If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ll have noticed that 2020 bashing has become a sport. These criticisms are well deserved, to be fair.  The past 11 months have wrought a level of death, despair, cruelty and isolation that is difficult to grapple with.  For me, this pervasive darkness prompted a really beautiful and difficult journey of reflection that led to the complete unraveling of the stories I told myself about who I was and what kind of country I lived in. 

My immense class privilege spared me from the acute pain and inequities exacerbated by this pandemic.  I grew up in the bucolic suburbs, went to prep school and college abroad, and have had steady employment since graduating. Frankly, I feel guilt even lodging a semblance of a complaint.  But as a Black Woman in the rarefied, lily white world I found myself in -- I’ve always been keenly aware that my presence was the exception, not the rule. And that the price of entry was that I would never fully fit into either this world or my own. 

When Barack Obama first ran for President, I felt, for the first time in my life, really proud to be myself.  Here was a Black man who didn’t really fit into any of society’s overly simplistic boxes, and he was nonetheless excelling. I was 15 years old when he first won,  and felt a sense of infinite possibilities.  It affirmed to me a deep faith in America’s teleological progress and systems that propelled my ancestors, grandparents and parents to create a better life for me. I believed that if I continued to work hard, I would continue to succeed and better yet - be accepted for exactly who I was. The country’s inequality would continue to be remedied,  with compassionate people like Barack Obama leading the way. It felt as if the arc of the moral universe was, and would continue to, bend in the right direction. 

Looking back now, my decline to pessimism started off slowly but like all boulders, started to pick up momentum over time. It started with Mitch McConnell, and his vow to make Barack Obama a one-term President. I remember initially feeling taken aback by the sheer callousness and brazenness of his comments. But it was the subtext that would truly haunt me. I knew intuitively that despite Obama’s sheer excellence and stated willingness to compromise, people like McConnell would never accept him because of his race. I internalized this message as a sign that no matter how hard I worked, something was inherently wrong with me because I was Black. While this hurt, I did what my ancestors had done for countless generations before me and doubled down to excel in our society’s metrics of success, such as education and weight loss. 

Despite my best efforts to work through these painful feelings, the universe had other plans to remind me I couldn’t hide from it. It’s hard to put into words how crushing the murder of Trayvon Martin was to me.  I had never really given much thought to my own impermanence before then. I could’ve been Trayvon Martin and this shook me to my core. He wasn’t much younger than me, and I frequently was the only Black face walking around mainly white neighborhoods. And that his murderer would just get to continue to live his life free of any consequences showed me that this country wasn’t living up to its promises of fairness and justice. I was outraged and heartbroken, but still held faith that this was an error in the system and it could be fixed. Then, 2020 happened. 

I am ashamed to admit it took me a global pandemic, depression and long overdue racial uprising to accept that this country was inherently unfair. Class privilege and I think a naive optimism clouded my vision. But, the harder pill to swallow is that I spent so much of my life telling myself that something was wrong with me for being a Fat, Black Woman. And that if I acted and looked perfect, I would finally be accepted by the omniscient white gaze. The same capitalist and white supremacist levers that kills my Black brothers, sisters and non-binary folx in body was also killing me in spirit by making me work towards an unattainable vision of perfection. 

I wish I could point to one, singular moment where my worldview utterly changed. But, I can’t. It was George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, lines of families waiting to get food, exorbitantly high hospital bills for COVID-19 patients and a lifetime of internalizing messages that my life wasn’t worth a damn. This river of rage, anxiety and unworthiness I spent my whole life ignoring bubbled up to the surface one morning in early June and I’ve been grappling with it since then. I expect I will be for the rest of my life. 

I have no policy prescriptions about what the future should look like, but find immense solace in the work of so many brilliant people like Angela Davis, Derecka Purnell, Raquel Willis, Janaya Khan and Ericka Hart. I do know that reforms, half measures or a return to whatever the hell civility means will absolutely not work for those of us at the margins.  If we do not fundamentally alter the power systems in this country that privileges White people above everyone else,  it will perish in one way or another. I do feel a tinge of hope - not in the systems that undergird America, but in the fact that there are more people like me who, due to the sheer magnitude of despair we’ve collectively experienced this past year, have begun the difficult work of grappling with America’s superiority complex.