I came to Corning in the tail-end of summer when the air is no longer a silk sheet but a blanket. I’d graduated that spring and tried and failed to carve out stability in Northampton despite begging corporate America to please, please exploit me just a little. Sometime before that, A and I had stayed briefly at a farm in the Dordogne. We’d planted strawberries, harvested golden beets, and read poems in a caravan the size of a wet matchbox. Despite our cramped quarters or precisely because of the romanticism of roughing it, this turned out to be a brilliant time—the sort of experience that recalibrates your sense of what is possible in the realm of joy and beauty. I suspect mine and A’s plan to stay in Northampton where the world is a cornucopia of rainbows and IPAs, was the echo of some unstated desire to regain the equilibrium of our valley days. 

I left college with a sense of having traded more worthwhile beliefs for something flimsier—my birthright for a bowl of soup. Perhaps all I had lost was a kind of innocence…the exaggerated belief in merit, in the big ideas of Justice and Community, and in the sense that all that undergirds right action is right knowledge i.e. to know better is to do better, always. And perhaps if one has any interest in participating in reality, innocence is good to lose. But the whole business of it is rarely pleasant or tranquil. The loss of innocence is almost always a yanking that prunes away the essential along with the superfluous, leaving one exposed, raw and vulnerable to the slightest wind. 

Whatever disappointments afflicted me were amplified by the sense that everything everywhere was going to shit. In my corner of 2016 America, the latest totem for All That Is Wrong With the World was the sexist, racist, and otherwise unqualified president-to-be. This floated through my mind as E drove us past Albany to Corning where 2 in 3 Steuben county voters (comprising Corningites) had voted Trump into the land’s highest office.

For many Americans, to know how someone votes—Republican, Democrat, or Independent—is to imagine insight into who they are and what beliefs they hold about topics ranging from gun control to minority rights and down to the very existence and nature of God. The divide is ideological and the ideology is identitarian. As American journalist Ezra Klein observes, “The most powerful identities in modern [American] politics are…political identities, which have come, in recent decades, to…merge with…racial, religious, geographic, and cultural identities.” One can almost be forgiven the association between politics and race in light of the 91% of black voters who voted Democrat or between politics and religion given the 81% of white evangelical Christians who voted Republican in the 2016 election. The truth is somewhat more nuanced or at least must allow for caveats. For instance, that Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, and those of Jewish faith tend to vote Democrat implies that religion is not the sole preserve of one party.

You hear it often that there isn’t demographic or ideological unity among Trump voters and that to imagine each last one as a gun-toting maniac itching to dust off their white hood is, at best, futile. But here also, let us allow for the fact that enough Trump voters seem to share the existential anxiety of feeling ‘left behind’, anxiety which manifests as economic protectionism, anti-immigration sentiment, and, at the far end of the spectrum, white nationalism.

Perhaps to soothe the half of the country shocked by the 2016 election and the subsequent violence perpetrated in the name of white supremacy, scholars have tried to estimate the proportion of ‘non-Hispanic white Americans’ who hold alt-right views i.e. who believe white Americans are under a threat against which they must unite. There is a world in which this kind of nuance is meaningful but how much does it matter anyways that an alleged 11 million Americans hold alt-right views in the face of nearly 63 million (46%) Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 and 74 million (47%) who cast their ballot for him again in 2020?

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My mornings in Corning began with a stroll past Hokey Pokey’s (the Italian ice creamery whose spring opening I awaited all winter) onto Market Street through the verdigris truss bridge on Bridge Street. Walking over the Chemung River past the twenty-four-hour Wegmans and up towards the steeple of St. Mary’s Church never got old until I found that Market Street could be gained more scenically through the seven-arch bridge farther downriver. The arch bridge had seemed uninvolving with its commonplace concrete coloring but, beckoned by the fuss of seagulls, I came to see that the Centerway Walking Bridge had an equal claim to beauty.

My business on the town’s commerce-lined street was usually coffee. I frequented Soul Full Cup often enough to merit a somewhat useless but routine-affirming fidelity card. On a given day, someone watching Soul Full’s entrance might see executive types in business suits, book clubbers of an age range between twenty and sixty, families with young children as well as tourists who visited Corning for its being something of a mecca for glass enthusiasts (Corning Incorporated, the town’s main employer, gave the world the once-iconic Pyrex kitchenware and Gorilla glass, otherwise known as the hardy glass that protects screens the world over) and for having once been “one of the most fun small towns in America”.

I lived for the unobtrusive gurgle of the espresso machine and the click-clack of caffeinating typers which sprang from me something resembling appreciation for the thinly-twined fates of strangers for whom cafés are first and foremost public meeting grounds and coffee, the permissible alibi for the half-communion of strangers.

But of all the things I loved in Corning, I loved the Chemung best. Frequency didn’t diminish the marvel of watching that old river snake its way south to the Susquehanna. I loved the river though all my loving entailed was looking. The hustle and bustle of workers entering their workday found me sat by the Chemung watching dew descend its calf-high greenery. In the late afternoons, the sun scattered unevenly over the town so that the valley darkened while the trees still shone with day. This compounded my sense of being elsewhere as if just a few feet away, I existed in a different timezone.

