ABSTRACT
That day I felt my world come crashing down. As the US presidential election results came in, I was living in a conservative part of Southern California where, if I am honest, I have never felt welcome. As I contemplated a Trump presidency that day, not only did I not feel welcome in Irvine, suddenly, I did not feel safe in America. I took a walk on the beach the day after the election and experienced a previously unknown fear and a heightened sense of awareness. My body tensed in new ways as I walked past white strangers, and a fight-or-flight trigger that I did not know I had was activated. I was on guard for whatever verbal attacks that were coming my way now that a campaign based on sexism, racism, and homophobia triumphed and gave permission for more public displays of that kind of language and action again. Of course, no one unleashed the barrage of hateful words I expected that day. That was yet to come. That day was steeped in uncertainty. My embodied sense of self was challenged. Was I being paranoid? Yes and no. Along with the myriad life-shattering policy changes that I saw coming, I also immediately and acutely felt the pain of the unrestricted license to hate coming out of the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign. All the bullies and mean girls were taking over the school, and I felt that they were coming after me and all of my friends and family members who do not think, act, or look like them. That day felt like a declaration of war on us. I stayed in a state of immobilizing shock and depression for many weeks. What brought me out of this state, what gave me back my body—my black female body housing a mind and creativity set to performance in the field of humanities intellectual discourse—what allowed me to open my mouth again, was black dance.
