The Community

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. —Martin Luther King Jr. You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul. —Swami Vivekananda

Old habits are said to die hard, and the same is apparently true for traumas.

After witnessing four years of a presidential administration that heightened racial tensions, created a policy to separate children from their parents, and banned Muslims from traveling to the country, all while amassing a cult following that led to hundreds of white men storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, under the guise of having been disenfranchised, I saw too many parallels to the world of York. York was in prison for life, but the kind of desperation he fed on for decades remained. Many who agreed with Donald Trump’s staunch stance against immigration argued that parents deserved to lose their children because that was the policy.

Today, four decades after leaving the Community, I have since learned that the need to find the good in something is universal, even when what is found has devastatingly harmful effects.

I didn’t feel like a child in the Community but instead felt like a tiny adult given an advanced placement course on the science of struggle.

James Baldwin wrote about sentimentality’s disingenuousness in the 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” aptly comparing sentimentality to dishonesty. The way to steer clear of this dishonesty is to address the nation’s deep wounds of racism, patriarchy, and white supremacy rather than poking at them. Sentimentality can explain how people who felt left behind by a changing nation fervently voted for a president who bashed anyone on the margins and promoted a return to the before times. It can explain why families still believed that if they braved the elements with their children and made it to the US border, they would not have their children taken from them, because no one could have imagined such a thing would be a national policy in a country that once sang of its immigrant roots. And sentimentality can explain some of the events that led up to the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, as well as why the white mob was handled so gingerly. I could see the parallels of all these instances in the experiences of my own family, and it was sentimentality, I believe, that my parents also fell for.