Today is Election Day. It’s also my late father’s 85th birthday. This past May marked 10 years since his passing — 10 years since I’ve heard his voice or felt the warmth of his skin. Even though the pain of losing him feels like it was just yesterday, I often find myself amazed at how much has happened in ten years — not just in my personal life, but in our world. 

The last president my father voted for was President Obama. I still remember the pride that swelled within him whenever he spoke about Obama and the promise of hope his election brought. As a Black man who was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the height of the Jim Crow South, he often recalled his personal struggle with fighting for his right to vote. He would tell stories of standing in line at the polls for hours just to be turned away for ridiculous, racist requests to stop him from exercising his newly granted right. I could listen to him speak for hours about his experiences—he was so proud to be from the South and to have played a role in a movement that reshaped American history. He never imagined he’d live to see the day he could vote for the first Black president of the United States. It was his wildest dream — proof that the statement about us being our ancestors’ wildest dreams is true. 

He was the first person I called when Obama’s win was confirmed. As a freshman at Howard University—his grad school alma mater—I could barely hear him over the roar of applause, cheers, and tears in the campus ballroom where we’d been watching the results. When the announcement came, the entire room erupted in celebration. We carried our uproar from campus to the White House. We were on a high for weeks. We couldn’t believe that we got to witness the election of the first Black president from the Mecca of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. My father couldn’t have been prouder. To him, casting his vote was the pinnacle of everything he had fought for in the ’50s and ’60s—all he had endured as a Black man in the South to reach that day. And he couldn’t have been prouder that this historic moment also marked his daughter’s first presidential election, where she cast her absentee ballot from Howard University, a place instrumental in his Civil Rights Movement journey.

“You know, I was there that day,” he would tell me. 

“I was at the March on Washington. I saw Dr. King speak. It was one of the most powerful moments in my life,” he continued. “I was at Howard University and we all walked down to the Mall to be a part of history.” 

He never imagined that he would witness the election of the first Black president with his daughter just 45 years after that iconic march where Dr. King dared to have a dream about the promise of America. 

Two years after my father passed away America went back on its promise. Let me correct that — American returned to who she’d always been. America decided that white supremacy was far more important than the progress we had made. White America was angry and the post-Obama whitelash elected Donald Trump as the next president of the United States. I remember the gut punch I felt when his election was confirmed. I remember the fear. I was carrying my first daughter in my womb. The fear I held for the world I was bringing her into was daunting — such a stark difference in just eight years. I longed to go back to that moment on Howard’s campus as tears filled my eyes while I gripped my belly. How could our nation have fallen to this point, especially after the place of vibrant hope we had reached just eight years earlier? 

I wanted to call my dad. I needed him to tell me what to do — where to place my anger. I needed him to wrap me in his comforting presence and remind me that this setback would be nothing more than a setup for our next major moment of progress, the next one even bigger than the last. But, he wasn’t here anymore. He was gone. And I wept. I felt so alone. 

I often wonder what words my father would have had for Trump. My father was not one to curtail his thoughts — he told you like it is and left nothing out. But, he was an intellectual, so he expressed his opinion in a way that made you feel like you were listening to a college professor over a cup of coffee. (He was a college professor, so go figure.) His words were always thoughtful, never laced with malice or anger. He was gentle but firm, kind and respectful, yet resolute. No matter the topic or your perspective, he had a way of making you feel safe. Even so, I wish I could’ve heard what he’d have to say about our nation’s biggest bully. And I wish he’d been here to offer comfort and guidance on that fateful day in 2016.

I grieve for the loss of conversations we would have shared for the past eight years of Trumpism. The hours we would have spent on the phone dissecting behavior, sharing our frustrations, crafting solutions, and trying to hold on to hope. I grieve for the fact that he missed the shift in my career focus to writing, speaking, and teaching about white supremacy and liberation — work inspired by his mission to live a life that fought for equity and justice, always. And, today, I grieve that he is not here to witness this history — the election of the first Black and South Asian Vice and soon-to-be president of the United States. He would have been filled with even more pride seeing Kamala Harris rise. He would have said, 'See, I knew we’d come back stronger. We just had to keep fighting.”

Today, I’m casting my vote for Kamala Harris, in honor of my father. When she wins, I’ll take my daughters—his granddaughters—to her inauguration. I’ll tell them about how, 61 years ago, their grandfather stood on this very ground, fighting for the freedom we’re still working to bring to life. This vote is part of that legacy, but we know the fight doesn’t end at the ballot box. Even after centuries of struggle, we’re just beginning. And we’ll keep pushing forward, carrying the vision he and so many others held, believing in a future they never saw.

I have wrestled with this for months — how to address the despair that many of us feel heading to the ballot box in the next few days. We are angry. We are exhausted. We are furious. We are grieved. We want nothing more than to dismantle this society that continues to work exactly as intended — keeping so many marginalized humans in bondage, operating off of proud imperialism and colonialism, funding a mass genocide, and upholding white supremacy at all costs. 

My grief didn’t care that I wasn’t ready. My grief needed to escape. It was already bursting at the seams. I couldn’t keep it concealed for much longer. God used this documentary project as an unexpected catalyst and vessel for my grief to surface and process what it needed to. My grief needed to tell me that I could no longer fool myself. My grief needed me to feel it, embrace it, and let it consume me. My grief needed to remind me that the love I have for my father did not deserve to be buried, and that grief is simply love looking for some place to land. 

The moment the world implodes with, yet, another political or humanitarian crisis and everyone’s think-tank caps immediately spring into position, the only thing I feel inclined to do is hide. I find myself mindlessly scrolling as I internalize my panic and anxiety. The pressure to have the perfect academically intelligent response to the events that just occurred is looming.

My protector, my rock, and my best friend was gone. Just as I had experienced in the dream, I felt his essence vanish from my body. I felt an emptying, physically and spiritually. My core, my being seemed to evaporate just as he was disappearing. The breath vacated my lungs. Surviving this was unthinkable, unimaginable. Life as I had known it would never be the same.

I grieve for us because you and I never got to experience that euphoria. Instead, our connection was severed immediately upon my arrival. They ripped me from your arms and determined our destiny without consulting us. They second-guessed your abilities because of your disability. Our society, built on a supremacy of able-bodied whiteness, decided that your disability, your race, and your class were inferior and treated you as such. They stole your autonomy over your body and they stole my only need as a baby in the process: my maternal connection with the only mother my newborn self knew.

So, I’ve somehow arrived here. I blinked. It’s 10 years later. I’ve reached the age that I used to tell myself would be the magical age when everything would finally feel aligned. I’m here. And, so very little feels aligned.

I often have to remind myself that Beyoncé is a regular human like me. She has arms and legs, fingers and toes, fears and worries, anxiety and peace, grief and joy — just like the rest of us. The genius of her work is proof that she is in a league all her own, not because she is some beyond-human species that is above the rest of us, but because she put herself there.