We, the people of color of these United States of America, are going to be the salvation of this nation. We are the firewall that is standing strong against the travesty that we’ve just seen displayed at the Klanvention convened by Republicans in Cleveland.
Black folks are not buying what Donald Trump and the rest of his raft of Republican racists are selling. Neither are Latinos, Asian-Americans and Native Americans. As the traditional media tries to sell us on a neck-and-neck horse race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—ignoring the electoral college—and as Trump and other Republicans ramp up the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic volume, there is one thing Democrats need to keep in mind: A big part of our voting base is black and brown, and that base is growing.
The coalition that elected Barack Obama twice isn’t shrinking.
President Obama achieved victory by carrying 93 percent of African American voters, 71 percent of Latino voters, 73 percent of Asian American voters, and only 39 percent of white voters
Republicans know that, which is why they are fighting tooth and nail to initiate more voter suppression across the U.S., and have even incorporated those efforts into their platform.
The Republican Party's platform formally endorses laws requiring voters to show identification when they cast ballots. The new provision inserts the national party into a contentious debate over voter access at a time when several states are tightening identification requirements. The party platform, adopted unanimously by delegates in Cleveland on Monday, goes farther than language that had been included in earlier years. The party "support[s] legislation to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote and secure photo ID when voting," the document reads. Four years ago, the GOP platform "applaud[ed] legislation to require photo identification for voting and to prevent election fraud."
The stronger language comes ahead of a presidential election in which 12 states -- including critical swing states like Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Virginia -- will enforce voter identification laws for the first time."This is part of a broader move to curtail voting rights, which began after the 2010 election, when state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote," wrote the Brennan Center for Justice, which opposes many of the new laws.
We need to mount every effort possible to not only fight voter suppression, but to increase our GOTV efforts in black, Latino, Asian, and Native American communities.
The good news is the Clinton campaign “gets it” in regards to expanding efforts with black voters.
NBCBLK has confirmed from a Hillary Clinton aid that Hillary for America is expanding its African-American outreach team for the general election.
The Clinton campaign has hired several staffers in an effort to build an already sizable advantage with African-American voters. During the primaries, African-American voters favored Clinton overwhelmingly and a recent poll in Pennsylvania showed Trump's African American vote support at zero.
We should expect to hear from her campaign about ramped up Latino and Asian outreach very soon. However, we can’t just focus on the critical presidential battle. We have to flip the Senate and make inroads into the House, while also beginning to undo the depredations caused by Republican legislatures across the nation. As we fight the battle for victory in November, our eyes have to be on the ultimate prize of dominating midterms, and building our local and state participation. Ignoring the central importance of people of color as the bulwark against white supremacist/fascist ideology and practice imperils us all, no matter your individual race, ethnicity, or gender.
Bear with me as I digress and rant here.
From my perspective as a black Democratic voter, married to a brown Democratic voter, who has been fighting for our voting rights since being inspired by Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer (among others) in 1964, I’m more than a bit ticked off by all the hand-wringing from the white left about white voters and the fantasy that the loss of “the white vote” is going to doom us. Before white Democrats read this and get upset, let me be clear: If you are white and not buying the racism—right on. If you are white and fighting voter suppression—right on.
Democrats lost “the white vote” decades ago. That doesn’t mean “all whites,” but it sure as hell tells us something about the pervasive impact of racism in American politics.
I also don’t want to hear crap from the PoC “left” about how voting doesn’t matter, and our situation is hopeless so just stay home. We heard the same basura directed at young whites who were in Occupy Wall Street. I also want to take time out to tell Cornel West and other so-called black leftists that the Green Party and Jill Stein ain’t gonna do a god-damned thing to help us change this country, and—most importantly—change the Supreme Court. If that is what you are selling to young folks I have one message for you: Go to hell in a hand basket. You ain’t radical—you’re reactionary and part of the problem. Take all that “corporatist, neo-liberal, centrist, war-monger” rhetoric y’all sling around and shove it where the sun don’t shine. There’s a war going on all right, a war against my folks, and a word salad from keyboard warriors ain’t gonna stop bullets, or provide health care, housing, education, justice, or peace.
Too many people died to get us to where we are today, and those folks still with us who put their lives on the line know what I’m talkin’ about.
I met three young men—two black and one Latino—whose names I don’t know, when I was at Netroots Nation last week. I was sitting near them late one night eavesdropping on their conversation outside of the hotel where they were seated after one of the parties. I heard them talking about why they weren’t going to vote.
I waited a few moments and then interrupted their tipsy discourse on “hopelessness.” Sure, they were angry—angry about the loss of black lives, police brutality, and conditions in our communities. I asked them point blank, “Are y’all just giving up and laying down to die?“ Told them I’d be 69 in a few weeks—and my life is more than two-thirds over, and I’m still fighting, and voting. Said that they have a lot of years left in which to struggle and if they are simply ready to lay down and die and let the racists win—well, that is pretty damn cowardly. They bristled when I said the “c” word. I shared about meeting Mrs. Hamer when I was 17, and how that changed my life.
Told them to take a walk and visit the statue in front of the Old Courthouse of Dred and Harriet Scott, like I did, and think about how important it is that we have a sane Supreme Court which will affect not just one electoral cycle, but generations. By the time I left them that night, they all said they were not only going to vote, but would also be registering voters.
