in white spaces means that you are suddenly blessed and cursed with hyperawareness, injected with the X-Men ability to interpret not just outright racism but malevolence cloaked in a cloudy layer of passive aggression and microaggressions. To be Black in white spaces means that you are both the designated ambassador of your entire race and no one at all, invisible, with an interchangeable face. In an essay titled “And Do You Belong? I Do” and posted on Saint Heron, Solange elaborated on her Tweets. She wrote:
It usually does not include “please.” It does not include “will you.” It does not include “would you mind,” for you must not even be worth wasting their mouths forming these respectable words. Although, you usually see them used seconds before or after you.
You don’t feel that most of the people in these incidents do not like black people, but simply are a product of their white supremacy and are exercising it on you without caution, care, or thought.
Many times the tone just simply says, “I do not feel you belong here.”
Anti-blackness is not solely relegated to overtly hostile or malicious displays of bigotry. There are numerous ways to make someone feel as though they don’t belong, as though their safety has been compromised. Later on in her essay, Solange wrote, “You constantly see the media having a hard time contextualizing black women and men as victims every day, even when it means losing their own lives….You realize that you never called these women racists, but people will continuously put those words in your mouth.”
White people who have deluded themselves into believing that they are progressive liberals often tout the phrase, “I don’t see color.” They frequently follow up with something along the lines of, “I don’t care if you’re black or white or green or blue,” ironically disproving their point, as they classify minority status as akin to alien foreignness. I didn’t grow up in the South, but that doesn’t mean I’m a stranger to racism, and to feeling like my blackness, my “Otherness,” doesn’t fit into my very white surroundings. The institution of whiteness ruled that my identity wasn’t authentic enough, that my blackness was dependent upon adhering to a narrow vision of blackness as defined by the white gaze. Boys who I deemed the love of my life have accused me of being too sensitive, of imagining things, of seeing fire where there isn’t smoke. That’s the clever trick of white privilege: the combination of willful ignorance and lack of lived experience imagines equality where it does not exist.
That’s the clever trick of white privilege: the combination of willful ignorance and lack of lived experience imagines equality where it does not exist.
I don’t believe that silence is a beneficial defense mechanism. In a society where being Black is punishable by death, silence only aids white supremacy. Solange recognizes that silence does not encourage change. She also realizes that she can use her public platform to connect with other Black girls and women and make them feel less isolated and alone.
Solange recently interviewed actress Amandla Stenberg for the February 2016 issue of Teen Vogue and spoke to that feeling of unquantifiable kinship between Black girls. She noted, “There’s a secret language shared among black girls who are destined to climb mountains and cross rivers in a world that tells us to belong to the valleys that surround us. You learn it very young, and although it has no words, you hear it clearly.” Knowing this language has made it possible for women to produce safe spaces in the midst of uninhabitable land. It’s a sense of higher consciousness, the look that transpired between the only other Black woman and me in my graduate school writing class, the exchange that prompted me to grab the open seat next to her. A feeling of anchoring myself. It is less a shared code of pain than it is a show of solidarity.
Anger is often viewed as destructive. Solange challenges that idea, arguing that anger can be a healthy, even necessary response to unfathomable atrocities ranging from the physical to the emotional and mental.
Anger is often viewed as destructive. Solange challenges that idea, arguing that anger can be a healthy, even necessary response to unfathomable atrocities ranging from the physical to the emotional and mental. While Beyoncé seems to filter her frustrations through subversive tactics that are primarily based on a nonpersonal, business-first sensibility, Solange participates in racial politics via personal reflection.
The media may deem Solange “crazy” for speaking out, as is often the case when Black people refuse to be complicit in racially motivated abuse. Solange is not exposing anything new or revolutionary, but her comments are viewed as such due to America’s legacy of deep denial. In the closing part of her essay, Solange remarks, “We belong. We belong. We belong. We built this.” Anger is testament to this mantra, a reminder that blackness is not validated by trauma.
In Owl At Home, Arnold Lobel’s 1975 illustrated early reader, solitary Owl scolds winter for coming into his house. He is frightened by a creature under his covers, which turns out to be his feet. He makes himself cry in order to enjoy a pot of tear-water tea. He runs up and down the stairs in order to be in two places at once. He worries about the moon.
Throughout these five short episodes, Owl never encounters any other animate creatures. He talks to the weather, his legs, objects in the sky. He doesn’t seem perturbed by the fact that they never reply.
“If I am looking at you, moon, then you must be looking back at me. We must be very good friends,” Owl says.
Aha, the reader thinks, the moon isn’t a real friend—it just seems like it’s there for you. The moon begins to follow Owl and Owl shoos it away. He feels sad when he is home safe in bed and cannot see his friend—and relieved when it reappears from behind clouds to shine in his window. Poor, deluded Owl.
