#two of the past elections the black woman in question was actually our neighbor down the street so that was a plus

[unforth]

I'm an OTW member again!

THANK YOU @petralemaitre !

If y'all want to get a membership scholarship before June 30th so you can register and be able to vote in the next OTW election, get all the deets here:

(the post is worth reading even if you don't want the scholarship; it's about End OTW Racism and it's such an accurate write-up of my own thoughts on why I'm involved too, I was like, "wow sharing a brain with a total stranger is so heckin' weird")

Very much lookin' forward to exercising my right to vote! Let's dooooo this!

[gracewithducks]

Justice, Mercy, and Grace (Faith at the Movies: Just Mercy) - Isaiah 1:10-17; preached 1/26/2020

I’ve really enjoyed this Faith at the Movies series. We’ve had fun the last few weeks – talking about Disney princesses and Jedi battles – though even in those fantastical universes, we’ve recognized the battle of good against evil, and the risk faced and the power held by ordinary people to confront their privilege and face injustice. But today, those themes come into the real world, and real lives are at stake.

 And I start by saying that, as I prepared for this Sunday, the thought that kept coming back to me over and over again is:  I should not be preaching this sermon. That’s not to say that I shouldn’t be preaching this sermon, but what I mean to say is, I should not be preaching this sermon – not because this conversation is not important, but because I’m me: I’m not a person of color; I’m a white cis straight woman… and while the world doesn’t always appreciate the voices of women, especially in ministry, the reality is that, as a cis straight white woman, I am very aware that people like me have far too often been treated as a precious commodity, to be defended and protected at all costs. In the name of people like me, injustices and violence have been heaped upon my trans sisters and people of color – especially men of color – even though, rarely, has anybody tried to trust or protect people like me against cis straight white men, who are actually historically our biggest threat.

 But I stand here knowing that the accusations of white women, the suffering and fear of white women, has been used over and over throughout history to justify prejudice and discrimination and imprisonments and railroading and lynching –and for that truth, and for all the ways I myself have over the years intentionally or not participated in a system that privileges me and devalues others’ lives and experiences – I stand here humbled, ashamed, full of sorrow and regret.

 I have wrestled this week with my place in this story – the story of a black man sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman, a murder he didn’t commit; a black man whose continued imprisonment is justified in the name of letting white women sleep well at night. But I’ve also recognized that this same black man was freed not just because of the efforts of his lawyer but the tireless and risky work of another white woman – a woman who saw what was happening, and knew it was wrong, and refused to be silent or just go away.

 Maybe I’m not the best person to preach this sermon. But I also know that, as a woman, I am grateful when my white male colleagues stand and name from their pulpits the experiences of their female and minority colleagues – so here I stand, naming my own participation in broken and sinful systems, but choosing to use the platform and the voice I’ve been given as best I can.

 So let’s talk about Just Mercy. Let’s not just talk about the movie, but the true story, the real life which inspired it: the life of Walter McMillian.[1] Walter was born in 1941, and he grew up poor, picking cotton in Alabama. As an adult, Walter made good – he purchased logging and mill equipment and began his own business. He married, raising nine children with his wife of twenty-five years – but he made waves in the community when he had an affair with a white woman – and when one of his sons married a white woman.

 Walter’s connections to white women – the ways he was seen to step “out of line” – made him an easy mark for suspicion, when another white woman, an eighteen-year-old dry-cleaning clerk, was shot and killed.

 At the time of the murder, Walter McMillian was at a church fish fry, with dozens of witnesses – including a police officer. Nevertheless, a few months later, Walter was arrested – by a newly-elected, openly racist sheriff who was feeling pressure to solve the crime.

 Walter McMillan was immediately sent to death row, where he waited for more than a year for his trial to begin. Did you hear that? He was sent to death row before his trial even began. The trial was moved to an overwhelmingly white county, where an overwhelmingly white jury, after a trial which lasted less than two days, found Walter guilty. The jury ignored the multiple witnesses who testified that Walter was at a church event. The jury ignored the lack of physical evidence or motive. The jury recommended a life sentence, but the judge – whose name was, this is the honest truth, Judge Robert E. Lee Key, Jr. – the judge overruled the jury – not to protest the miscarriage of justice, but instead to sentence Walter to death.

