on election day, while americans were at the polls putting democracy to work, a black graduate student came to my university office to talk about race and time travel. this young man grew up in a fairly disadvantaged neighborhood, in a fairly disadvantaging city, in a very disadvantaging nation <u+2014> all the result of our shared history of slavery and institutional inequality that allows american cops to choke blacks on youtube and go home and play with the kids. now, on a day that promised to be a new dawn in american politics but that looks increasingly like our racial dusk, it occurs to me that this young man came to me not only out of intellectual striving but existential worry. how can any black american securely exist in a country where his or her future is haunted by the past, making the present an almost-impossible-to-embrace moment of both hope and fear? in putting democracy to work, americans elected donald j. trump to be 45th president of the united states, so we are about find out. this student wasn<u+2019>t actually talking about time travel, of course. rather, immersed in the black political genre of afrofuturism <u+2014> wherein blacks use the imaginative soil of science fiction and fantasy to reframe debates about colonialism, racism, otherness and political legitimacy <u+2014> he wanted to think about the way blacks experience time differently from whites. now that idea may strike you as absurd. a second is a second, a minute has 60 of them, an hour has 60 minutes, there are 24 hours in a day, and a day is the same for everyone. well, of course that<u+2019>s true. but that doesn<u+2019>t mean the experience of those days adds up as neatly as the ticking of the universal clock suggests. james baldwin, for example, argued relentlessly that whites believe they are white because they consistently forget their history. in failing to deal honestly with the legacy of white supremacy, whites embrace their sense of identity as bound up with american virtue and in doing so they obscure notions of responsibility and culpability for historical wrongs and horrors that no reasonable person can deny took place. baldwin felt that in refusing to deal honestly with the fact that their prosperity depends entirely on a history of black exploitation, rape, murder and pillage, whites imbue their identity with an innocence that allows them to see the future as open and free and their minutes and days as pregnant with possibility and power. what happens in these instances is indeed a warping of time. the laws of the universe are experienced without friction for white americans because a willful denial of the past leaves them with no sense that their present is insecure or that their future is in question. it will always be o.k. in exactly one minute, day, or year from now. but this is not many blacks<u+2019> experience of time. rather, many blacks are now morbidly amused by america<u+2019>s newfound horror over black death at the hands of the state. <u+201c>we must do something to stop this tragedy!<u+201d> the newly awakened shout. but for us there is nothing new in this. indeed, if we had been truly listened to so many decades ago the timeline of many innocent blacks would have been extended; the histories of so many families would be marked by more christmases spent together; the futures of so many of the young and living would not be tinged with the apathy born of doubt and skepticism. these people <u+2014> i suspect my graduate student is among them <u+2014> would not look to tomorrow wondering if it really is in their power to change. we talk unceasingly in this country about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, but doing so isn<u+2019>t only a matter of managing action, it is also about planning action, and doing that depends on what one really thinks an american minute amounts to. to say at this point that his candidacy was controversial is, well, uncontroversial. in the time he made his case to the people we came to learn that he believes <u+201c>the<u+201d> african-americans live in hell <u+2014> linguistically defining us as a monolithic block of existential misery worthy of pity and more police. we learned that racial paranoia can be expressed openly by whites and left unchallenged; that nonwhite voters left unmonitored would <u+201c>steal<u+201d> the election; that the powerful can grab women by the genitals without remorse; that finding every way he could to avoid paying taxes and betting on a housing crisis was just called <u+201c>business.<u+201d> all this indicates a man for whom normal expectations <u+2014> what is supposed to happen a minute from now <u+2014> are null and void. that he has been elected to the nation<u+2019>s highest office indicates a largely white electorate that believes that the country<u+2019>s future should be in the hands of a man to whom the present has no causal relationship to the past, and thinks that the future is what we make of it. trump secured a mere 8 percent of the black vote. one way to think of a cast ballot is as an instrument of democratic voice, a way of legitimizing those who hold power. but another way to think about voting is that it represents a means of securing a kind of future. barack obama<u+2019>s slogan, <u+201c>change we can believe in<u+201d> evoked in the minds of the people a sense of future possibilities bound only by what we collectively agree to imagine together. but trump, displaying during his campaign every form of racial disregard one can imagine, as validated and certified by the ku klux klan , pledges to <u+201c>make america great again.<u+201d> the other 92 percent of voting blacks see, not a change-seeking, future-altering movement like #blacklivesmatter, but a clear white supremacist sentiment given voice in the highest political office in the land. those who know history must certainly be reminded of 1865, when andrew johnson took office determined to undo reconstruction. baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1962, <u+201c>[whites] are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.<u+201d> today, president-elect donald trump gives little reason for blacks and sympathetic whites to think he doesn<u+2019>t intend on taking us all back more than a century in order to seek his american greatness. chris lebron is an assistant professor of african-american studies and philosophy at yale university and the author of <u+201c> the color of our shame: race and justice in our time. <u+201d> he is at work on a book on the black lives matter movement. now in print : <u+201c> the stone reader: modern philosophy in 133 arguments ,<u+201d> an anthology of essays from the times<u+2019>s philosophy series, edited by peter catapano and simon critchley, published by liveright books. follow the new york times opinion section on facebook and twitter , and sign up for the opinion today newsletter .
trump<u+2019>s racial time machine
chris lebron