At Johns Hopkins, I grew frustrated by the outdated, patriarchal views of my government professor (we’ll call him Dr. G) a political operative from the 70’s who’d grown disillusioned with the protest side of politics and delved instead into Lindsey Graham, “whichever way the wind blows” habit that had made Congress, just blocks from our D.C. classroom, a stagnant, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical mass of old men and women unwilling to give up their seats to fresh minds. I took my whiteboard on the Metro to draw diagrams in class, giving visuals for my own impromptu lectures on the value of voter outreach, standing up to injustices, and all I had learned working on the Democratic Party of Georgia’s 3 history-making campaigns in 2020 and 2021. If I was going to pay tuition for the class, I decided to make it worth my time.

For our final, we had to choose one person from George Washington to the modern day, and write for them an acceptance speech for their party nomination for President. Besides that, there was no rubric. At Berry College, I had used the holes in rubrics to write raps and deliver them as my verbalized finals. Now I had the opportunity to turn that towards the old guard politics and the East Coast elite’s Democratic Party that Dr. G encapsulated, which was, at that very moment, running the 2024 election season into the ground.

I wrote Alexander Hamilton’s imagined acceptance of the 1804 Federalist nomination for President, and delivered it directly to the slave-holding, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical Thomas Jefferson. Politely, I asked Dr. G if he would play Jefferson for the performance. When he asked what he had to do, I said “Nothing. Just sit and listen.” I got an A.