 This was in 1988. This is recent history, friends. This was the eighties: when we thought we were finally past the chaos of the civil rights movement, when good white people said we don’t see color and everybody can just be friends. This happened in my lifetime, and in many of yours.

 A couple of months after Walter was sentenced to death, and well into his second year on death row, a young attorney named Bryan Stevenson visited Walter in prison. The two men bonded over their common life experiences, especially their faith, and Stevenson was moved to help Walter fight for freedom. Over the next three years, the Alabama Court turned down four appeals in Walter’s case. But then the key witness – really, the only witness – against Walter McMillian recanted: he confessed that he was put under pressure by law enforcement to lie, to place Walter at the scene of the crime, or else to face death row himself.

 In the movie, this is the moment when you finally start to believe that the good guys could win – this is the moment when Walter himself, who’s refused so far to get his hopes up, when Walter starts to believe he might get his life back. Walter and his lawyer petition for a new trial, showing the evidence that was faked, the evidence that was ignored, all the evidence that Walter is an innocent man.

 But then the petition is denied. Walter McMillian goes back to death row – heartbroken, devastated, after that hope, which he’d resisted for so long, fails him again.

 But Stevenson doesn’t give up. Walter doesn’t give up. They keep telling the story: inviting the media to bear witness, inviting the public to hear what’s happened, getting the momentum to shift to the point where those in power can’t ignore it anymore. And after six years on death row, after six years of brutality and despair, after six years of protesting his innocence, Walter finally got a new trial. He was exonerated; his name was cleared; and Walter got to go home.

 It’s a happy ending – but it isn’t. Because Walter McMillian carried the trauma of his years on death row for the rest of his life. And Walter McMillian’s community, his children, never forgot that their lives could be ended just because someone thought they “looked guilty.” And Walter McMillian is not alone. Although the prosecutors claimed that Walter’s eventual release proved that the system worked, the reality is that – as his lawyer Bryan Stevenson said – “it was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man… and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence.”

 This is a powerful movie. It’s all the more powerful because it’s grounded in truth. But it also begs the question: how could this happen? And what’s terrifying is the realization that this story still plays out – innocent people are underrepresented, railroaded, convicted, even executed – all around us still today.

 The systems that are supposed to protect us are broken. Systems are made by people, and people are messed up and broken, unwilling to acknowledge our prejudices, unwilling to face our mistakes, far more concerned with keeping up appearances and offering the illusion of justice than we are concerned with seeking actual justice based on the truth.

 One of the protests offered again and again by those who refused to reopen Walter’s case is that “my neighbors deserve to sleep well at night” – as if having someone locked up, even if it’s the wrong someone, as if having the illusion of security is what really matters.

 But the question is asked, “Whose neighbors?” Whose neighbors deserve to sleep well? Whose neighbors matter? Do you think that the people in Walter McMillan’s neighborhood slept well at night? Men and women and children who’d been with their neighbor, their father, their friend, who knew he was innocent, and still had seen him condemned to death for a murder he couldn’t possibly have committed?

 What about us? Do we prioritize our own sleep over the sleep of innocent men on death row? The sleep of mothers, living in terror that their sons will one day be gunned down just for being black? What about the sleep of children separated from their parents at the border? The sleep of women who’ve been victimized but know if they come forward, their lives will just be destroyed all over again?

 Who gets to sleep well at night? On the night before his own death, Jesus scolded his disciples for the inability to stay awake, to pray and keep watch with him – are we, too, guilty of sleeping while others weep?

 It’s easy to talk about loving our neighbors – but as Just Mercy asks us: where is our neighborhood? Who are our neighbors? Jesus never gives us the luxury of limiting “loving our neighbors” to the people who look like, think like, believe like, or act like us.

 And you know, for a religion that laments the sacrifice of an innocent man, for a religion that proclaims that one death is enough, and no one else has to die for their sins – or anybody else’s, for a religion that celebrates grace in the name of Christ, we sure have hurt and killed and ignored the suffering of a whole lot of people in his name.

