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Sometimes we are blessed with being
able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manor of our
revolution. But more usually we must do battle where we are standing.
-Audre Lorde
The Biden-Harris team flipped
Wisconsin. Over 1,630,570 citizens gave Biden 50% of the vote. Trump,
receiving 49% of the vote, that is, over 1,610,030, came in second.
Trump lost, according to the votes. Wisconsin is blue
for Biden.
But I still see red!
Like most Black Americans, I’ve
seen red for a very long time. To paraphrase Dave Chappelle, I’ve
been Black long enough to discern a pattern - of red. The red
spreading westward, left in its wake Indigenous people, falling and
trampled upon. The Africans, my ancestors, saw it for sure. Newly
arrived to these shores to be chained and abused with whips, the red
filled them with terror so that for hundreds of years, old hands in
the cotton fields picked the buds, signing of the red.
After Reconstruction, the strung up
is surrounded, hearing voices he can no longer see because of all the
agitated and gurgling red blocking his windpipe. And years later, the
voice on the phone, a white man, taunts the 14-year-old Sunday school
secretary, struggling to hear, to understand: “Three minutes.”
Time stops for four little girls, lying among concrete and brick.
Ella Baker, Diane Nash warned about
it as did Sojourner and Frederick Douglass before them. Wilmington.
Tulsa. Ida B. Wells in Memphis takes to the road after the fellow
citizens informed her with the threat of death that it was best to
leave home behind. John Lewis is covered in it on Pettus Bridge - and
it’s more than his own blood. No longer confined to Wyoming, Utah,
Nebraska, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, or Louisiana, Malcolm finds
it New York, Dr. King in Chicago, Rodney King, Los Angeles.
Only in a country with so much red
would we witness a Steve Bannon conjuring for the restoration of a
Medieval practice, the beheading of Anthony Fauci (Director of the
National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and
Christopher Wray (Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations)!
Only in a country with so much red
would we witness a senator requesting that all the votes from
Pennsylvania be thrown out!
A few days before, fellow citizens
carrying long rifles gathered at the polling facility in Maricopa
County, coming in the night to warn election poll workers of how much
better it would be for them, fellow Americans, if the votes favored
Trump!
Those more than 72 million Americans
stood at the polls last week with Trump on their minds. Biden, at the
time of this writing, has 5 million more votes than Trump in the
national election. The highest ever! Not, please, no more white
nationalists establishing policies to separate over 600 Latinx
children, 200 of which are babies and toddlers, from their parents.
Not, no more Blacks parents forced to accept as a given the shooting
of their unarmed children.
The concern for these Latinx and
Black children were not on the minds of those Americans who voted for
Trump.
That’s the red I see today as I
write this piece.
It’s the morning of the
presidential election, November 3, 2020, and a van service for
seniors has picked me up from the northside of Kenosha. It’s a
driver I’ve had, on a few other occasions, a driver seemingly
determined that I hear the rants of a local radio host. And the radio
is loud, so loud that I actually can’t hear through the volume
distortion to know what the rant is about this morning. In the past,
I’ve listened to a caller and a host heap praise on Robert E. Lee
and his military skills! The two seemed to forget the man served on
the losing side!
But, given all the red on a 2020
election map…
I’m looking out the window, but
out of the corner of my eye, I see the driver’s right arm reach
out. The volume now is so loud I think there must be speakers
somewhere behind me. Doesn’t this qualify as a form of torture?
Then I see the remains of something
extraordinary. I strain against the loudness of the radio to think on
what I’m seeing outside the van window.
In the wake of the police shooting
of a 28-year-old Jacob Blake, on August 23, 2020, ordinary citizens
Black and white, along with Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other
community organizations from Milwaukee, protested in the streets of
Kenosha. The protests in downtown and in the Uptown area went on for
days and drew not only outraged allies to the cause of justice and
organizers and activist-minded citizens, but also militia groups.
Some businesses and vehicles were set ablaze. Owners of downtown
businesses began boarding up doors and windows.
Read the dissemination campaign on
right-wing news sites. The message is, the Black Lives Matter
activists are the agents of violence! BLM activists are looters!
There’s a reason to discredit
activists for justice, to disseminate ignorance, to ignore the
presence of armed militia groups. It is to deny white violence and at
the same time, justify white violence.
Since August 23, 2020, I’ve had
only one conversation with a white resident about George Floyd, about
the difficulty we both had in watching Floyd succumb to eight minutes
and forty-six seconds of Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck. Only one
person! No one has spoken to me about Jacob Blake right here in
Kenosha!
Was Floyd actually murdered? Did the
Kenosha Police really shoot Blake? Really?
The gaslighting began as soon as the
last bullet hit Blake’s body! The harassment escalated. During the
days of protests, residents where I lived at the time, tried to
“educate” me about Black people, “your people,” destroying
Kenosha. “Looters!, Looters! Looters!” Looting, consequential
looting, has been an American pastime.
On a grand imperialist scale with
insurmountable damage, lives have been lost from Africa, to the
Philippines, to Chile… For a barrel of oil from Saudi Arabia, how
many innocent children had their lives stolen in Yemen last week,
last month, last year?
