Tag Archives: elections

No Gloating

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

As per Edric, I do not wish to gloat when Hillary wins tomorrow or Wednesday morning.

I will celebrate, eat, drink, dance, calm down…decompress…slowly.

I will likely spend the whole day Wednesday sleeping, thinking about what movie to watch at the theatre (likely #DoctorStrange in 3D) and finishing my slideshow for a #Nerdacon panel.

I will be waiting for someone to respond to my post-election job applications.

I’m not interested in gloating. I don’t think much that is favorable about Trump, but the people who have voted for him or will vote for him tomorrow will still be with us on Wednesday.

We will have to work differently than we did under President Obama. The racism and sexism exhibited by both his most ardent supporters and his Republican opponents over the Obama years will still be exhibited in different doses.

But those who voted for him over economic anxieties should not be left behind in not only explaining our economic limitations and dead ends, but charting a course forward to overcome those limitations.

Those who voted for him over their being de-centered in the future of the great American narrative – by sex, gender, sexual orientation or, as egregious as it is, race and skin color – will either find a way to navigate this landscape, hopefully by recognizing their privilege and helping to build a new, more equitable, more domestically compassionate status quo, or will retreat into an organized but dysfunctional socio-economic dystopia of the mind. I’m already doing what I can to dispel that dystopia for the fallacy it is, and to show that everyone should have an equitable role to play in this country, and an equitable chance to play that role.

We live in a small world, and we live in a big world. Our place is not assured, but we will write our own futures. Let’s write futures which will reach out to people who are not like us in shared background but who have the goal of comforting the afflicted, even if this disturbs and rouses the comfortable to wakefulness.

For me, it’s not enough to vote, or to share social media posts, for the causes I care about or the candidates most qualified to make good of those causes.

It matters to call, text, knock on doors, enter data on the people I’ve contacted, and do it all again every day until your candidate is elected or loses.

It matters to connect and work with every person who wishes to contribute a small chunk of their lives to this campaign.

And it matters, after the campaign is over, to want for more, for better, for yourself, for your neighbors, for your world.

Whatever happens, here’s to the next campaign.

I disagree with this.

  1. Not even Bernie Sanders would qualify as a left-wing Trump, no matter how many comparisons were drawn between them or how many folks had wet dreams of a Trump-Sanders debate.
  2. a left-wing Trump would have to be sexist AF and adept at racist dogwhistles (*hinthint* “BLASTED ZIONAZI BANKERS” *hinthint* “Asians tuk er jerbs”). That would gut the Dems in the Black third of the South, so why even try?
  3. The closest I could imagine to a left-wing Trump is George Galloway, and he’s a British MP who got kicked out of Labour.

African-Americans Who’ve Ran for Governor

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

To date, I’ve been able to find 8 major-party nominees of African descent for governor of a U.S. state, over the spread of 6 states:

  • Douglas Wilder (Virginia Democratic nominee 1989, elected 1990-1994)
  • Deval Patrick (Massachusetts Democratic nominee 2006, elected 2007-2015)
  • Johnny DuPree (Mississippi Democratic nominee 2011, first AA nominee since Reconstruction)
  • Robert Gray (Mississippi Democratic nominee 2015)
  • Cleo Fields (Louisiana Democratic candidate 1995, Louisiana has no primary system)
  • Bill Jefferson (Louisiana Democratic candidate 1999)
  • Theo Mitchell (South Carolina Democratic candidate 1990)
  • Anthony Brown (Maryland Democratic nominee 2014)

Compare this to:

  • 36 elected governors of Irish descent
  • 21 elected governors of Ashkenazi Jewish decent

Not bad for two other ethnicities who were once considered non-white by White America.

But it’s emblematic of how adrift Democrats are at the moment in the South, and just how much we have failed in representing and accommodating one of the most and longest-politically-disadvantaged ethnic groups in this country.

Building on the #WEBDuBois quote Edric just posted:

Reading DuBois’ critique of both parties in 1956, one has to understand what the parties represented in that period. The Democrats were still a very racist political party which appealed to the White working class. The Republicans, by comparison, were mostly indistinguishable from the Democrats except in their Lincolnian heritage and their more concrete adherence to free-market ideals. Republicans in the South were struggling to arise as an appreciable political force, becoming plastered in its declining years as the “Negro Party”.

Fast-forward to today. The Republicans are dominant in the South and are a very racist, white-identity-obsessed party. The Democrats in the South are struggling to arise as an appreciable political force, and are now becoming consigned to “Negro Party”, permanent-minority status. Outside of the South, the parties are more apart than ever before, except on many of the matters which DuBois touches on in this letter. Some things have never changed, and some things have changed party affiliation.

It’s More than Identity for Us

Politics, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

You know what I felt to be racist about 2008? It wasn’t that so many chose to vote for Obama or McCain based on their skin color.

It’s that so many in the GOP went out of their way to denounce Obama’s presence in the race overall, and dismissed his eligibility based on his ethnicity and insinuations about his ethnicity in ways that McCain did not face.

You know what I feel to be misogynist about 2012? It isn’t that so many choose to vote for Clinton or Trump based on their gender.

It’s that so many in the GOP have gone out of their way to denounce Clinton’s presence in the race overall, and dismiss her eligibility based on her gender and insinuations about her gender in ways that Trump has not faced.

So I don’t mind that African-Americans turned out much more for Obama, and I don’t mind that women will turn out much more for Clinton. Not one bit.

I do mind that anyone would be institutionally denounced in their candidacy based on their ethnic or gender background, especially by those whose ancestors have been privileged with citizenship and social credibility for the entirety of this country’s history.