 When black men are shot in parks and traffic stops, we find ways to say it’s their own fault. When women are attacked, we immediately ask: what was she drinking? Why was she dressed that way? When violence breaks out, we breathe a sigh: it’s not in my neighborhood. When the water runs dirty for years on end, we shrug our shoulders – because our tap water is safe. Or at least we hope so. When mosques and temples are defaced and bombed, we look away; it doesn’t threaten me. And when the so-called justice system is in fact a travesty that privileges rich white people while overwhelmingly punishing people of color and threatening immigrants and refugees and terrifying victims out of telling the truth lest they be punished and victimized all over again –

 When rich white men play with fidget spinners rather than hearing evidence, because they’ve already made up their minds, and because the lies are more profitable than the truth –  

 Then we are a very long way from the days the prophets dreamed of: when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, where the young have vision and the old dream dreams, and there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, black nor white, slave nor free, but we are all one in the peace and the grace of Christ.

 Walter McMillian was almost executed for a crime he was innocent of; the system that was supposed to protect him let him down. But he’s not the only one. In fact, based on continuing work to secure new trials for those on death row, for every nine people who are executed in our country, at least one person is proven innocent. One out of ten. That’s unacceptable. That’s heart-breaking.

 But even for those who are guilty – as Just Mercy reminds us, no matter what you’ve done, you are more than your worst act. Isn’t that exactly the gospel that we proclaim here every week? We celebrate the promise of grace for the foulest sinner, grace that saves wretches like me. In God’s eyes, there is no such thing as a lost cause; even the worst criminal can, by God’s grace, be forgiven, redeemed, become someone new. Just look at the heroes of our faith: Moses was a murderer. David was a sex offender and a murderer. Paul breathed hatred and murder against the early Christians. But God used every one of them – even the criminal who died by Jesus’ side, who had no time to turn his life around, no time to redeem himself or atone for his mistakes – even he was promised a place at the feast of God in glory.

 We don’t get to kill people because they scare us. We don’t get to kill people because we don’t like the way they look. We don’t get to condemn people to death because they live on the wrong side of an imaginary line, or because they were born poor, because their skin is a different color, because they don’t fit in, because they follow a different faith. We don’t even get to condemn the worst criminal out there to death – because Jesus had something to say about throwing the first stone, and because – let’s face it – we are really good at getting things wrong. More than that, friends, we are people of life. We are people of grace.

 It’s not popular. It’s not easy. In Walter McMillian’s story, Walter’s family and friends were pressured and threatened; Walter’s lawyer and his colleagues faced death threats; the key witness had to overcome his own terror and trauma to risk telling the truth; the prosecutor had to face the guilt and embarrassment and responsibility of getting things so wrong.

 Speaking the truth is risky. Forgiveness is dangerous. Loving the wrong kind of people, eating with sinners – that’s exactly the sort of thing that got Jesus crucified.

 And he said, “Take up your cross, and follow me.”

 We are not promised that the road will be easy; it certainly won’t be comfortable or convenient. But we are promised that Christ will be with us, even in the shadow of death, even to the end of the age; we are promised that the truth will set us free. And we are promised that God’s grace will always be sufficient for our needs.

 So let’s keep speaking truth. Keep facing difficult truths: like the reality that racism is built into the foundation of our nation, and some lives have always mattered more than others, and the death of a few innocent black people or desperate brown people has always been considered a reasonable sacrifice so long as white people can sleep well at night.

 That’s the cold hard truth. Some of us have had the luxury of ignoring it for too long: but we can’t pretend any more.

 Do you remember, back when our nation was debating whether or not we should welcome refugees – something we’re still debating, but much more quietly, while our government distracts us and keeps turning desperate people away… do you remember, someone used the analogy which compared refugees to candies? And they said, “Would you eat a bowl of candy, if you knew that one or two might be poisoned?” – with the implication that we shouldn’t possibly invite refugees and immigrants into our country, when a few of them might turn out to be criminals. Not like we don’t have enough homegrown terrorists already, but that’s another story…

 When I remember from that conversation was when someone came up with the perfect response: He said, “Are the other candies human lives? Like, is there a good chance, a really good chance, that I would be saving someone from a war zone and probably save their life if I ate a candy? Then I would GORGE myself on candies. I would eat every single one I could find… And when I found the poisoned candy and died, I would make sure to leave behind a legacy of children and of friends who also ate candy after candy until there were no candies to be eaten. And for every person who found the poison candy… we would weep for their loss, for their sacrifice, and for the fact that they did not let themselves succumb to fear but made the world a better place… Because [the] REAL question [hidden behind an inaccurate, insensitive, dehumanizing candy metaphor] is, is my life more important than thousands upon thousands of men, women, and terrified children… and what kind of monster would think the answer to that question is yes?”[2]

 I know we were talking about the death penalty, but it’s all connected: because whenever we allow ourselves to be guided by prejudice and by fear – we’ve lost our way. When did we start believing that one life doesn’t matter, unless it is our own? I’d much rather err on the side of grace and compassion than hear about one more child dying in an American concentration camp, or one more teenager taking their life because they’re afraid to be who they really are, or one more innocent person executed by our government in our name.

