NOSTALGIA IS THE LEVERAGE of the powerful. When weaponized, it serves as a deft political tool. It plays on the sentiments of the disgruntled and disenfranchised. It creates a one-dimensional patriotism that never tells the full story. It preserves the story of privilege.
One white comedian reflected, “Here’s how great it is to be white: I could get in a time machine and go to any time, and it would be ... awesome when I get there,” he says. “That is exclusively a white privilege. ... A Black guy in a time machine is like, ‘Hey, if it’s before 1980, no thank you. I don’t wanna go.’” While this made for good comedic insight, many of my siblings of European ancestry who know the history of their ancestors — religious persecution and violence motivated some of their journeys to the shores of North America — also might not want to escape too far back in time.
For this reason, remembering “truth-fully” is vital for our politics. No matter who wins the upcoming U.S. presidential election, we will need to continue to name, interrogate, and disempower the influences of toxic nostalgia. This conversation is high stakes for many people of color who, when peering into the political future, feel both hope and dismay. If Trump takes office, the country will slide into a government fueled by white supremacist nostalgia. If Harris is elected, we will witness the enormity of the first Black woman of South Asian and Caribbean heritage as president. While many would celebrate that, it may also mean that some racial and ideological fault lines that divide our country could deepen and widen. None of us would be able to afford to confuse that achievement with a free pass to be complacent in the work for justice.
And so, curating history and truth-telling remains a sacred task for our times, because it is an inclusive project that requires individual and collective time travel. How are we becoming conversant with our personal histories and the impact of larger historic forces? How do our spiritual practices support us becoming conversant with the time-traveling nature of toxic nostalgia? What if we began to see that healing our mindsets and expanding the narratives of history are generational work?
We see the generational work of truth-telling in the efforts of nearly 300 churches in Florida that now teach from Faith in Florida’s Black History/Black Studies Toolkit, created in response to state legislation that prohibits schools from teaching concepts related to race, racism, and privilege. We also see it in the work of Mt. Pleasant Christian Academy, a small Christian school in my neighborhood that teaches their students about the Harlem Renaissance and its luminaries.
James Baldwin once wrote, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” We can travel through time, here and now, for the muscle memory needed to fight for our political future. Resistance, then, is harmonizing our individual and collective stories into a more generous history that we can make together.
José Humphreys III is author of Seeing Jesus in East Harlem: What Happens When Churches Show Up and Stay Put and co-author of Ecosystems of Jubilee: Economic Ethics for the Neighborhood (Zondervan, 2023).
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