Thanksgiving

I woke up the morning of November 9, 2016, to a world in which I did not want to raise my children.  I planned to rear them in a world where the first black man was elected president, followed by the first woman.  I anticipated more progressive thinking and reform in the United States.  I assumed that the adoption papers my wife and I carry for our own biological children would become antiquated.

I was wrong.

What happened to our country?  We elected a racist, narcissistic misogynist to run our country.  I say we because even though he clearly did not have my vote, 53% of white women voted for him.  What kind of respect do we as women have for ourselves if we elect as a leader who wants to take away our reproductive rights?  A man who disrespects us so much that he normalizes rape culture?

My black friends and colleagues like to tell me that I am black like them.  This is a false honor.  Unlike them, I was completely shocked by the election's outcome.  My friends and colleagues knew what was coming.  But in my naive white privilege, in which I do not experience daily social and institutional injustice, I believed that our society was getting better.  I was wrong.

Our President-elect is selecting his cabinet, and his "alt-right" choices are bringing back high school memories from the early 1990s.  I had completed a research project on neo-Nazi hate groups in the United States.  In my presentation to the class, I explained how Morris Dees, a lawyer from the Southern Poverty Law Center, was bankrupting hate groups by suing them successfully in the court of law.  After white supremacist members of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) beat an Ethiopian man to death, Dees won a civil court case against their leader for $12.5 million.  The leader declared bankruptcy and WAR went out of business.

As part of my research I called neo-Nazi hotlines and recorded their hate-filled messages.  They were blatantly racist and anti-Semitic.  They threatened violence, torture, and genocide.  They were on a quest to reclaim their country from anyone "different."  They ended their tirades with, "This... is... WAR."  For weeks I had recurring nightmares about these skinheads coming to my school and sticking a loaded gun in my face, pulling the trigger when I was unable to recite the entire Lord's Prayer.  This is how, in my dreams, they discovered that I was Jewish.  During this time, in reality, we evacuated the school for a pulled fire alarm and returned to black swastikas spray-painted all over the stairwells.

Last year a friend tried to convince me that after so many white supremacist groups went bankrupt, they were quietly and slowly infiltrating government organizations, waiting for their time to come.  I laughed this off as another conspiracy theory.  She told me that they were rising in the ranks as police officers, FBI agents, and representatives in local and state governments.  I said something noncommittal, like "that's scary," and we left it at that.  Was I wrong again?

When David Duke celebrates Steve Bannon's appointment by Trump; when a KKK parade is planned in North Carolina; when a group of neo-Nazis raise their arm in the Nazi salute; when there are 700 hate crimes around the United States in one week post-election, the world becomes a much more frightening place.  On the other hand, these events are bringing together more than three million Americans who vow to not be complacent.  We have a community of three million who will stand up against bigotry, against racism, against misogyny, against anti-Semitism, against homophobia.  We are a community of people who in the past complacently believed it would all work out, but now we are ready for action.  We are a community of people who believe in goodness, diversity, and freedom.  We are ready to fight.

I still mourn the loss of the world in which I wanted to raise my children.  I didn't know how I could ever explain to them this turn of events in our nation's history.  But now, I also see that my children will have role models to teach them that one voice among many counts.  They will learn how to be an ally, how to speak up on behalf of others, and how to be part of a community.  They will learn how to be kind, loving, and accepting of all people.  On this Thanksgiving, while I am still anxious about the future, and depressed about the present state of affairs, I am also thankful for my friends, my colleagues, and my family.  May we do what is right by each other, and in doing so, be role models for all of our children.