So-called expediency might doom us all this election
The world and the nation has watched in horror as Donald J. Trump
has taken the United States down an increasingly isolationist path complete
with healthy servings of racism and xenophobia. His disregard for the rule of
law and his authoritarian nature—and that lack of repercussions for either—have
made it clear that our nation’s system of checks and balances are broken.
Despite his bumbling buffoon act, Trump has remade the federal
judiciary with one in every four circuit court judges being a Trump nominee and
two of his picks sitting on the Supreme Court. To be honest, his presidency has
been almost a complete victory for the right. In less than four years, he has
reshaped the country and held a mirror to our faces and what many of us are
seeing is not pretty.
In many ways, life in America has become a real-time version of
the 2006 film Idiocracy.
Which is why, as we enter presidential primary season 2020, the
stakes are feeling higher than ever. Can the republic be saved? Or should the
American empire, built on stolen land with the labor of stolen people, die a
slow and painful death?
For the majority of American voters, even those on the left, they just want to get back to normal or what passed for normal prior to 2016. Unfortunately, what used to pass for normal in this country was toxic and harmful for Black people, Indigenous people, other people of color (POC) and so many other marginalized groups. The American Dream was already a nightmare for us. Which is why many of us had the foresight to know that the odds of Trump winning were high and that we would be screwed.
However, no one listened to us then and apparently no one wants to
listen to us now.
And by “no one” I mostly mean the white people—poor, working class
and middle class—who are also being harmed (particularly economically) but
haven’t been pushed all the way to the margins because the GOP needs their
votes. Those people still see faces like theirs in most positions of power and
prosperity and thus many of them continue to feel like the system mostly works.
They haven’t caught on yet that it doesn’t work for them either; it’s just that
they will be the last ones to get the boots on their necks when the system is
done with the rest of us.
As of this writing, after the debacle with the Iowa caucuses, and
with the New Hampshire primary finishing up, it looks like Bernie Sanders is
emerging as the Democratic front-runner with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg
close to his heels. After existing in near anonymity with her Midwestern potato
casserole, we have Amy Klobuchar rounding up the top three at the beginning of
this primary cycle. We also have Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe
“Corn Pop” Biden rounding up the rear. Yeah, I know we have a few other
candidates but barring a miracle will we really be seeing much from Tulsi or
Tom? And oh yes…I will be getting to Mike in a moment.
Mind you, neither Iowa nor New Hampshire are racially or
ethnically representative of the Democratic party (or the country, for that
matter) but for some reason, we still look to these two very white states to
give us the pulse of things.
The next two states to have a voice will be Nevada, which uses the
caucus system (hope they can get the results sooner than Iowa) and South
Carolina. Both are states which are far more racially reflective of the country
and both are states where large numbers of POC will cast their votes.
Which is where the former New York City mayor, Michael “Mike” Bloomberg, enters the picture. In case you have been unplugged, Mike is a really, really rich white man who used to be a Republican (and literally just switched to Democrat a hot second ago–opportunism, anyone?) and who as mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013 made life a living hell for Black folks and other POC.
In 2015, Bloomberg spoke at the Aspen Institute and said the
following: “95% of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You
can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops.
They are male minorities 15 to 25.” You
can read more about that speech here, as well as his thoughts on the
controversial practice of stop-and-frisk. If you aren’t familiar with
Bloomberg, you may also want to read some of his thoughts on redlining here.
So at this point, you are probably asking
yourself, why is any of this relevant? Isn’t the goal to save ourselves from
another four years of the orange monster? Well, yes and no.
See, the thing is that the Democratic National Committee decided that the usual rules needn’t apply to any wealthy folks who can self fund their campaigns. Meaning that under some changes, to participate in the February debate, candidates must earn at least 10 percent of voter support in four qualifying national polls, or 12 percent in two polls in Nevada or South Carolina. Alternatively, a candidate must earn at least one delegate from either Iowa or New Hampshire.
In layman’s terms, an uber-wealthy candidate can flood markets with advertising and pick up traction without doing any of the usual fundraising or getting to know the people. Meaning a self-funded billionaire candidate in particular can buy all types of visibility and go from people not knowing who they are to actually earning support from those people. In this case, Bloomberg—despite bypassing the work that all the other candidates have done—is polling well enough that he will be on the next debate stage. While his name is known to many as being the former mayor of New York City, what is lesser known is what happened during his time as mayor and the impact on marginalized communities like Black and other brown-skinned kids and young men. To be honest, as bad as it was, stop and frisk was merely one of the negative impacts. And that’s the problem.