 The problems are daunting. The systems are broken. And one person can’t fix it all. But each one of us can refuse to give up and to give in. We can choose to repent, to acknowledge our own prejudice and complicity, to name our own fear. We can search out truth, and call out lies – even when they come from the mouths of people we love. We can commit to a much broader definition of our neighborhood, and try to love and work for the good of all God’s children who live there – and when we fail, when we get discouraged, we can give thanks for God’s grace which is more than enough to cover our sins, and we can help each other find the hope and the courage to get up and start again.

 I want to end today with the words of Bryan Stevenson – the real Bryan Stevenson, the man who fought for so long to get Walter McMillian free, who dedicated his career to freeing other innocent people from wrongful convictions:

 Bryan Stevenson says, “We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as [we] victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and – perhaps – we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”[3]

 Thanks be to God, for justice, for mercy, and for unmerited grace.

   O God, we have all fallen short of your glory. We have all sinned. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not heard the cries of the needy. We have looked away from injustice. We have thought too often only of ourselves. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Forgive us for privileging power over people. Forgive us for choosing comfort rather than change. Forgive us for choosing crucifixion, when you’re a God of resurrections. Transform us. Teach us to love others as you love them. Teach us to love others as we love ourselves. Teach us to seek truth, to do justly, to love mercy, and above all, to walk with humility and love. In the name of Christ, who redeems us, who forgives us, who calls us to new life, we pray; amen.

Note: The photo above includes a portion of the United Methodist Church baptismal vows; along with rejecting evil, repenting of our sins, and putting our whole trust in the grace of Jesus Christ, candidates are asked: “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” Methodism (and the early church, and Jesus himself) has always linked the personal and social gospel; we are called to live out our faith in the world.

[1] The story is drawn not just from my movie notes, but from this article, which helped me fill in the gaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_McMillian

[2] https://www.joe.ie/news/broadcaster-eli-bosnick-with-a-far-more-humane-skittles-analogy-561050

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6591318-we-are-all-implicated-when-we-allow-other-people-to

[hellofastestnewsfan]

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa—Demographically and economically, Iowa isn’t actually that representative of the country as a whole. But even as the demographics and economics make it less like the rest of America, Iowa’s absurdly outsize role in picking the leader of the free world remains.

Enter two candidates, in the space of 48 hours, who both see the state as crucial: two women, two senators, two former local prosecutors, two people who had breakout moments during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings last fall, two presidential hopefuls on their second trips to Iowa since launching their campaigns.

[Read: Amy Klobuchar for president?]

Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris need the same thing, but they need it for opposite reasons.

Literally dozens more Democrats are in or circling the race. But the dynamics between these two, both doing well in early polls, contrast familiar Midwest pragmatism with diverse Left Coast progressivism. And most important for the ultra-energized voters here: Who is best to beat Donald Trump?

[Read: Kamala Harris’s campaign strategy—don’t pick a lane]

For Klobuchar, Iowa is her neighbor to the south—“We can see it from our porch in Minnesota” is the line she uses—conveniently located in geography and order on the primary calendar. A win in the Iowa caucuses could validate her pitch that the 2020 election is calling out for someone who can link the years her grandfather spent working in a mine to the “grit” to stand in a snowstorm for her own campaign announcement two weeks ago, and connect a purported hard-nosed pragmatism to years of big wins in her home state. For Harris, the state is the essential test of whether the parts of the country far from the square in Oakland where 22,000 stood in the streets for her announcement rally last month are really ready for a half-Jamaican, half-Indian woman from California who speaks bluntly about what’s gone wrong with America.