Ultimately, over 50% of the population voted for Obama based on his background and his credibility. The same will happen for Clinton.

If GOP voters are concerned that so many would vote for a Democratic candidate based often on their background while their similarly-originated candidates don’t do anywhere near so well, they are not doing anywhere near enough to bring in candidates with both a relatable background and a believable credibility for office. Try harder.

One more time, with feeling:

I disagree a bit with the Republican “line” being drawn at white women (see Hillary Clinton and Wendy Davis). His base is not abandoning him over this insult to White female autonomy, only the other party members with clout outside of his campaign.

No, this has to go deeper for a nuclear apocalypse to happen within his base. He has to be shown smearing some unforgivable crap over the wrong Anglo-American, able-bodied male, the avatar in which most of his base perceive and vaunt themselves. Whatever will destroy him will have to show him, “the Donald”, to be the Emmanuel Goldstein-like “cuck” which they train themselves to most grievously despise.

According to Trump insiders like Hugh Hewett, another shoe is to drop momentarily. It’s supposed to be worse than the “grab them by the pussy” tape.

Does this make any sense?

“I’m going to vote for Trump! I think he’s a destabilizing force. I’m skeptical of him, too, and who exactly is behind Trump. But given that there’s eternal dissent in the Republican Party, that leads me to believe that whatever he represents might be a destabilizing force. And he’s made a lot of overtures to Russia and China, which in some ways could be thought of as an encouraging thing. I don’t support or endorse any of Trump’s policies. I just think it’ll escalate the problem, which is the best we can hope for. I hope at the very least he’d turn the White House into a reality show. America would tune in, right? And then he could do something nice, like give the money to the National Park Service, because they’re trying to defund it.”

Source: American History XXX – Office Magazine

This is heightening the contradictions. Does he want to heighten the contradictions?

Lack of Self-Respect Among Black Republicans

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He told the New Times that he had hopes of helping the Trump campaign avoid the mistakes that Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) made in his failed presidential run in 2012. Romney, said Jackson, waited until too late in his campaign to start outreach to nonwhite voters.

“I have been saying repeatedly that you cannot go into black community in the 9th hour of a campaign and ask them to vote for a GOP candidate,” he said. “The party has done a piss poor job of courting the black vote over 50 years. So you have to have more vested interest in time and in your financial effort for the whole campaign, not just in the last 100 days.”

Source: Head of Trump’s black outreach in Florida says ‘piss poor’ campaign doesn’t care about blacks – Raw Story

Thinking about it, I can understand an immigrant from Haiti like Rep. Mia Love of Utah becoming a GOP politician. Because she is an immigrant, she gains from the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps because we’re a nation of immigrants who sought a better life here” doctrine. I don’t find it strange that she follows through on that, first as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah and later as a House rep from Utah. She doesn’t even need the Congressional Black Caucus because she rhetorically hates its very existence, despite joining it after joining Congress in 2015 (oops).

But what do African-Americans of antebellum slave descent gain from joining the GOP at this moment of political history? The prevailing consensus in the GOP is that our history is an inconvenience to be glossed over (even glamorized) and not “focused upon”; that our contributions are to be honored but not the trauma which produced those contributions; that our current plight, only 2 adult generations out from the end of Jim Crow, is a result of our “personal lifestyle choices” and not of systemic origin; that we should ditch the Mexicans in order to make more room for (everyone else but) us in the low-skill, high-labor jobs of agriculture, mining, manufacturing and even service industries (which may or may even not be “real jobs worthy of a living minimum wage”); that we should ditch LGBT people and Planned Parenthood clinics in order to make our divorce rate drop, men return to their wives, children have more children, and women stop being so liberated as to make informed choices for their bodies; and other insults to our intelligence.

None of that is appealing to me. None of this makes sense. Maybe if I got into a car accident, got a bad case of amnesia, adopted a new name and identity as a Nigerian immigrant from Lagos, integrated myself into the Nigerian American community like Rachel Dolezal did with African-Americans in Spokane, became religious, set up a business and then decided to go into politics as a moderate Republican Congressperson from Atlanta, this message would be a bit more appealing for me to campaign on and live by. A bit.

Then I would be lauded by those who don’t know any better as another rare Black politician who “never slaved on the Democratic plantation” and joined the party of Lincoln “bcuz freedom.” And Fox News, Breitbart and the National Review would love me for every word I publicly utter.

But that ain’t happening in this timeline of reality. I’d have to shut part of my brain off to join the present GOP even if I were a descendant of antebellum slaves who was anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-welfare or at least just pro-free-market. I’d have to shut off part of my brain to vote for the real estate developer or anyone who endorses him. And most Black Republican descended from antebellum slaves, except for Rep. Mia Love, don’t even sound original to me in their adoption of GOP talking points, especially when those talking points emanate from some angle of gratuitous anti-Blackness and class bigotry. Maybe they’re honest, but not original or nuanced.

We’re looking for empowerment for our families’ and neighbors’ lives that we didn’t have when “things were simpler” and “Black businesses were better” under Jim Crow. The GOP’s austerity and anti-civil rights policies simply don’t provide empowerment for most African-Americans, and they seem to be harming the Euro-American community across the country, too (see Kansas under Brownback, Indiana under Pence, Wisconsin under Walker, Michigan under Snyder and North Carolina under McCrory). The latter may get tired of it soon enough, if they can jump off the nativist train first.

MLK’s description of the 1964 Republican campaign of Barry Goldwater applies just as much to this year and the subsequent landslide that is about to happen against the GOP nominee.

Again.