Meanwhile, all the candidates of color have dropped out because
they couldn’t raise the money to stay in the race. Andrew Yang was the last
remaining candidate of color and he suspended his campaign after a dismal
showing in New Hampshire.
Look, I know it’s been rough under Trump; I am a Black woman in
America and I get it. But with the national media turning its eyes on Bloomberg
and virtually anointing him as the front-runner, despite earning nary a
delegate, is frightening at best.
Even the buzz around Bloomberg picking up Black votes feels disingenuous. It seems he is flooding Black markets with his ads and sadly the other candidates aren’t since—to be fair—they don’t have the same bottomless pockets that Bloomberg has. Even my teenager has come across his ads on her social media feeds.
A few hours of researching Bloomberg will show that he is no kind, benevolent guy. In fact, he in many ways is just a superficially nicer and better put-together version of the current occupant of the White House. Also savvier and smarter and better able to hide his prejudices, which might make him more dangerous. Is oligarchy really better than dictatorship? Are a collection of rich oppressive boots on your neck better than one violent, unhinged and gleefully cruel one?
At this moment, there is a rallying cry that no matter who the
Democratic nominee is, we must support that person. I disagree. Regular readers
can pick up on the fact that we here at BGIM Media are no fans of Pete
Buttigieg. His record on race in South Bend, Ind., doesn’t impress me and that
is after me being contacted this past summer by his then director of black engagement.
But as much as I dislike him, if he were to get the nomination, I would
probably hold my nose and vote for him.
However, Bloomberg is a rich man that plays by his own rules and has his own authoritarian leanings with a history of being anti-Black and misogynist, among many other unpleasant things. I am sorry, but as an anti-racist, I cannot support the nicer and more articulate version of Trump.
This country is at a real crossroads, and it will require courage
to get back on track even with the old system, much less changing that already
fundamentally flawed system to something better. We cannot shortcut ourselves
to an equitable and just nation. We cannot allow fear to be our guiding
principle. Sometimes, change means that things will have to get really bad
before we get to a better place.
There is a new breed of politician rising up in this country and
they don’t care about the little people. They aren’t interested in being of
service to the people. They want a new shiny toy to be in control of. The
American people are their new toys. All of them, not just marginalized
communities.
After the past several years, we should know that and be ready to stand up for what is right, not what is expedient. We shouldn’t let “electable” be our guiding star, we should let our shared desires for a healthy nation that leaves no nation behind to be our North Star.
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Reaching for racists before Black people is a bad look
You
don’t have to take a population’s rights away in order to suppress them. You
can just nullify the rights. We’ve been doing it in this country a long time.
For instance, Black peoples’ right to vote is on the books, but literacy tests,
poll taxes and gerrymandering are all tactics used to
nullify that right ever since we attained it. While those are all great
tactics, they’re not the best. The absolute best way to nullify our vote is to
not give us a candidate who actually represents our interests. Problem solved.
This
brings me to Mayor Pete. As of this writing he’s neck and neck with Bernie in
the disastrous Iowa Caucus recount and he may well be the front-runner very
soon. He did this by moving from a progressive candidate to a moderate candidate.
While that move may have worked in Iowa, it doesn’t work on me. And by judging
from his polling numbers, it doesn’t work on anyone who looks like me.
Some
people see becoming moderate as a smart move, but I don’t. I see it as
disingenuous. It means he’s not a man out to bring his vision of the country to
the people. Instead he’s someone who’s interested in presenting himself to the
world, and he’ll tell people whatever he thinks they want to hear in order to
do that. That on its own is bad enough, but it’s actually much worse.
Right
now the Republican Party is more openly racist than any other time in my memory.
Mayor Pete’s lack of Black support leads to him becoming more moderate which
means he’s trying to get Republican votes. In other words, including Black
folks is too hard, so welcome in the racists!
The
thing is, it’s actually pretty easy to get my vote for president. All you have
to do is say what I want to hear. That’s what the whole system is based on,
unanchored promises. Unfortunately for Pete, you have to listen to people in
order to tell them what they want to hear. While he seems to have no problem
doing that with “moderates,” he doesn’t really do that when it comes to Black people. Not to put too fine a point
on it, but now is when it’s actually easy to support Black people. Now, when
it’s just listening and unanchored promises. If he can’t even do that now, what
chance could we possibly have if he’s actually got to face down the bigot army
of Mitch McConnell?