On Thursday night, Klobuchar was at the United Auto Workers hall, the featured guest at the Ankeny County Democrats annual dinner. On Saturday night, Harris was on the other side of town at the United Steelworkers hall, keynoting the Iowa Democratic Party Black Caucus. Klobuchar, as she always does, built her speech up to a quote from Walter Mondale, talking about Jimmy Carter’s presidency: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.” Harris, as is her custom, progressed to a paraphrase of Coretta Scott King: “The fight for justice and the fight for civil rights must be fought and won with each generation.”

Afterward, I asked Klobuchar what she thought being a senator from Minnesota, compared with being a senator from California, would mean to Iowa.

“It means that for me, going south for the winter is going to Iowa. It’s easier to get here,” she said. “It’s important to have a lot of people running, but I am a candidate from the heartland, and it’s an important part of our path to success in the general election.”

[Graeme Wood: The two Amy Klobuchars]

Was she arguing that senators from the coasts—not just Harris, but Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand—wouldn’t be able to win?

“Senators from the coast have won in the heartland in the past. So I don’t think it’s that. It’s that my No. 1 request was to be on the Agriculture Committee. I served on that committee for 12 years. I’ve played a major role in getting the farm bill passed,” she said. “I know these issues here.”

Klobuchar likes talking about herself as an underdog, and structurally that’s how she started a campaign that many people thought she wasn’t actually going to go through with. She’s short on campaign staff, here and nationally, and arrived with just one person on her payroll and a handful of others who’d come in as volunteers. She had a surge of online fundraising after she announced, but aides have acknowledged in conversations with others that money is going to be a scramble and that her best hope is to scrape by enough to make it through Iowa, and then count on an explosion of interest if she wins to carry her over.

And so she lays it on thick, talking about the two states’ main agricultural exports, or how they both put a premium on butter-carving contests. On the list of ways the states are similar that she read from on Thursday evening: “You have the world-famous matchstick museum, and we have the only museum in the world devoted to Spam—or, as we call it, the ‘Guggen-ham.’”

But her main argument is that the country needs a pragmatic president, and that starts with making a pragmatic argument for why she should be the nominee.

“We need to win. So here’s my deal: I have won every single congressional district in the state of Minnesota, including Michele Bachmann’s, three times,” Klobuchar said, referring to the former congresswoman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate who helped popularize Tea Party politics in the run-up to a campaign that got much more attention than actual votes. With Democrats nationally nervous that Minnesota is in danger of slipping away—in a shocker, it had the smallest margin of any state Hillary Clinton won in 2016, and Trump’s campaign has been public about Minnesota being at the top of its 2020 target list—Klobuchar leaned in.

“He has said to me several times, ‘I would have won Minnesota if I went back there again,’” she said, attempting a Trump impression that leans more on making the president sound dumb than making him sound like he’s from Queens, New York.

Harris landed here after two weeks of a sublimated freak-out, churned by Republican websites, that all tracked back to her being black. Just a sampling of the stirred-up controversies: Is she black enough? What does it mean that her husband is not black, but Jewish? How does she use hot sauce? What were the circumstances when she smoked pot? How extensive and authentic is her knowledge of rap music? Did she really order chicken and waffles at a famous soul-food restaurant?

[Jemele Hill: Kamala Harris’s blackness isn’t up for debate]

Harris had only briefly passed through Iowa since making her candidacy official, popping in to do a CNN town hall on her way back to Washington after the Oakland kickoff rally. But the state is key for her too: She wants a top finish here next February that would solidify her as a front-runner and give her the momentum going into a four-week blitz around the country in which most of the delegates will be awarded. Her expectation is that there wouldn’t be enough time or money for even the best political organization to keep up with her if she racked up enough early wins to create the momentum and a sense of inevitability.

This second trip was a full weekend of town halls and local Democratic events that she kicked off by greeting Asians and Latinos at the state capitol. She was trailed everywhere by the cameras and the staff entourage that mark a candidate being thought of as a front-runner.

Already in two weeks as a candidate, Klobuchar has started wearing creases into some of the lines she keeps using. Harris, meanwhile, has been delivering the same stump speech almost verbatim since hitting the midterm trail (including here in Iowa) in October, telling the same jokes, as if each time an ad lib has just come to her, like when she mocks smooth-talking candidates for sprinkling “lovely dust.” Beyond the performance skills as a candidate that Harris is demonstrating as she continues to introduce herself to voters who’ve never seen her in person before, she notably does not vary the speech much, no matter who’s in the crowd. Some bits get cycled in more frequently when she’s in front of minority audiences, like when she hammers the wage gap for black and Latino women, or mentions the radically higher mortality rate for new mothers, but nearly every audience hears her talk about Russian interference, just like nearly every audience hears her say that parents of 12-year-old black boys shouldn’t have to sit down with their sons and have “the talk” about how police are more likely to harass them because of the color of their skin.

