Protecting My Granddaughters

Protecting my Black Granddaughters.

I can’t protest my Black granddaughters. I struggle with this day. I struggle thinking about this new time we are in. My struggle isn’t about how this incoming President and his overly classist, nationalistic, bigoted, misogynistic, grifter/con man ways will affect me. I’m not worried about myself; I can protect and defend myself l, literally and figuratively. 

The struggle is to not feel hopeless and helpless because I was unable to protect my granddaughters.

My young, precious, Black Granddaughters.

All I see are their perfect faces, with their gorgeous, sometimes manageable hair, looking at me with a look that says, with you we are safe. I have been there for them from their births. My wife and I raised the oldest one almost as our child for her first few years. They see me as their protector; I am their PaPa. When they and their siblings play tag, I am the safe base. When their parents parent, I grandparent. My “yes” overrules the “no”, and candy is had.

On November 5, 2024, I stopped being a safe base. A new system is being ushered into our country that has exposed our young women, and especially our young women of color, to shifts that are likely to be catastrophic to their emotional, mental, and physical well being. Our country has shown WOC that they have achieved little since the days when they were legally considered property and need not be considered as human.

Their “counterparts”, white women, balked when given the opportunity to stand in solidarity and support of the dismantling of the white male patriarchy that has choked, beaten, raped, murdered WOC without fear of consequence for centuries. Now their pillage is figurative, through abortion bans, education deprivation, and history alterations and omissions. The effects are still literal though. A loss of sense of self, lack of educational equality, and other internal and external impacts create a group of women who are stuck in a societal quicksand, never able to comfortably rest, recuperate, grow. They can never just breathe.

And now I must accept that when “they” told me that we need to “come together and heal our divided nation”, that “they” are Christians protecting children…that everyone is equal. “They” lied.

“They” protect their children. “They” want a nation that resembles them. 

“They” believe in equal as long as “they” are in control, and all kotmlike them are less than equal.

My concern, my efforts, my goals moving forward are not to rely on any help or assurances from a group of people whose morphic energy field has been fed and strengthened by the generational wealth built by enslaving others, Jim Crown laws, and the overt, consistent, intentional efforts of a group of people to maintain and strengthen a white male patriarchy that has always seen the abuse and subjugation of people who look like me and my granddaughters as some “divine right” or manifest destiny.

I am no longer playing your game. I must protect my granddaughters.

I will protect My granddaughters.