And now as I look at the potential for Nominee
Pete, I think about walking into the voting booth, and having to choose between
two motherfuckers who prioritize racists over me. Again. I think about all the
white liberals who would want me to vote myself into oblivion for the sake of
things like climate change despite their silence while people who look like me
suffered under its causes and effects for decades. I think about voting on
every other race and issue and just leaving the president boxes blank. Then I
think about how some people would view that as not doing enough, as though
voting for president could in any way fulfill your social obligation in 2020
America. Then I think about the 4.4 million people who think just like me and I genuinely
wonder how long this thing can actually hold together.
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‘Wokeness’ fails from a lack of commitment…including funding POC candidates
We are currently living in the era of “wokeness” where buzzwords
such as equity, diversity and inclusion easily roll off the tongue. For the
more “radical” amongst us, it’s anti-racism, white supremacy and racial
justice.
Social media feeds us a daily diet of change language and sound bites,
yet when one digs deeper, it’s not hard to see that most of this moment’s
wokeness is just that: A moment.
And like every time when most people are having a moment instead being
part of a movement—it is going to pass. This one will almost certainly pass once
we are rid of the orange menace, assuming that we actually can get rid of him.
Or that he leaves willingly if voted out of office, but that’s another post for
another time.
After the post-racial slumber of the Obama years, white America
was jolted into reality with Trump’s ascent to the white house and his near-daily
white nationalist rhetoric. People with virtually no analysis on how race
operates—and the connection between racism and capitalism—really thought that
America was mostly not a racist place.
Since the 2016 election, people have tried to understand: How did
we get to this place?
Never mind that the Black folks weren’t exactly living their best
lives under our nation’s first Black president. After all, the spate of highly
publicized extrajudicial killings that were almost weekly occurrences happened
under Obama’s watch. The creation of Black Lives Matter happened under Obama’s
watch. Truth be told, it was never quite clear that Black lives actually
mattered to Obama but the familial bonds of seeing one of our own ascend to the
highest seat of power in the world has made real critique of Obama’s policies with
regard to Black people taboo in a lot of circles.
In the ensuing years since the reality show bully and buffoon
ascended to leader of the American empire, there has been a real thirst for
knowledge on race and specifically systemic racism, but that thirst for
knowledge at present is having a hard time translating into concrete action on
the part of a critical mass of white people.
Now that election season is upon us, we are being inundated with
information about who the best candidate will be to go up against 45.
However, before we talk about the current slate of candidates who are still in contention and the overwhelming whiteness of those candidates, we have to go back to 2019, when we had a much larger and racially diverse pool of candidates. As of this writing there are 11 Democrats still standing and 17 who have dropped out.
Mind you, many of the folks who tossed their hats into the ring
had little chance of getting far, but sometimes you just have to do a thing. If
nothing else, running for POTUS has to make for good resume fodder and family
stories.
However, what was seen as most amazing about the pool of
candidates was that it was the most racially diverse ever. The type of racial
diversity that gets people excited in our current moment of wokeness. That’s
when so many of us conflate people of color occupying spaces as being the same
as POC actually having the power to make change. Or even having power.
The thing is that out of the now 17 who have dropped out, there
were some Black people and other brown-skinned candidates who at some point
were receiving high praise and were viewed as highly viable candidates. In
other words, they weren’t just running because they could. No, Senators Cory
Booker and Kamala Harris along with former Housing Secretary Julian Castro were
all attractive enough at one point. There was real buzz about their
potential.
Unfortunately, for each came the moment when the reality of being “valued”
for being a diverse candidate (and the ensuing buzz) faced the reality that
running for POTUS in 2020 requires cash, and lots of it.
As each of the highly visible candidates of color dropped out,
there was the inevitable moaning about the whitening of the field yet few
conversations on the why. Why were highly viable candidates of color unable to
secure the funding needed to stay in the race?
Truthfully, it’s because even at this moment where supposed wokeness
around race is high and people of color are seemingly valued, actually moving
material resources to support POC in meaningful ways is not a lived
value.
In a world where one presidential candidate is blowing the fundraising out of the water $5 at a time, there is no reason that Cory, Kamala or Julian shouldn’t still be in this race (or all three). Unless the reality is that for all the talk of diversity, equity and inclusion, no one is really interested in any type of significant change. It’s easier to tsk, tsk that these candidates dropped out than to acknowledge potential systemic barriers to staying in and accessing funding at levels equal to their white counterparts.
It’s easier to be sorry that they aren’t there anymore than to
question why a white man in his 30s with negligible qualifications for the job
of president has access to resources that allow lavish fundraisers in wine
caves. Seems to me that being a sitting U.S. senator or former housing
secretary is a better qualification for POTUS than serving as mayor of a city
with a population of 100,000 people—and by all accounts not doing all that good
a job with that job.
