The Community

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

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.