Vote For Us!
So much has changed, and in a blink of an eye. In 2020, I ended my book Begin Again by saying that Trumpism presented Americans with a choice: we could either continue to lie to ourselves about the superiority of white people and choose the lie’s illusion of safety, or we could finally do the hard work of ridding ourselves of the assumptions of race that have stained this nation since its founding. I held on to the belief that we could be better and that we could work tirelessly for a third American founding.
But the country made a different moral choice. A sizable portion of white America had a powerful allergic reaction to self-examination, doubled down on its illusions, and elected Donald Trump again. They turned their backs on the so-called racial reckoning and retreated into the comforts of categories (and policies) that cut off the humanity of others from their own. We have gone too far, they said. Transgender athletes became an avatar for fears and rage. Identity politics blocks the way to what really matters, both political parties declared. Inflation was the excuse. Hatred, greed, and grievance were the motivation.
The shift was so breathtakingly fast that one could only conclude that people lied after the murder of George Floyd—that the outpouring of concern for racial justice was mere sentimentality. Or people had nowhere to go with their rage and frustrations and simply returned to business as usual.
After 250 years, and after all that has been done and said, Black people still face the consequences of a country that insists it must remain white. By now, and given our history, one would hope that we would have honestly confronted the madness that haunts this place. The soil of the country has been soaked with blood because of it. Many Americans throughout our history have lost their sense of morality, or lost their minds, because they either believed the country must be white or had to bear the brunt of that belief’s implications. We should know better.
But here we are. Caught up in the whip of the whirlwind. The Trump administration has engaged in an all-out assault on Black people in this country, with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act as the latest in a slew of cuts and slashes.
This weekend thousands of people gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, at the All Roads Lead to the South (ARLS) rally. It was the inaugural event for a summer of action aimed at organizing and mobilizing like-minded people to fight for the political power that MAGA has relentlessly sought to diminish.
I wished I could have been there. I plan to make my way to Mississippi on Wednesday for another march. We must remember that these marches are dramatic forms of education – not the aim and end of mobilization. They afford an opportunity to orient people to the task in front of us and to dramatize the scale of the assault on Black people and our democracy. They amount to a readying of the self for the more direct action to come.
I have been thinking a lot about the various registers of how we might address this moment. There is the reality of the white nationalists who have seized government. They have attacked DEI, affirmative action in federal contracting, college admissions, redacted American history, gutted the Civil Rights division at DOJ (it now advocates for white Americans), effectively killed the Voting Rights Acts, etc.
These people have efficiently sought to cut off our political power and to shut down pipelines to wealth and economic security. They want to put us in our place and remind us that we’re just n**gers in their eyes.
In the face of this assault (rooted in a nostalgic longing for a country where white folk were at the center of everything and everyone else cowered in the shadows), we must assert our political power at the ballot box and defeat these people. That requires a massive voter registration and mobilization campaign – one particularly aimed at the demographic between 18-39 years of age.
It is true that MAGA is trying to dilute the power of our vote. But the fact remains we still can vote. We must turn out in historic numbers to affect elections across the ballot. And we must do so not only out of a fidelity to the past – that people fought and died for our right to vote – but we do so for us, in this moment, and for the future of our babies.
That’s what I am thinking: VOTE FOR US! Not for a politician or a political party, but for us. And, to my mind, that is a vote for a more just America.
I do not want us to be too backward looking in our approach as we struggle for our freedom: that we only draw on the rhetoric and the sloganeering of the mid-twentieth century black freedom movement.
We can’t counter their nostalgia with our own.
We must beat these white nationalists with new tools informed by the lessons of the past, and we must fundamentally shift how we do politics moving forward. We must be aware of the forces who will use the call for massive voter registration for their own purposes and gain. They want to turn us out in order to secure power, and then, as they have done historically, fail to deliver on policies that will impact our community.
We are not registering or voting for a return to business as usual. That is what got us here in the first place. We can no longer be a captured electorate. This movement must break the back of Trumpism’s assault on Black people, and we must reject the political status quo that made it all possible.
I am reminded of Frantz Fanon’s words in The Wretched of the Earth: “Each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” We have our mission. Now let’s get to work!
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Absolutely on point. The outreach must happen at the community level. And it needs to be visual and at town halls and community centers. We need to lift up those campaigning for the “us” in our entire neighborhoods.
Watching an episode with Stanley Tucci over the weekend in Sicily. He was interviewing a woman in a small village that had African roots, and how many people had moved decades before to help build and grow the community. He asked about feeling welcome - she answered yes because they had achieved “a cultural maturity” of how to respect and coexist.
When we will reach that maturity in America I still do not know.
I am an old (78) white feminist---a woman who marched in Washington and Cairo, Illinois. Our response has to be more than voting. When I look at professional sports, for example, I see Black sports stars everywhere. When I look at film and TV and commercials, I see Black actors. Companies use Black actors to sell their products. (The same is true for women, of course.) They want our money, our patronage, our participation in culture but they don't want to share power. Boycott their asses. If all of the pro sports teams would simply speak up and stand with Black voters, things would change. Withhold your talent, your allegiance, your admiration, withhold your dollars---it's what they understand.