The Elusive Elephant
in the room everyone keeps dancing around
I heard a gentleman on Thom Hartmann show talking about the failures of the Democratic Party and how they lost their largest voting blocs —veterans and seniors he said. What he did not say was black women —92% (very telling) and I represent the trifecta.
He went on to say Harris’ campaign boiled down to…“A noun, a verb, and abortion”
Then he referenced a poll that showed the top 3 issues in 2024 Election:
Cost-of-living
Immigration
Cost of healthcare
Who did they poll? Because as a woman with two granddaughters—reproductive healthcare (i.e. abortion) is top of my list. As a black women raised in the Jim Crow South “Education” especially the teaching of all our history, matters to me. Representation matters. Knowledge is power!
Immigration is an important issue, but it doesn’t make my top three. Immigrants are not increasing my cost of living for affordable housing. Billionaires’ gentrification of my city is doing that, and they employ the immigrants that build their new utopian neighborhoods. It was immigrants I saw on the construction site for Amazon’s new headquarters and the new stadium that gobbled up property owned by or serving minorities.
Part of the polarization and party in-fighting that’s happening is a refusal to acknowledge some base behavior and ideology in both parties: misogyny and a built-in white superiority complex --supremacy. This is the elephant in the room, everyone keeps dancing around when these discussions are held.
When black people bring it up, they’re accused of playing the race card and making everything about race. Because in America it always comes down to or back to this issue. Like the title of Isabel says in “Caste, The Origin of Our Discontent.” It’s a must-read book for anyone having these discussions about the problems in America. If you’re short on time watch Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” a documentary about the writing of this book by Isabel Wilkerson.
We are not post-racial because we had one black President, no matter how much white folk like to pretend. That one black President bought a resurgence of these supremacy attitudes and political movements like the Tea Party and strategies like REDMAP. They wanted to ensure that could never happen again. Mitch McConnell famously said their main mission was to make him a one term President. Republicans took obstructionism to a whole new level.
Now we have almost half the states (23) with Republican trifectas. Republican controlled states like mine (Tennessee) were able to pass laws like “The Dismantle DEI Act” to explicitly undermine the Civil Rights Acts protections and reverse decades of progress toward equity and representation. Pushing the Party lingo, one of the Republican sponsors said, “DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are "racist" a form of "reverse racism."
Republicans want to make racism ok again. Some Democrats want to focus on class issues and pretend that fixing the economic woes alone will make things better. For whom? When marginalized communities are not protected, they are targeted, exploited and denied full access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Civil Rights Acts levelled the playing field. Now they want to rig the game as their fear of replacement, becoming a minority, looms large.
We must get to a place where we can have these uncomfortable but necessary conversations. I think a great place to start is with a historical understanding.