What Remains: The Professor

What remains implies not only that there was a past but that someone will be waiting in the future, ready and willing to bear witness to that past.

I was born into a world molded under the weight of war and conflict. Someone first had to teach me this about the world.

In elementary school, I asked my fourth grade history teacher why we only ever talked about wars. I didn’t understand why wars had to shape my understanding of the past or initiate me to the present.

My teachers, though, taught these wars with an infectious enthusiasm. They made U.S. wars feel like riveting theatre. My teachers stoked a deep sense of national pride when they taught us about the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, and D-Day.

They waxed poetic about how regal George Washington looked when he crossed the Delaware River; the valiant men who marched alongside General William Tecumseh Sherman as he set the South ablaze.

War was an invitation to patriotism, borderline jingoism. I accepted the invitation with every passing grade.

So when I heard that two planes had struck the World Trade Center, I sat in my eighth grade science class thinking. I didn’t think about the scale of life that was lost or even about my two grandmothers who took the World Center Train from Jersey City into New York for work.

My education had already hardened me to the mass casualties and taught me to accept death as an unfortunate but necessary companion on the road to freedom, to democracy.

Instead, I thought, “this is the moment that I enter history!”

As an actor or audience member, I was prepared to witness heroes emerge and the villains vanquished. What my twelve year-old mind couldn’t possibly grasp at the time was how the line between villains and heroes was never as clear cut as my history books had made it.

I would later learn that the line between villain and hero is a white line that etches and carves the world into borders.

I stepped on to the stage that day. In a way, it was the first time that I could mark through my own experience what came before, the world before 9/11, and bear witness to what would come after.

What remains of the little girl that sat in that eighth grade science class twenty-four years ago, excited to witness war and brimming with national pride? Not much.

Today, it’s impossible for me to find any affinity with the U.S. or any of its many wars (Sudan, Congo, Palestine, camps at the U.S.--Mexico border, the long-standing war on Black American life).

I’ve long ago distanced myself from revering white saviors, or any savior other than the collective. I’ve replaced patriotism with solidarity, working to support the most marginalized in their and our right to live a full and dignified life. The future should belong to all of us.

Trading patriotism for solidarity is exhausting. After living in the remains for so long, sometimes I think it would be easier to search for that version of myself that was hardened to death and waiting for a savior.

And then, I hear the late writer, activist, and poet June Jordan saying: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

— Shared by The Professor