What I Learned About Fear After the 2024 Election

Like a lot of introverted academics over-thinking is my super-power. And as I writer I’ve learned to hold my words lightly, trying to remain untethered to their meaning and implications. Most of the time, this serves me well and I can remain nimble in my connections and allow my subconscious to surface conclusions my waking-self may not yet see. Or be prepared for. 

I have been working on a writing project for many years entitled After Purity, about the ways that our desires for innocence are related to claims about what the United States represents as a nation. Since my classes started in September, I’ve taken a much-needed break from writing and revising, allowing these arguments and evidence to settle back into a dormant state.

The night of the 2024 election as I struggled with sleep, I felt a familiar grief descend. Other feelings were too muddled by realizations that this grief was not just my own. It was loud and heaving, an ancient Banshee with her inconsolable shrieks, simultaneously demanding consolation and, yet, unwilling to accept it. The turmoil surfaced my own words to me:

After Purity investigates the the myths that perpetuate illusions of innocence: about bodies, White racial identity, and national greatness.

Evangelical purity culture is just one of many efforts throughout the history of the United States to reinforce the innocence myths that function at all levels of social organizing: the individual, the family, the church, the nation. Since the 19^th century, sexual innocence has served as a proxy for national innocence, marking sexual deviance however that may be defined as a threat to personal and collective well-being. At the same time, histories of genocide, slavery, and other immoral acts perpetrated by European settler-colonists have been transformed into spiritualized myths that celebrate God’s sovereignty and blessing upon the creation of a new nation-state. Without these myths and their continuous reinforcement, the nation and its residents are left with a past stripped of any pretense toward greatness, displaying the deep wounds and fissures we’ve been so well trained to ignore.

I fell for it once again, this purity myth. The belief that the United States is just one election cycle away from restoring its moral core. That somehow in a single election cycle—a shortened one at that we, a nation plagued by white supremacy, misogyny, trans/homophobia, xenophobia, and capitalistic greed, could become deserving once again, those faults just footnotes to our otherwise stellar record. I want desperately to live in a nation where I feel like I deserve and can enjoy safety and prosperity. Most people do and we all vote for the candidates that we believe will allow us to achieve this. I have my own notions of American greatness, the promises of a participatory Democracy characterized by shared fights for equality, where the boundaries between the impacted and their allies dissolve into a shared burden. This election, I’d hoped, would shore up that arrangement.

I write primarily about White, conservative evangelicals, a group I understand on a personal and academic level. My ideas about national myths of innocence have grown from that work. But I’ve always known that myths of innocence function as part of the White racial imagination, regardless of political or religious affiliation. In the discourses of White liberalism, a President Harris, like President Obama, indicates an exoneration of our national sins. Vice President Harris held up impeccably under these expectations, as women of color often do. Her candidacy held significant meaning for many, but she was never going to be able to distance herself from the myths of innocence shaped by White liberal self-interest. Her campaign’s decision not to highlight her gender, racial, or immigrant identities was, I believe, a necessary choice and also an indication that our national discourses, across the political spectrum, cannot tolerate the complexity of a lived, embodied experience.

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Since Tuesday I’ve been thinking non-stop about fear and White liberals. At a post-election campus event yesterday people gathered to debrief the election, I brought up the topic of fear. There are many, many reasons why entire groups of people are more fearful after this election.  And much of our work now is to protect those groups from severe policies that further dehumanize people based on their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and immigration status.

But in this conversation yesterday I heard these words: fear is a privilege. And this has already re-oriented my thinking. Fear is an anticipatory emotion—it’s about what *might* happen.  Fear is how we respond to a threat, real or perceived. And often we have to do the work of convincing others that our fear is real in order to feel safe again.

I spend a lot of time in the space of what *might* happen. A student might threaten me-physically or professionally. A young person I love might harm themselves. I might lose my job.  I might lose my hard-won sense of bodily autonomy. And so I ask people, beg them. Please, please help me feel less afraid that these things will happen.  This, I realize now, is how I’ve been anticipating another Trump presidency. 

In the past year I’ve trained myself to witness the devastation in Gaza because it is all I can muster. It has taught me to re-define my relationship to fear. When I see the faces of Palestinians of all ages, I don’t see fear in their eyes. Sadness, yes. But mostly anger and determination. The don’t live in the future tense, where fear resides. The devastation is now.

As a White person in the United States, I live in the space of “this might happen.” And I still have the privilege of a political system that allows me to organize around my fears, the biggest obstacles coming not from authoritarian powers at home or abroad, but from my own and others’ complacency. 

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My Grandma Berta often comes to me in my dreams. She is my maternal Grandmother who passed many years ago. As she aged her propensity for straight talk increased, a quality I admired greatly even if it meant releasing personal tragedy into the light.  

But in my dreams, she never speaks and only rarely directly engages me. Though once she showed up to my house in her thin cotton house dress just to give me a hug. It was then I realized she had things to teach me, she had taken up the role of my ancestor.

Grandma Berta lived in a small industrial town outside of Pittsburgh, her house part home and part Mobile/Exxon gas station. Across the road were the train tracks. Across the train tracks was the Monongahela River. And across that river was a fire-breathing mass of metal called Claritin Works, a steel mill that captivated me on the nights I spend in her attic. The air was thick with dust particles that made my allergies relentless. Her home was covered in a layer of grit and grime that changed the chemical composition of everything it touched.

The night after the 2024 election she came to me again. Or rather, she opened her home to me as this is often where I meet her. She was diligently cleaning her home, the transformation remarkable. The floors were shining, the layer of grit and grime had disappeared. She did not look up from her task. As she worked, the fires of the steel mill enlarged-they were exploding into great, threatening balls of flame. In response, the river began producing larger and larger Tsunami type waves, the water slowly creeping its way up the riverbank with ambitions toward my Grandmother’s house. And she kept cleaning. Unafraid and intent on completing her task.

I’m not entirely sure what Grandma Berta was trying to tell me, what cleaning am I being asked to do? Is my house also covered in grit and grime that requires my undivided attention and labor? Or was she showing me the work that had already been done on my behalf, work that would keep me safe, free me from my own fears and allow me to extend myself further into the world to aid others needing to find their own safety and stability.

In anticipation of the election, I sat with a great deal of fear, imagining people seeking to do me harm in the darkness of my own back yard. But ever since I have felt a quiet strength like a tiny flame growing in size and light. And for now, the fear has dissipated. In the week after the election I sat and grieved with mothers of queer kids who are bracing themselves to the challenges to come. I’ve taught confused and over-whelmed college students who had just voted in their first election and are trying to hold onto their dreams for a life of their own design. I’ve felt deeply, released my own grief with the help of healing and gifted hands, and returned to the tasks before me. We do not know what is ahead, but we know what stands behind us. Our ancestors calling to us, reminding us of what they have faced and how they have prepared us for this moment. May we open to their embrace and open ourselves to one another. May our strength and courage grow, fire and water no match for our love.