The morning after an election is always strange. It’s not the big moments that linger; it’s the quiet ones. The streets are still, the air carries an eerie familiarity, and the world, for all the noise and energy spent in the months leading up to the decision, just keeps moving forward as if nothing monumental happened. That’s where I found myself Wednesday morning, driving my 15-year-old son to school through the winding roads of North Atlanta. It’s a drive I’ve made for years, twice a day, 40 minutes each way, navigating the suburbs that somehow feel both like home and a reminder of how precarious belonging can be.
I glanced at the yards lined with the remains of political fervor. Signs, flags, banners — now just relics. The world felt the same, but that sameness was unsettling, almost mocking. After all the arguments, the think pieces, the debates over dinner tables, the rants on social media, was this it? Was this what we’d all been holding our breath for?
Handout
Handout
My son was silent, lost in the rhythm of a morning routine that neither of us had the energy to break. But in that silence, my mind was loud. The election had been framed, dissected and reassembled a thousand different ways by people who seemed to know what they were talking about. Yet, as I drove past the polling stations, quiet now, I couldn’t shake the weight of a different question: Did anyone really understand what just happened? The night before, I stayed up, switching between networks, trying to listen not just to the results but to the stories behind them. Numbers don’t lie, they say. But people do. And the way those numbers were spun into narratives told me more about who we are than the results could.
For months, the focus had been on us, on Black men. The narratives came at us like a barrage of arrows, each one tipped with blame. We were framed as the deciding factor, the unreliable voting bloc, the one piece of the puzzle that could flip everything — if only we cared enough. The weight of that narrative was suffocating, as if we were simultaneously powerless and all-powerful. The contradictions didn’t seem to matter to those telling the story. They needed us to be the scapegoat. When you’ve already decided who to blame, the truth becomes irrelevant.
But the truth, as I saw it, was far messier. Latino districts, once considered reliably Democratic, had swung Republican in places like Florida, Texas and New York. Young voters, whom everyone had assumed would lean left, had shifted right. A majority of white women supported a candidate accused of sexism and worse. And, yes, some Black men voted differently than expected. But the story isn’t that we didn’t show up. The narrative was wrong from the start.
As I listened to the pundits fumble through their postmortems, what struck me wasn’t the data but the complete lack of accountability from those who had shaped the preelection conversation. For months, they had painted Black men as apathetic, uninformed or, worse, complicit in their oppression. Yet here we are, on the other side of the election, with numbers that tell a different story. Black men showed up. Black men voted. And, yes, some of us voted for a candidate others found reprehensible. But that wasn’t unique to us. Every demographic had its share of surprises and its share of shifts. We are not monolithic. We never have been. Why, then, was our voting behavior scrutinized more than anyone else’s?
This perpetual cycle of blame is exhausting. The weight of being Black in America is heavy enough without having to explain, defend or justify our existence every time something doesn’t go as expected. But that’s exactly where we find ourselves — again and again, year after year, election after election. As if the world needs us to carry not just our pain but also the pain of its shortcomings.
I thought about all of this as I dropped my son off at school. He walked away, backpack slung over one shoulder, headphones in, oblivious to the weight I carried at that moment. Watching him, I felt a pang of something deeper than anxiety. It was a mix of hope and fear, pride and sorrow. He is growing up in a world that feels so familiar to me but that is much more complicated. What kind of man will he become in a society that decided what his value is before he can define it for himself? What kind of father can I be to him when the world keeps reminding me that, no matter what I do, I’ll never be enough in its eyes?
The drive home felt longer than usual. The streets seemed louder now, as if the silence itself was a judgment. I thought about the celebrities who had tried to speak for us during the election. Their words had been polished, their intentions perhaps genuine, but their distance from our reality was glaring. There’s a quote from Eddie Murphy that has stayed with me: “I’m rich now. There ain’t much that is funny in my life that could be funny to other people.” That honesty was refreshing, but it also spoke to the chasm between those who live the struggle and those who now only remember it.
The memes, the viral posts, the infographics that reduced our lives to percentages and pie charts — they were all just noise. But noise has a way of drowning out nuance. People posted their disappointment in us without understanding the complexities of what they were sharing. They didn’t see the whole picture, didn’t care to look beyond the headline or sound bite. In doing so, they became part of the very problem they claimed to be fighting.
By the time I pulled into my driveway, I was tired — not just from the drive but also from the weight of it all. The election was over, but the work of understanding what it meant had only just begun. And as much as I wanted to shut it all out, to retreat into the quiet of my home, I knew that wasn’t an option. The world doesn’t stop spinning when you feel like it should. If we don’t take the time to make sense of what just happened, to really understand it, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
This isn’t just about politics. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we choose to believe and the work we are willing — or unwilling — to do to build a better future. It’s about the responsibility we all have to see each other, to listen to each other, to fight for each other. It’s about the courage to confront uncomfortable truths, even when it’s easier to point fingers or look the other way.
As I sat there, the car engine still humming, I thought about what comes next. Not just for me, but for all of us. The election is over, but the real work has just begun. If we’re serious about change — real, lasting change — then it starts here, in these quiet moments, when the world feels like it’s standing still. It’s in the stillness that we can finally hear the echoes of what we’ve been too afraid to face. And it’s in those echoes that we find the truth.
Kenneth Braswell is chief executive officer of Fathers Incorporated.
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