I Am Not Scared of This Administration. I Am Angry

We are not even a month into President Trump’s second term, and it is safe to say that he has turned our collective lives upside down. There were his Week No. 1 executive orders targeting the trans community and DEI efforts, which were barely disguised attempts to reintroduce segregation and open discrimination back into American lives. Then his Week No. 2 efforts to freeze funding that would impact a wide swath of Americans and his patron—billionaire Nazi boy wonder Elon Musk—commandeering the Treasury Department payment systems and getting a good long look at every American’s most confidential data. It’s a lot. 

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon refers to it as muzzle velocity. Bannon told PBS’s Frontline in 2019:

“The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to …”

There are a lot of reasons not to like Bannon, and while I most certainly would have no interest in enjoying a crisp Chardonnay with the man, I do find that he occasionally says things that are accurate and should give one reason to pause. 

What we have been experiencing over the last several weeks is absolutely the muzzle velocity that Bannon so candidly talked about. It feels like the mainstream media is steps behind in keeping up with the administration’s plays. Because as soon as you think you heard about the latest executive order and batshit actions, they have moved on. It’s designed to keep you exhausted, to keep your nervous system out of balance, to steal your sleep, and to essentially keep you locked in a cycle of fear. It’s the same playbook as the first term, except it has been updated and, with the addition of Musk and his money and his social media platform, it’s going faster and harder than we ever imagined possible. 

That said, I am not scared. While social media is filled with people being informed around the clock, it can also be the echo chamber that magnifies our fears with the type of terror that immobilizes us. That isn’t where I am. 

No, I am mad. To be frank, I am pissed off. As a 52-year-old Black woman, who is a daughter of Jim Crow–era parents. It was only five years before my birth that Jim Crow laws finally fell in an official capacity, but not before leaving lifetime scars on the generation before mine. My grandparents were sharecroppers in Arkansas, who had 16 kids—my own beloved late father being one of those kids. I was well into my late 30s before my father talked openly about his childhood under Jim Crow. How after school, he and his siblings and some of their children had to pick cotton on the farm—well, more accurately, the plantation—whose land my grandparents worked. How picking cotton was backbreaking work that hurt the fingers. How as a child in what we now call middle school, a white teacher scoffed at him when he said he wanted to be a scientist and suggested that he become a janitor, as that was a more suitable goal for a young Black boy in the Jim Crow South. How the day he graduated from high school, he took his graduation gift—a steamer trunk—and packed it up to take a Greyhound bus to Chicago. There he would join several of his older brothers who had traded the harsh, brutal, racist conditions of the South for the promise of freedom in the North. A promise that often fell short, as he would later learn, but which still allowed him a more favorable life than in Arkansas and the harsh lingering racism and poverty that resulted after the fall of Jim Crow. 

It was those revelations that explained why we rarely visited my paternal grandparents and extended family during my childhood. My only clear memories of Arkansas as a child were homes that looked like tenement shacks, stores with sawdust floors, and Pepsi Cola. Oh, and that anyone white was to be addressed as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So.

Dad came to Chicago to create a better life that would one day give both his children access to the education and positions he never dreamed possible because of his race. I was one of the first in our extended family to graduate from college and my brother is the only member of our family to hold a doctoral degree. These accomplishments were made easier for two Black working-class kids because of the work of those who came before us and sacrificed to demand the humanity of Black people. Work that to this day serves as the springboard for all marginalized people in the U.S. fighting for their rights and humanity. 

Trump’s attacks on DEI represent a clear desire to take us back to the time when uppity Black folks like me were put in our place. He wants white men to be our rulers again and that doesn’t sadden me. It fills me with rage.

Rage to even consider the possibility that my four beautiful grandbabies who are children of the South, living in midst of the Bible Belt, may grow up in a world that more closely resembles the world their great-grandfather grew up in, than the integrated world in which I was raised in Chicago. While far from perfect and still riddled with racism, it was not quite the state-sponsored racism and apartheid that Trump and that man from South Africa desire. 

The irony, of course, is that Trump and his cabal insist that DEI puts unqualified people in positions and steals from competent white men, when his choice of cabinet picks and staffing shows nothing but the highest levels of grossly incompetent white men. White men who were angry that before the return of Trump, their whiteness was no longer cover for their mediocrity and that in a world with DEI, they were forced more often to actually be competent and well-qualified to get work. 

I refuse to go to the world from which my family escaped. I refuse to allow my children and grandchildren to ever be seen as “less than” because of the color of their skin. I refuse to be seen as less than because of my gender and race. While all of the things happenings are scary—because it’s clear that the Trump-Musk regime is working from the playbook of Hitler—I have a dream that if we dare to raise our collective voices and push back with all our might, we can stop these jokers. That in raising our collective voices, we can channel our fear to fuel our passion for what is decent and right—letting these people know that in our world, the hateful oligarchy has no place. We don’t bow to the purveyors of hate, we don’t give in to terrorists, and we don’t cower in fear. They may have the money and even the access to our money, but we have people power and our shared humanity. That is worth more than their billions, and it is the true power.