Now I don’t know if they will or won’t but that’s not the point of my story. Those of us who do know how important voting is need to drum that message into the heads of young folks who are being messaged by idjits who claim that bringing down more repression from the likes of white supremacist Trump will ensure a revolution. Frankly—that’s bullshit. A Trump win, and the resulting SCOTUS he’d appoint, will simply bring more pain, more inequality and more suffering for our communities of color for generations to come. The middle and upper middle-class left that has white privilege will do just fine, thankyouverymuch. Poor white folks, and especially poor white women will simply suffer with us. If you are L, G, B, or T, then take a good look at Republican vice presidential candidate Pence’s thoughts on “gay conversion therapy.”
Wake up and smell the cafe con leche. Our hopes for the future as a multicultural and multihued society rest in the hands of people of color who are the backbone of the Democratic Party voting bloc, but not always the leadership. That has to change.
(End of rant, and back to my regularly scheduled Sunday conversation — which is related to my rant.)
If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a book that needs to be on your shelf or your Kindle:
Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority
Despite the abundant evidence from Obama’s victories proving that the U.S. population has fundamentally changed, many progressives and Democrats continue to waste millions of dollars chasing white swing voters. Explosive population growth of people of color in America over the past fifty years has laid the foundation for a New American Majority consisting of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters in America right now, and that majority is growing larger every day. Failing to properly appreciate this reality, progressives are at risk of missing this moment in history—and losing.
A leader in national politics for thirty years, Steve Phillips has had a front-row seat to these extraordinary political changes. A civil rights lawyer and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Phillips draws on his extensive political experience to unveil exactly how people of color and progressive whites add up to a new majority, and what this means for U.S. politics and policy. A book brimming with urgency and hope, Brown Is the New White exposes how far behind the curve Democrats are in investing in communities of color—while illuminating a path forward to seize the opportunity created by the demographic revolution.
Back in February, Daily Kos had a promotion with the book. The author, Steve Phillips, is not simply an academic. He writes based on hands-on political experience.
Steve Phillips became the youngest person ever elected to public office in San Francisco and went on to serve as president of the Board of Education. He is a co-founder of PowerPAC.org, a social justice organization that conducted the largest independent voter mobilization efforts backing Barack Obama, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris. In 2014, he co-authored the first-ever audit of Democratic Party spending and was named one of “America’s Top 50 Influencers” by Campaigns & Elections. He has appeared on multiple national radio and television networks, including NBC, CNN, Fox News, and TV One. He was a featured speaker at the City Club of Cleveland in 2014, and his address on race and politics was nationally broadcast on C-SPAN. He holds a BA from Stanford University and a JD from Hastings College of the Law.
If you have an hour to spare this discussion with Phillips, at the Commonwealth Club, is worth a listen.
“Democrats Ignoring Black Voters In Favor Of White Swing Voters; Bad Idea” is a shorter video interview with Phillips.
If you can fix your mouth to say voting isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, then answer this: Why are Koch-funded Republicans working so damned hard to repress, and suppress the vote? Who are the main targets of that suppression and gerrymandering? Why was the Voting Rights Act gutted?
Ari Berman answers these questions and discusses much of this in Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.
Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time.
In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.
Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.
Berman is one of the few journalists of national stature who has consistently covered the growth, development, and impact of the Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina. That multiracial fusion coalition, led by Rev. Dr. William Barber, who is black, deals with a cross-section of issues that hinge on fighting against voter suppression, and mobilizing to get people registered and to the polls. Repairers of the Breach, Rev. Barber, and other activist leaders of faith are currently touring the U.S. and—as usual—getting ignored by much of the traditional media, and also by a big chunk of the “progressive left.” Stay tuned to Daily Kos’ new Moral Movement Forward Together group to follow and get involved.
Berman’s book brought to mind an earlier work, written during the Bush/Rove administration: Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters, by Frances Fox Piven, Lorraine C. Minnite, and Margaret Groarke.
Today, over forty years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 demolished bars to voting for African Americans, the effort to prevent black people—as well as Latinos and the poor in general—from voting is experiencing a resurgence. A myriad of new tactics, some of which adopt the mantle of “election reform,” has evolved to suppress the vote. In this sharply argued new book, three of America’s leading experts on party politics and elections demonstrate that our political system is as focused on stopping people from voting as on getting Americans to go to the polls.
In recent years, the Republican Party, the Bush administration, and the conservative movement have devoted a remarkable amount of effort to controlling election machinery (the scandal over federal prosecutors was in part over their refusal to gin up election-fraud cases). But Keeping Down the Black Vote shows that the effort to rig the system is as old as American political parties themselves, and race is at the heart of the game.
I agree with Piven and her co-authors that “race is at the heart of the game.”
It has been that way since the establishment of this nation, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the institution of black enslavement. The change that was “gonna come” as sung by the immortal Sam Cooke is staring us in the face. We will trounce Trump, and we will move this country forward against everything those who want to turn back time can throw at us. The only question that remains is who will be standing together with us in that firewall of brilliant color that is the rainbow on the horizon.
I hope it is you.