Everywhere, Harris keeps to her “Let’s speak some truths,” rhetorical spine, and every time, it builds up to the same one: the truth that there is more that unites Americans than divides them, despite the efforts of Trump.

“Part of our strength as a nation is we are aspirational,” she said in her opening remarks at her town hall on Saturday afternoon. “Part of our strength is we will always fight to get to that place. Let’s hold on to our nature.”

It’s a call to unite behind her, and to believe that others will unite behind her, specifically because she is different and can piece a broken nation back together.

Maybe it was that the town hall was on a college campus in Ankeny, or that no one had to pay for a seat, or maybe that Harris is already being treated as a political celebrity, but the crowd was not only bigger—it was younger and significantly more diverse. By Saturday night, when she drove through a blizzard from a soup dinner in Ames to make it to the United Steelworkers hall for the Black Caucus event in West Des Moines, the crowd wasn’t as big as Klobuchar’s sold-out dinner two nights earlier. But those in attendance responded more enthusiastically to having Harris in the room.

Based on the questions they’re getting and the conversations they’re having while shaking hands in the crowds, Klobuchar is still being treated as an interesting person voters want to get to know, while Harris is being looked at as someone people are trying to squint at and see as a nominee.

That’s how Klobuchar and Harris are putting themselves out there as well.

“I have grit,” Klobuchar said on Thursday night. “And I have friends and I have great neighbors in Iowa. And I have every reason to believe I can do this.”

“I intend to spend a lot of time in Iowa,” Harris said on Saturday afternoon, doing her best to project strength. “I intend to win.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2tAiRqC

[foodselfiesandstuffblog]

Vogue: What It’s Like to Be Black and British in Trump’s America

"Vogue Magazine's" Fashion News Editor, Chioma Nnadi takes on the cross-intersectionality of being Black and British under a Trump Presidency. 

It was the weekend after the presidential election, and what had to so many felt unthinkable had actually happened—bolstered by waves of misogynist and isolationist rhetoric, Donald Trump had actually won. After the initial rush of protest rallies, the atmosphere throughout New York City was somber. A friend had invited a small group of similarly downtrodden souls for dinner at his partner’s apartment on the Upper East Side, aiming to lift our spirits. “Creative solidarity is essential for the most urgent matter,” read the email. “Looking forward to seeing. Supper at 6:00 p.m.” The idea of commiserating over wine and home-cooked food seemed particularly soothing. It was an unseasonably warm Sunday evening, and so I made a pit stop at the Met Breuer on my way from Brooklyn before I continued walking uptown, buoyed by the mood-brightening effects of Kerry James Marshall’s paintings. Against the stark white walls of the museum, his colorful, noble scenes of black American life had an optimism that was thoroughly uplifting and felt universal, one that seemed to suggest to me that the future might not be so bleak after all.

That positive thinking came to an abrupt end some 20 blocks north, when I arrived at my friend’s building and was pointed in an unfamiliar direction, away from the wood-paneled elevator banks, toward a small door at the opposite end of the lobby. Moments later, I found myself in the bowels of the building, not my friend’s warm, comforting apartment. It took a few minutes for me to realize that instead of directing me to the dinner party on the ninth floor, the doorman had sent me to the service entrance. I looked down at my clothes under the flickering florescent lights—plaid Junya Watanabe jacket, fire-engine red leather boots, and turquoise statement earrings—kooky art dealer, maybe—but delivery person? And then, of course, it dawned on me: It was because of the color of my skin.

I am lucky. It had been a long time since I’d experienced discrimination on such a rudimentary level in New York, though, of course, this minor incident paled in comparison to the grim hate crimes and police shootings that have been making headlines lately. Ultimately, it was further confirmation of what I already knew: that the bubble on our so-called post-racial society had burst long ago. Trump wasn’t even the needle that popped it—he was the grim residue.

