The Community

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

Old habits are said to die hard, and the same is apparently true for traumas. Beginning in earnest in 2016, the nation has been in a renewed fight against old themes and updated gaslighting techniques, reopening former wounds that had previously been sloppily sutured over. There was the target on Muslims preventing them from entering the country in 2017; the nation’s formal child-separation policy in 2018, which removed children from parents; and in 2020, the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement because of the constant police killings of Black people. I watched wearily as we moved from one crisis to another. Decades before all of this, I was acutely aware of what it meant to fight for freedom and belonging, and to lose a family at the same time. These traumas are irritatingly unhealed because they are cyclical, because this is not the first time that race has intersected with the systemic breakdown of families and the abuse of children.