E and I lived a little over a stone’s throw away from the river, on West William Street, of which nothing remarkable can be said except that three doors down from our apartment often stood a black Ford F-150 with the Southern Cross decalled across its entire back mirror. I ran into this Confederate flag often (that is what it was: a running into—the collision of two objects each surprised by the other’s occurrence). Every morning an old man glid past our street-level kitchen window on his motorized wheelchair, American and Confederate flags cutting across the wind, and every morning I stood briefly mesmerized wondering what, if anything, all of it meant. When cars bearing the flag zoomed past, I wondered if the driver would feel reckless enough to hurl something at me, an empty beer bottle or perhaps the n-word. Then I wondered if the n-word being somewhat removed from me, a non-American Black person, would slide right off of me or if I would shatter like stressed glass, forever disfigured by the unkindness of some strange, white dude in Upstate New York. The world seemed full of possibility. As though anything could happen. As though the worst already had.

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To move through America as an immigrant, particularly a black immigrant during Trump’s presidency, is to be forced into curiosity about white anxiety and its promise of violence. It is to ask, When will the violence come, as if the violence isn’t already here. It is to be an unwitting participant in the cynical narrative which insists that to be alive as a black person in America is to be spared. This narrative, spun by both the violaters and the violated, insists on the death of the body as the only violence that weighs. It is this narrative that insists that the Confederate flag can be separated from white supremacy even as it continuously punctuates white violence as it did at Charlottesville where James Alex Fields, Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Danielle Heyer and injuring 35 others as white nationalists chanted, “You will not replace us!”

In France, white anxiety has been codified by Renaud Camus as the Great Replacement, what he esteems as “the biggest and most urgent problem Western countries have to face”. For Camus seeing (or imagining) the Other as in veiled North African women at “a fountain, six or seven centuries old” fills him with the dreadful sense that European civilization and Frenchism are under attack. The assailants? Black and Arab immigrants peddling Islam.

In the late 1800s sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies conceptualized two types of social organisation:  Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (civil society). Community is common to small, homogeneous rural places where personal ties are of primary importance while society is characteristic of urban, heterogeneous areas where members share relatively impersonal ties (think coworkers in a big business operation). Communities are characterized by high levels of trust and belonging (the benefit of which include emotional well-being and access to resources) and so the threat of exclusion (shame; morality) is sufficient to keep members in check.

Viewed naively, white nationalism looks like an attempt to reverse engineer community; to start at homogeneity with the hopes of finishing at trust and belonging. Or perhaps it is simply a resource problem: In 2019, a 21-year-old white man uploaded a manifesto decrying the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” before firing into a Walmart, killing 22 people, most of them Mexican or Mexican-American. The killer was inspired by the Christchurch mosque shootings where an Australian gunman killed 51 Muslims. Both justified the killings as a path to environmental preservation, echoing ecofascism, roughly the idea that “humans are overburdening the planet and that some populations are more of a problem than others.” Or perhaps it is just the inability to imagine one’s racial privileges reduced even when they are already so entrenched.

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At first glance, Corning seemed to me like Tönnies Gemeinschaft or Baldwin’s Leukerbad which drew from him a sense that “from all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in [that] tiny Swiss village before [him]”. But Leukerbad’s All-Catholic population of six hundred was a far cry from Corning’s population of over ten thousand. You could stand on any street of Corning and be within sight of at least two churches of varying denominations. One of the churches E and I visited was the Seventh Day Adventist church where a Southern black man preached to a multicultural congregation. The sermon that day was love: how the Marys and Marthas ought to carve room for one another.

I kept running into the many points of collision between Corning and the rest of the world. One evening, a voice cut through the agreed-upon anonymity of cafès to ask, “Are you African?” The owner of the voice was a black man, shorthaired or balding, with a demeanor that seemed at once belligerent and good-natured. This was Y., a Rwandan-Burundian who had set roots and was raising children in Corning. A Spanish teacher wondered if I spoke French—Sénégalaise?—and then offered uraho and urabeho, learnt from his wife who’d learnt it from so and so. A who sourced Tanzanian peaberry coffee from Arusha asked if she could bring me something nice from home.

The dream of the village is obsolete even if the dream of the tribe drags on. We long for the tribe because to belong to one is to, in some capacity, be shielded from the ravages of modern living. Belonging is said to elicit positive emotion while unbelonging, both real or perceived, generates ‘unpleasant emotional states’ and is associated with a host of physical and psychological disadvantages. But belonging is also perhaps a drug. And if we are never more unified than when we face a common enemy, why not invent one, forever?

We forge belonging on the basis of identity—who we think we are and who we are perceived to be. And since one is never just a bus driver or a septuagenarian or a Black person despite our best attempts to make them so, it follows that we have always had, as Simone Weil puts it, multiple roots. One writer opines, “community is dead, and thank goodness for that. Nothing unites us, and therefore nothing divides us as it once did.” No. Too much binds us.

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