Granted, as a black British woman, I am in some ways already at a distance from the complicated racial politics of this country. Though I have a deep connection with and admiration for the African-American experience, I can’t claim to know all of its complexities firsthand. I recently heard comedian Gina Yashere, a black woman who was born and raised in the U.K., jokingly tell the BBC in an interview that her English accent had gotten her out of a lot of trouble in America; that resonated with me. I know that I can change the course of a first impression with my voice, disorientating those with preconceived notions of blackness. My Britishness can offer an escape route from the insidious little boxes that have formed over centuries to stifle African-Americans. I am “other” in a way that is nebulous to some, and so considered to be more exotic than threatening. Throw the fact that I’m also half white into the equation, and my identity becomes even more difficult to contain.

The complexities of being biracial were something I navigated relatively easily as a child. The central London community in which I grew up was like something out of a Zadie Smith novel; the neighbors in our government housing block were all first- or second-generation immigrants like us—Irish, Portuguese, Ghanaian, Jamaican, Indian; most of the kids at my public elementary school were Bengali, and so we celebrated Muslim holidays like Eid along with Christmas and Easter in class. My parents encouraged me and my brothers to see our mixed heritage as a blessing, and made sure we socialized with other black and brown kids; my two best friends in the neighborhood were both mixed—one of Dutch and Nigerian origins, the other with Greek Cypriot and Barbadian roots.

It was only when we stepped outside of that working-class, multicultural safe zone that things got weird, like the time my older brother was chased by skinheads on his way back from a soccer game in the East End. London in the late ’80s wasn’t always a friendly place, but then neither was Continental Europe. I remember traveling to see my Swiss grandparents with my mother and younger brother, and the stares we got there were like nothing I’d ever known. Few could believe that our mother was really our mother, assuming that we’d been rescued from an orphanage in some faraway land by this dark-haired white lady. And when we said we were from London, the next question was always the inevitable: “But where are you really from?” We were welcomed with open arms in Nigeria, my father’s homeland, though still as something of a space oddity, especially in rural parts of the country. I remember one woman at the local village market running up to me with a huge smile on her face, excited to tell me that I was the first white person she’d ever seen: in her mind, all Westerners were essentially one and the same, regardless of color.

It’s perhaps why I’ve sought out safe zones of a similar kind to those of my childhood as an adult. Moving to Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn—what had been pitched to me as “the Brixton of New York” 14 years ago—was somewhat of a survivalist move on my part. Sure, it helped that the rooms for rent were then within my modest price range as a young writer working at a downtown magazine, but beyond the practicalities, this was a place that felt like home. It was comforting to hear both church bells and the prayer song of the local mosque on my morning coffee run; my favorite Senegalese hair-braiding spot downtown was only a short bus ride away; and whether I was in the mood for jollof rice or jerk chicken, I could satisfy my craving within a matter of blocks.

While gentrification has displaced some of my favorite spots, the most imminent threat to diverse, vibrant neighborhoods like mine are the racism and bigotry that has drifted this way in the past year. When I once openly envied the Americans who’d been lucky enough to have Barack Obama for a president, the outcome of the last election had me instinctively reaching for my European passport and plotting an escape. That said, returning to the U.K., and Brexit, a referendum that has exposed all kinds of a xenophobic fault lines in British society, wasn’t exactly a welcoming thought; outside of London, the very idea of England as my motherland never had much meaning to me anyway.

Those initial feelings of panic and despair have dissipated for the most part in the three months since, and deepened into a new resolve. Now more than ever, I’m determined to stake my claim here, to deepen the roots I’ve already planted. Some might call me naive for clinging to the old New York clichés—the place where you can be whoever you want to be, where everything is possible, and all weirdos great and small are encouraged to let their freak flag fly—but shouldn’t we all have our own set of keys to this city?

It’s a thought that crossed my mind when I found myself at a friend’s holiday party uptown a few weeks ago, at the same Upper East Side address I’d visited back in November. This time around the doorman on duty rushed over to welcome me with cheery salutations as I hovered nervously in the lobby, barely giving me a chance to name-check the host before he ushered me toward the elevators I’d been denied before. It was somehow strangely empowering to know that I’d been given access to both the basement and the upper floors of the building, two totally different strata. Being temporarily locked out of one was jarring, but it hadn’t taken away from the sense of belonging I felt in New York as a whole. Nor should it deter the young dream-chasers of every color and creed who come here from all corners of the world. This city—this country—would be incomplete without them.