At another point, Owl tells himself vignettes of small things and objects, about wasted potential, and isolation, in order to make himself cry:
“Spoons that have fallen behind the stove and are never seen again,” said Owl…. “Books that cannot be read,” said Owl, because some of the pages have been torn out.” … “Mornings nobody saw because everybody was sleeping,” sobbed Owl.
“Soon,” Lobel writes, “the kettle was all filled up with tears.”
And yet, while the episode chronicles small moments of stunning loneliness, the chapter ends on a note of optimism. “Owl felt happy as he filled his cup. ‘It tastes a bit salty,’ he said, ‘but tear water-tea is always very good.’”
After his recitation, Owl’s decision is to be happy—to be nourished by his temporary sadness. He seems to be the master of these sad stories.
And yet…if Owl understands the illusory nature of these stories, does he know that his friendship with the moon is also not real? Does it matter, if it makes him happy? Is Owl in command of the narrative? Are we?
Arnold Lobel is perhaps best known for creating Frog and Toad, who make up one of the funniest, most poignant relationships in children’s literature.
The first book, Frog and Toad Are Friends, came out in 1970. The pair is a classic odd couple: Frog is sunny and energetic; Toad frets about buttons, swimsuits, and about not being able to think of stories. He has moments of deep and deeply real insecurity and melancholy that always find reassurance in Frog’s abiding friendship. Frog and Toad can also be seen as a portrait of male-male love. In total, Lobel wrote four Frog and Toad books. (Another two were discovered more recently and released by Lobel’s daughter, Adrianne.)
It is hard not to read some of Owl’s loneliness—the wasted potential that he cries about in the tear-water tea, the ignored history of objects and creatures—as being about Lobel’s personal, hidden tragedies.
When reading the Frog and Toad books, it is difficult not to draw parallels to Lobel’s life. In a May 2016 piece for The New Yorker, Colin Stokes traces Lobel’s origins as a children’s book author and illustrator—sometimes in collaboration with his wife Anita Kempler. Stokes also notes that Lobel was gay. Lobel was one of the early casualties of AIDS and died of complications from the disease in 1987. He had come out to his wife and children in 1974. Owl At Home was published in 1975. It is hard not to read some of Owl’s loneliness—the wasted potential that he cries about in the tear-water tea, the ignored history of objects and creatures—as being about Lobel’s personal, hidden tragedies.
But perhaps we don’t have the right to look at Lobel’s story—his stories—through that lens. Lobel’s books, after all, are ultimately happy. They affirm friendship. They show that people (or owls and amphibians) need and find joy in ties, even while acknowledging that relationships are as ephemeral as life.
My experience of Owl at Home has always been social. I likely first encountered the book during one of those important early kid’s events: story time.
Between kindergarten and third grade, my class went to the school library at least once a week for a reading with our librarian, Ms Wilkins, and to take out books.
To this day, the memory of Ms Wilkins—of sitting cross-legged on a low carpet of the library surrounded by other kids, of listening to her read in her low, scratchy voice—brings me immense comfort.
Ms Wilkins was tall and gray-haired. She wore a heavy man’s watch, which I sometimes stared at when she read. She introduced us to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. She read us Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day and paused to explain to us how the author used collage to make up his illustrations. I still remember the care she took to talk to us about each book that she selected, about how pictures and words were put together. She was teaching us how to see, what to look for in narrative—something that I don’t think anyone had ever really done for me before. I remember her as a reserved woman—not the kind of person whom one would peg as someone who wanted to work with kids. But as my reading advanced, she listened to me quietly when I told her I wanted books like Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. She didn’t grimace or laugh—and she steered me to Enid Blyton, P. L. Travers, and Dodie Smith.
To this day, the memory of Ms Wilkins—of sitting cross-legged on a low carpet of the library surrounded by other kids, of listening to her read in her low, scratchy voice—brings me immense comfort. It was this same feeling of intimacy and sharing that I tried to bring to my daughter when I read to her about Frog and Toad, and Owl.
In the wake of the US election, I have been thinking a lot about the uses of reading and writing. I dwell on how useless writing—my writing—seems to be. I consider this while taking refuge in stories that conclude happily and unhappily—in narratives that have the courtesy to end while our reality continues rudely and dangerously on.
I tell myself this when I write: that a book may be an inanimate object, but it is also contains the words of a person reaching out. I tell myself that empathy works even when results are not immediately visible. Or I tell myself nothing and just go on.
We do think of reading and writing as solitary pursuits—perhaps they’re even selfish. But reading can take the form of a parent reading to a child, a story time for a class of eager kids. Or it can be one person and a book.
I tell myself this when I write: that a book may be an inanimate object, but it is also contains the words of a person reaching out. I tell myself that empathy works even when results are not immediately visible. Or I tell myself nothing and just go on.
At the end of Owl at Home, Owl has fallen asleep. The moon is still shining on him. It is there if Owl needs it.
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