Tramp Ass Won Big Time - Tumblr Posts

Just casually thinking about 2016 where the day before the election, my professor for the Race sociology class I was taking made mention of the fact that he was nervous, but hopeful. He wished us all a happy election day, told us to go vote, and he’d see us on Wednesday for our quiz and a recap of marginalization and voter suppression.

Then on Wednesday, we walked into that 9:30am class and found him sitting on the table up front with puffy red eyes, wrinkled T-shirt, shoes untied, and no quiz on the board. He just sat there and watched us come in and we all sat in silence and he spent the whole class leaking tears and talking it out with us.

He was a white man, a self-professed privilege magnet: male, heterosexual, Christian, college educated, middle class, etc and so forth, and he was in absolute shambles. He told us that he stayed up all night watching everything he built his career around get ground into the dirt in one evening. He spent all night and all morning fielding terrified phone calls from the undocumented kids he helped get into the university he worked at, who were wondering when they were going to get deported now, from his Black and Latino coworkers just sobbing in utter rage and agony and fear, from his students of color and his LGBT friends and students. And, he said, all he could do was listen, because we, as the majorities, had failed them. We let the worst happen.

Several folks in the class tried to be optimistic and say that it wouldn’t be that bad, but the professor, who up to this point had always been a ray of sunshine and hope, shut every one of them down because, he said, it absolutely would be that bad.

One girl in the corner started sobbing and told us that just a week before her uncle in Arizona, who had a green card, got deported illegally, and they were fighting to get him home, but now she was wondering when it was going to happen to her. She was too scared to go home and visit her parents for Thanksgiving because she was afraid of going through security at an Arizona airport and getting snatched and shipped out of the country illegally just because she was latina.

And our professor passed her a tissue out of his own pocket, looked at all of us and said, “Remember this in 2020. Don’t you dare let it happen again.”

So I’m sending his plea on to all of you. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t let it happen again. Please, don’t let it happen again.