The day after the election, the day after I went to bed knowing that everything was going to change, I woke up and the instinctive change I thought I would feel wasn’t there. Actually, that morning, November 9^th, was the first time I’d woken up to see sun shining through the thin slits in my standard, metal, dorm room blinds. As I walked over to the mirror rubbing my eyes, wondering why I was so tired, I stopped amidst the dappled light and looked at my reflection, especially the pronounced dark smudges of no sleep resting under my eyes. I remembered how much had changed across the border, the extent to which identity had transformed in one day, how much the identity and position of my home country in the world stage reflected back upon myself.

Later on, when I didn’t want to exist as an American in the sea of Canadians, our class’s professor – who wasn’t going to come in that day, supposedly busy with research – burst through the door. The moment he stood in front of the long row of blackboards lining the wall with the letters W T F drawn on with thick lines of chalk, it was clear to me why I didn’t feel that change. Donald Trump isn’t the problem, he’s the symptom of a systemic problem. The problem existed before that election because the problem has always been there. Yet, amongst the seeming sameness, something had changed, the American “cultural memory” had undergone a difficult and perhaps traumatic alteration.

Cultural Studies scholar Marita Sturken examines the concept of “cultural memory” – the way in which a culture as a system remembers and in the process inevitably forgets – and its role in ‘producing concepts of the “nation” and of an “American people”’ … (Sturken 1). When describing how American culture “strategically forgets” certain events, she uses the term “culture of amnesia”, reminding the reader that in order to remember certain events, that are important to what Americans define as their cultural identity, it is preordained those memories that don’t fit that mold will be “forgotten” (Sturken 2).

For decades, Americans ignored the hatred brewing from genocide, slavery, and segregation, and continued racism. Events we didn’t explicitly forget, but events we gloss over in “cultural products” like history books and most importantly the mainstream media (Sturken 1). Now we cannot ignore the hatred fermenting from these events and thousands of others. My professor used an analogy, illustrating a dark room, when we finally flip on the light a snake is curled in the corner, hissing, and ready to strike. This snake has always been there; it didn’t simply appear before the light flipped on. The problem has always been there, by electing Donald Trump, we just shed light on it. America is a nation founded on genocide, on slavery, on racism, and on xenophobia. We are plagued with these problems and it wasn’t going to be much longer before we had to confront their existence and their harm to our happiness and safety.

The election of Donald Trump is, if nothing else positive, an invitation to revisit our “cultural memory”, to remind ourselves of what we have forgotten in the process of remembrance and how detrimental this neglect of crucial historical events (especially the negative ones) is.

My professor identified as an optimist and for the first time I feel the same way. He struggled the entirety of election night to find one, slightest, possible point of positivity in this disaster of an election cycle. What he found is that we, Americans, now have clarity as a nation. If Clinton was elected, this racist, sexist, homophobic, able-ist, classist, xenophobic cancer would continue to be hidden. But now that Trump has been elected president we have just seen the extent to which hatred, fear, and confusion is and has been breeding in the nation.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: U of California, 1997. Print.