The Day the Better Angels of Our Nature Went Out to Lunch | Opinion

Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?

This is what Martin Luther King Jr. sought to answer in 1967 as he studied the state of America’s race relations and the struggle for civil rights.

Nearly 60 years later, when America stood on the precipice and considered this choice, it chose chaos.

Election night was more than a “bad night” or an “electoral letdown.” It was a stunning rebuke of the possibility of a nation guided by our better angels in favor of a modern-day caricature of the Confederacy. This is the version of America Black people have always known. It brutally asserts itself each time we get too close to forming a more perfect union. On Tuesday, 86 percent of Black American voters locked arms and once again attempted to stand as a firewall between democracy and tyranny. But this time, too few of our fellow Americans stood in solidarity with us.

To now be standing toe to toe, staring into the face of the America that forced my grandparents to flee the South in 1940, is unthinkable. An America that crushed the rights of its citizens. Constructed systems that would guarantee generations of unequal treatment between its people—unequal education, unequal justice, unequal housing, and unequal opportunity.

Trump has said he will use the force of the military to quash peaceful protesters, bless police with blanket immunity to use violent force in our communities, and systematically dismantle our civil rights. In the wake of the Supreme Court already making irrelevant the Voting Rights Act, Trump’s right-wing justices refused to even affirm the tenets of Brown v. Board of Education, and the end of the Civil Rights Act is written into the DNA of Project 2025.

We know this version of America. We recognized it in the Tea Party that rolled into the halls of Congress on the promise of stonewalling any legislative achievements of the first Black president, and who called him an illegitimate American. We recognized it when this distorted version of America descended a golden escalator spewing hate. We recognized it in Charlottesville and at the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters and insurrectionists raised the treasonous rebel flag.

We also recognize it in the arrogance of white progressives who insist they know better than we do when it comes to protecting democracy and mobilizing our communities. They believe their testing and models are far more sophisticated than our generations of lived experience.

We know this version of America. We’ve heard too many times “This is not who we are,” but it is in the unwillingness to acknowledge and confront this version of America that we continue to fail ourselves, our children, and generations yet to be born.

Tuesday night, I found myself humming “My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty… place where our fathers died … of thee I sing.” It is a version of America that I thought possible when singing My Country ‘Tis of Thee with my classmates as a child. But it is a fleeting version of our nation that we, sometimes, can reach out and touch but can never seem to hold firmly in our hands. Tuesday night, it slipped through our fingers once again, as our nation chose chaos over community.

Adrianne Shropshire is the founder and executive director of BlackPAC, an independent, Black-led organization that uses the power of year-round political engagement and elections to change our economic, justice, and political systems.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.