The thing about systemic racism is that it creates a set of
conditions that you can almost predict with certainty, even down to the fact
that the last viable candidate of color, Andrew Yang, has proximity to
whiteness.
What good is having the most diverse pool of candidates running
when, in the end, the same lack of access to resources that hinders the
potential of regular Black folks and POC becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle
for these candidates.
For my white readers, if you truly want to change things, it will
require a change in your mindset. It will require giving up something so that
racial parity can be achieved. At the end of the day, the system is not some
amorphous and anonymous system. Systems are made up of actual people, who can
and do make choices in their lives.
In our capitalist system, money is a prized
asset and a much-needed reality. What you choose to do with your money matters.
Are you using your money in support of liberation or are you using your money
to maintain the status quo? Are you supporting Black people and POC in their
work to create change? Or do you think that your awareness alone is a form of
support?
If this piece or this blog resonates with you, please consider a one-time “tip” or become a monthly “patron”…this space runs on love and reader support. Want more BGIM? Consider booking me to speak with your group or organization.
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Trump: You get a car…and you get a car…the rest of you will get nothing
In his state of the union address (SOTU) on Tuesday night, Donald Trump turned it into a reality show/campaign speech and channeled Oprah Winfrey to give out “prizes” to Black people in a craven and calculated attempt to get more of the Black vote.
He really did that ish.
He really did.
It’s basically, “You get a car and you get a car—you all get
a car!” like in Oprah’s classic giveaway episodes on television. Except that we
Black folks aren’t all gonna get a car. He’s going to trot a few of us out and
pander to a small number of Black people and ultimately give the rest of us the
shaft—not a shiny new vehicle with a state-of-the-art drive shaft but a stick
right up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Trump has been a racist from long back. From his days of
denying Black people the ability to rent from his housing properties to his ad
calling for the deaths of the Central Park Five (now the Exonerated Five) and
his insistence that they were guilty even when that was proven false, and
throughout his presidency making people with brown skin out to be the villains
every time he has a chance and talking about how good he’s been to Black people
as president—it’s exhausting and infuriating.
Some of what he did at the SOTU:
- Showcased five Black guests invited to the first lady’s box for this year’s address.
- Telling the story of 100-year-old Charles McGee, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, and saying he had pinned stars to promote McGee to brigadier in the Oval Office.
- Sharing the story of Tony Rankins, an Black Army veteran and former addict who he related was currently working in an “opportunity zone,” a tax incentive meant to encourage investors to put money into the poor neighborhoods.
- And he awarded an “opportunity scholarship” to Janiyah Davis, daughter of a single Black mother..
And even before the SOTU, a re-election campaign ad that aired
during the Super Bowl and featured Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old Black
woman who was granted clemency last year, as if this marks a trend he would
continue. He won’t. He’ll pass out a few party favors, try to confuse Black
voters and hope that he can lure some of them to his side.
I hope it won’t work; Lord knows the man is toxic for Black
people, amplifying and supporting efforts by the GOP to continue to cut into
voting rights, gerrymander the hell out of states with large Black populations
in red states so that they aren’t able to vote their own interests, and
generally “keep us in our place.”
If you want a good rundown of what he’s doing and why, the New York Times (which admittedly is
often no friend to Black people and other people of color or any marginalized
groups even as they highlight stories of the nice Nazis next door) had a good summary article about this sideshow of an SOTU.
I’m heated. Bad enough that he somehow managed to turn the
SOTU into a campaign effort but to try to use it as a way to pretend to be down
for Black people and to lure them to his side is filthy and depraved. This is
pandering of the highest level, and we (Black people, Latinx people, white
people who claim they aren’t racist and so many more) need to not fall for
this.
Trump is all about dividing us, trying to convince everyone
he’s screwing over that he’s really showing love to them, and basically
cementing his path to kingship. The Senate is already doing a lot of that work
for him, and while there’s still a slim chance we might have fair enough
elections to get this man out of the Oval Office, we need to expel him with the
quickness.
If this piece or this blog resonates with you, please consider a one-time “tip” or become a monthly “patron”…this space runs on love and reader support. Want more BGIM? Consider booking me to speak with your group or organization.
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New travel ban tips us off: Trump is coming for all brown people, even citizens
I know that I often say I prefer my racists be up front and
honest and direct about it so I know what they’re about and don’t have to mess
around with pretense, but Donald Trump is something else. He’s a whole new
level of blatant that might make me long for more passive-aggressive
presidential racism. I’m just waiting for him to demand more money from
Congress not just for his wall to keep out Hispanic people from Central America
and Mexico but also to hang up giant signs at each coastline saying: “No
Coloreds Allowed.”
