The Bowdoin Orient

Our sense of place may be seen as inherently connected to our physical location, but at the same time, we are connected to innumerable places at any given moment, regardless of where we are. I usually write about my explorations of Maine’s beautiful coast—my search for connections in the pebbly serenity of my adopted home state. But over the past week and a half, I have been compelled to reevaluate my sense of place within the historical and present political context of physical and emotional safety in Brunswick.

A presidential election radically shifts our sense of place from the micro to the macro: we become not just Bowdoin students or New Yorkers but residents of the U.S. We become aware not just of the people within our communities but the people living in the remarkably different communities, from this small town on the Atlantic to across the country on the Pacific.

From coast to coast, the U.S. has not recently been a safe place for an incredible number of its residents. It has been some time since we have had a major political leader who normalizes vitriolic language and has built a campaign on the exclusion and hatred of groups of people, but racism—and classism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia, ableism and xenophobia—are American realities and have been American realities throughout national history. To overlook this history in the face of new political concerns is to overlook the generations of people who have been fighting and waiting and struggling.

Here in our Brunswick microcosm, within the first week following the election, I heard stories about aggressive harassment over Hillary Clinton bumper stickers, conflicts between students and town residents and schoolchildren yelling racial slurs out of school bus windows. But in the United States macrocosm, these instances are neither novel nor one-off.  

During my three and a half years at Bowdoin, there have been explicit reports of racism, homophobia and sexism manifested through language and violence—not to mention the innumerable moments that go unreported and affect people of so many identities. There was a violent homophobic altercation on Maine Street and many cases of sexual violence, harassment and rape. Within the past year alone, three explicit acts of racial bias occurred on campus. Discrimination, marginalization and fear for personal safety are not new to this place, but neither is the fight and the struggle that many are beginning to participate in for the first time. Privilege—white privilege—is never so clear as when people begin to experience fear for the first time, without realizing that their neighbors, friends and classmates have been experiencing fear—and fighting against discrimination—for their entire lives.

This week, I’m not going to visit any beautiful Maine locations (although that respite is one that everyone should still take, and I could write pages upon pages about my fears and griefs regarding Trump’s environmental policies and the potential for literal destruction of this place I love so dearly). Instead, I’m planning to attend on-campus events about experiences of discrimination, go to Portland for community meetings and join students who are planning political actions. Those are a few of my own ways to understand how hometowns have become even less safe for so, so many people in the past week and to contextualize my sense of place within that reality.

Caught between the micro and the macro, the awful truths of the past and the terrifying realities of the present “place” takes on new, layered meanings. It holds the memories from which we should learn and possibilities towards which we should look forward. But it also carries the physical and emotional well-being of marginalized people across all identities. It carries the fears of people who are being told that places, from their home towns to the entire U.S., will no longer be open to them. As a white woman living with chronic illness, I am looking for ways in which I can continue to be a better ally, a better listener and a better fighter, for everyone experiencing marginalization who have always been fighting. For me, it’s not about making our country great again, but making our places safe—finally.