Opinion: How grieving my grandfather helped me grapple with Trump’s win

I buried my grandfather the day before Donald J. Trump would be elected as the 47th president of the United States.
Mohamed Daoud was a few weeks away from his 98th birthday. I was his eldest grandson. He lived a remarkable life, and we were different and similar in some striking ways.
With only a sixth-grade education, this man developed the engineering know-how to build and fly his own airplane. While I certainly didn’t inherit his engineering prowess, we did share an obsession with Jerusalem and with the significance of 63rd Street on Chicago’s South Side. As someone who was born and raised in the Jerusalem village of Ein Karem and then moved to the South Side as a Palestinian refugee in the early 1950s, my grandfather spoke passionately to me about both these subjects from his lived experiences.
My grandfather survived the violent “Nakba” after the creation of the state of Israel, defending his home until the last moment. He eventually, along with 750,000 other Palestinians, fled after hearing reports of atrocities taking place in nearby villages.
His wife was nine months pregnant with their first child, my mother. They stopped to give birth to her in an abandoned home.
Through connections with my grandmother’s family in Chicago, they managed to obtain a visa to the United States. As much as he loved Chicago, he never stopped thinking and talking about his home in Ein Karem.
They rented their first home in Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood at the same time many Black American families were still fleeing the horrors of the Jim Crow South. I once remarked that in some ways, he and the Black folks in those early Englewood years were both refugees.
“No Rami, it was different. I could be white; what they went through was way worse,” my grandfather stated matter of factly.
He didn’t need critical race theory to figure this out. He understood the parallels and differences between Black folks fleeing the same violent institutions responsible for the enslavement of their ancestors and the relative privilege that immigrants ‒ even refugees like my grandfather ‒ experienced as they arrived to this country.
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While he could still drive, he would show up unannounced at my work to see the progress along 63rd Street and delighted in returning to Englewood.   
Among the things we spoke about was one of his confrontations with racism. It took place in the fall of 1959, on a day that otherwise was filled with joy. He had gathered at a private airfield to fly the plane he spent months building in his garage. His family crowded around the red single-engine “Star of Ein Karem” for photos.
He had even brought an 8-millimeter camera that an African American friend was helping to operate.
At some point in the video, a helicopter lands in the airfield and a large white man, the owner of the facility, comes barreling toward them. While hurling racial and ethnic slurs against my grandfather and his African American friend, the man threated to burn down his plane if he ever dared bring a Black man there again.
It was those same sentiments during that period used to reinforce racial covenants and red-lining restrictions. These practices led to what sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton would term an “American Apartheid”: the divestment of billions of dollars from neighborhoods like Englewood that transformed these spaces from some of those most thriving communities in America to the epicenter of the greatest life expectancy gap in the country.
“That’s why what you and your team are doing is so important,” my grandfather would say while driving with me through the community.
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We shared a conviction that the type of work and organizing we were doing in these communities resonated with importance well beyond any specific geography.
On my last visit with him, the disparaging jokes and comments made about Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Black folks, women and others at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City were still playing on the news.
“Shut that off,” my grandfather said.
Over the next few weeks, I will be trying to shut off as many of the reminders of the rhetoric that animated the return of Donald Trump to the White House by leaning deeper into the work we’re doing at an organization like Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN.)
It was that work that inspired my grandfather. The granular work of building multiracial and multifaith coalitions. The work of radically reimagining what our country could one day look like if we fight through the legacy of fearmongering that pits us against one another and sustains deep inequalities.
Yes, the actions and rhetoric that fueled genocidal horrors affecting so many of our communities once again seems so ever present. The painful truth is that the foundational structures that created those sentiments never went away.
But neither did the opportunities to fight back.
Now, more than ever for me, that fight is about returning to streets like 63rd on Chicago’s South Side and asking what is really possible. What is possible when we stretch across all types of boundaries and recommit to the type of organizing that builds lasting coalitions for a future grounded in love and liberation for all our people.
I would like to think that was the hope that drove my grandfather to regularly show up unannounced at my work, and I pray that’s the future we can still make possible as we forge through and beyond what will certainly be some dark and turbulent times ahead.
Rami Nashashibi, a MacArthur Foundation fellow, is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.