Just a few days ago (January 31), Trump instituted new travel restrictions aimed at six
countries for what seems to be the primary reason that brown-skinned people
live there. Those would be: Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan and
Tanzania. It’s aimed to virtually block immigration from Nigeria and Myanmar (a
place where the Muslim minority is fleeing genocide) and to heavily restrict it
from the other nations on the list.
Raise your hand if you’re aware of any major conflicts we
have with these nations or if any of them are strongly associated with
terrorists who have attacked the United States directly.
Did you raise your hand? Oh, you’re a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump
follower. Go the hell away.
But really, this is an extension of what Trump did back in
2017, early in his dictatorship, a Muslim travel
ban that got challenged in the courts—which ultimately ended up in favor of
our orange autocrat. And yeah, you might have guessed it already, but a common
thread in the countries added to the list now are substantial Muslim
populations.
Yes, plenty of folks will argue that this is for our
protection, because stirring up fear by slapping “Muslim” on any horrible policy
makes a huge chunk of America feel safer and allow them to bask in their
bigotry. But it’s always been notable that the Muslim nations that never seem
to get added to the ban list are ones that actually produced terrorists who
took part in 9/11 and are also nations in which Trump has major personal financial
interests. Really, this is all designed to sow fear among those deemed as “other” and sadly it
works.
What’s heartbreaking about this beyond just being inconsistently
cruel to brown-skinned people because of race and/or religion is seeing yet more
people in the United States who are citizens and now have to weigh how safe it
is to visit those countries. There are people here who are citizens, whether
naturalized ones or born here, who have family roots in those nations. But
these days, under Trump and with ICE and CBP having been his loyal fascist enforcers and
continuing to be so even more cruelly, these people have to worry if they will
be allowed back into their own country.
It’s already happened countless times that American citizens
come back from countries Trump doesn’t like, whether across the ocean or south
of the border, and they are detained for no good reason. Terrorized and harassed.
We’re not that far from Trump simply stripping naturalized citizens of their
citizenship en masse and, for that matter, doing so to Americans who were
actually born here. The administration has already begun trying that with
Hispanic people, questioning the validity of the birth certificates issued at
U.S. hospitals for them.
One post on Twitter really broke my heart: A woman talking
about urging her mother (a naturalized citizen of 20 years or more) not to
attend her sister’s funeral in Nigeria because she might not get let back into
the United States—or at the very least likely encounter frightening treatment
by federal jackbooted thugs.
It starts by just blocking people from entering the country,
when we’ve boasted how we are nation of opportunity, freedom and openness—leaving
refugees without hope and treating immigrants in general like some kind of
infesting vermin. In the end, it will lead, if Trump keeps power long enough
and tightens his grip ever more, to many people losing their citizenship.
Trump doesn’t like Black people. He doesn’t like Latinx
people unless maybe they’re white-skinned. He doesn’t like Muslims. And while
he can deny all these things all he likes (and he does), his actions are clear
as to his intent: Make America as white as possible again.
Before I go, I also want to point out how all of this travel
ban talk has brought out more subtle racism as well from people in the middle
and on the left. Too many people are pointing out on social media how successful and educated Nigerians tend to be, as a way
of highlighting how pointless and stupid the new travel bans are. Education isn’t
a reason to avoid the racism; humanity is. All these people being banned are
human beings and in many cases human beings facing violence or other threats in
their homelands that often are caused in large part by American foreign
policies of the past many decades.
This will continue. Immigration will be tightened more and
more until it doesn’t exist for almost anyone but white European people if
Trump stays in power. To be honest, it’s not just Trump. Plenty of GOP representatives
and senators and their constituents want to keep out the brown folk and Muslims
and kick out the ones we have. They need to be checked as well. But the single
greatest architect of all this mistreatment and lack of empathy and protection
for non-white people is Trump himself. He’s basically king of the United States
now thanks to the Senate’s handling of the impeachment trial. There’s nothing
to stop this from getting worse aside from voting Trump and a lot of other
Republicans out—assuming we even get fair elections in November. And if we don’t,
what will we do. Will we stand up to protect immigrants and refugees? Will we
stand up even for our own citizens?
If this piece or this blog resonates with you, please consider a one-time “tip” or become a monthly “patron”…this space runs on love and reader support. Want more BGIM? Consider booking me to speak with your group or organization.
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