If my Facebook feed represented political thought in America, Bernie Sanders would be president having won 92% of the vote. Trump would have gotten 0%, and 8 % would have written in Cubs third baseman Chris Bryant.
But apparently that’s not what went down. And now in the collective wailing and gnashing of teeth, all my favorite left wing bloggers are saying hey y’all. We fucked up. Let’s go talk to Trump voters to find out what happened. Click off the Huffington post, refriend everyone you unfriended and listen to people who don’t agree with you. Pop the bubble baby, because it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.
I thought that too until I spent a day drinking with white supremacists.
Come with me to Chicago. 1983. I was in my late 20’s
So, 1983, Mayor Daley Sr had died, and power was up for grabs. It was a 3 way race for mayor between Little Richie Daley, the mayor’s son, Jane Byrne, the machine candidate, and Harold Washington, an African American with deep roots in the progressive movement.
I decided to volunteer for Harold Washington, and my friend Clem Balanoff Sr. who was running the campaign in my neighborhood asked me to go hand out palm cards on Election Day outside the polling place on the East Side, at 111th and Avenue J.
The east side is a working class neighborhood separated from the rest of the city by the calumet river. To get there you have to go over a drawbridge. If you’ve seen the movie Blues Brothers, you’ve seen that bridge.
We lived on the other side of the river and felt alienated from the people over the bridge. We used to call them Skiakoviches, because everyone there had a name that ended in ski ak ov or vich. A few days before the election I was walking in that neighborhood with a black friend. We were only going 2 blocks and in that time bottles were thrown at us out of four different cars. That’s the kind of place it was. But it was also a neighborhood where no one locked their doors and a bicycle left outside unchained would still be there in the morning.
The city councilman was Eddie Vrdolyak. He had been indicted for attempted murder. He was known for racketeering. There were rumors that he was connected to the Croatian mob There were rumors that if you, for instance, hired the wrong contractor, your body parts would be found floating in the Calumet river.
111th and J was Eddie Vrdolyak’s home precinct.
I got there at 6 am when the polls opened and there were already 7 of Vrdolyak’s guys out there ready to hand out palm cards for Jane Byrne. When they saw I was there for Washington, they approached me. They formed a semi circle-kind of closed in around me and one of them looked me in the eye and said: “You’re a nigger loving jew communist.”
I was scared. I didn’t know if my body parts were going to be found floating in the Calumet River. But at the same time, what could I say? Was I going to quibble? So I said “that’s pretty good, now guess my zodiac sign.”
And the head guy started to laugh so the followers started to laugh and he said “you’re okay—have some Slivovitz” and he pulled a bottle of this Croatian brandy out of his pocket—and I took a pull and he took a pull and the bottle starts going around, and more bottles start going around so basically, so we stood around drinking and talking and drinking and talking until 7pm when the polls closed.
And I learned where they were coming from. For these guys, elections were not about ideology, they were about patronage—or as they put it “whose cousin is going to be hanging off the back of the garbage truck in November.” And they were afraid for their property values if people moved in whose names did not end in Ski, Ak, Ov or Vich.
By 1983 the massive steel mills that lined the river were laying people off. My Skiakovich buddies weren’t thinking about justice, they were thinking about holding on to the little they had. And we talked all day. And I explained my point of view, that you can’t blame black people for ghettos and you can’t blame immigrants when jobs are lost: you have to blame capitalism. And they listened to me, and I listened to them, but I’m quite sure no one changed their minds that day.
Well Harold Washington won. And the long neglected south side got some potholes fixed and some new books in the library. And some south side playgrounds finally got wood chips instead of the traditional ground cover of asphalt and broken glass. And not long after, Eddie Vrdolyak got caught stealing from a children’s hospital and went to prison. And the mills shut their doors.
So when I think about those guys, and that day-- I’m pretty sure they all voted for Trump now. And I don’t think that they are evil, but I also don’t think they have a point.
What I wish I had said was that we all want the same thing. Safe neighborhoods. Good schools. Black people and brown people want those things too. There has to be a way to empathize with people AND call out white supremacists. It’s not either/or.
Every day we have a choice and an obligation. We can blame the victim or we can connect the goddamn dots. We can choose fear or we can choose love. We can be silent or we can stand for justice. Because it’s one thing to have a dream, and it’s another thing to stay woke.