Nonetheless, the narrative of Black
and Latinx “looting” goes hand-in-hand with unsubstantiated
claims of voter fraud. The perception of a rampant conspiracy
instigated by the “left” on behalf of people of color serves to
stir in white Americans a fear that their very existence will be
snuffed out by “aliens,” “hulks,” “terrorists.”
So in the red county of Kenosha,
fear and the need to conceal the truth justifies campaigns of
harassment and gaslighting as I experienced from fellow tenants and
management alike - until I moved from that village in Kenosha County!
So much for anti-discrimination disclaimers when keeping the county
“safe” is what matters!
Black lives matter because in
America, they don’t matter, and whites in those red counties and
states throughout America know this in their hearts. We know from
years of reading student papers that the dining room table is a place
where the word, “nigger,” is uttered frequently. The “absent”
subject conjures a landscape of the familiar.
For more than 70 million Americans,
the lives of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people threatens the
stability of the United States itself!
No one in this sea of red is willing
to concede a loss!
In the meantime, in the City of
Kenosha, “a third of Black residents live below the poverty line,”
according to a National
Public Radio (NPR)
report, many earning, when there’s a job, half of the earnings of
white workers. In Kenosha, there’s a lack of jobs, and
opportunities are lacking.”
The report continues: “It’s not
just that Black Kenoshans are worse off than their white neighbors;
it’s that they’re worse off than almost anywhere else in the
country on almost every measure.”
There’s a history of “poor
relations with Kenosha Police, according to Black residents
interviewed. And these residents notice that man in the White House
“inciting hate.”
“In a county that Donald Trump won
by just 255 votes four years ago,” according to the NPR report, “in
a state he unexpectedly and narrowly won, the police shooting of
Jacob Blake and the protests and violence that followed are likely to
influence election results from Kenosha’s city hall to the White
House.”
And it did!
Out the window was something
unexpected in this city. It wasn’t red; it wasn’t blue. Could it
have been Black and Latinx and white?
On every single boarded window and
door was a message to the viewer:
Black Lives Matter and Justice!
Justice for Jake!
All Black Lives Matter!
Here Comes the Sun!
On the boarded up entrance to the
Joe McCarthy Transit Center, spray painted in black, is the
abbreviation, “BLM.”
And on a good many of the boarded up
buildings, the message read, Peace!
Love! Unity! Kenosha Unity!
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, in this most
deadly year of the pandemic for people of color, these monuments of
graffiti testify to the truth of resistance: That those infernal
blocks of red on
a map of the United States
have met their match!
Black Americans, Black woman, Latinx women, Indigenous women are
rising together, standing, alive, resisting! Here’s a glimpse of an
empowering vision for the next coming years. On those monuments of
graffiti is recognition that those blocks of red diminish the
possibility of ever building a country dedicated to democracy and to
freedom for all.
Yes, we’ve seen it; we don’t
like it! And it won’t be acceptable anymore!
Black Lives Matter! Black Lives
Matter!
And then the whitewashing!
This is America, it has to come! One step forward, two steps back.
Whites, who don’t live in the Uptown area, began painting over the
message about justice. Black Lives Matter covered over becomes,
Unity! Love! Kenosha
Strong!
And who or what represents Kenosha!
It’s a divided America in miniature, willfully nodding to a
narrative that erases pleas for justice, for democracy.
Outright hate would seem to win the
day, except on the day Wisconsin’s votes gave the Biden-Harris team
a blue state, I checked Kenosha’s vote tally. In the red
of Kenosha County, where Trump racked up 44,972 (51%) votes to
Biden’s 42,191 (48%), Republican representative Samatha Kerkman,
attributes Trump’s last-minute visit to Kenosha for favorable
outcome - favorable for residents concerned about “public safety”
(Kenosha News).
Trump, the representative suggests, showed Kenoshans that “he
cared,” as they did, about “safety.” “Our area was in crisis
and he came.”
Wow! I recall, or maybe I was
imagining things, this same Trump, the man concerned with the
“safety” of Kenoshans, openly defending Kyle Rittenhouse, a white
supremacist who fatally shot two Kenoshans and seriously injured
another. Law and order rhetoric, however, is reserved for wrapping
around the necks of Black Americans.
The narrative doesn’t speak of
anyone’s concern about the safety of Black citizens. After all, the
protests happened because a member of the community, a Black man, was
shot in the back seven times by Kenosha Police. And when Blacks craft
their own narrative around the pursuit of justice, it’s smeared in
violence of whiteness.
Kenosha County’s largest
demographics is white, by 87%. Of this number, according to Kenosha
News, 75%, aged 25 and
older, are “non-college-educated whites.” In this sea of red,
Biden received only 34% of the vote to Trump’s 60%. Nonetheless,
the City of Kenosha went blue.
Absentee and early voters are sending the Biden-Harris team to the
White House! In Kenosha, Trump received 19,566 votes while 26,158
votes were cast for the Biden-Harris.
The anger and focus on injustice
paid off!
But there is still this sea of red
to consider.
I’m not suggesting that America
further embrace a culture of white supremacy or values of the cold
and callous. As journalist and Democracy
Now! co-host
Juan González points
out, white women cast more votes for Trump in this 2020 presidential
election (54%) than they did in 2016 (52%). More white Americans
voted for Trump, 72 million plus, than did in 2016. Is the message
from this sea of red that millions of Americans identify
with a harden culture dedicated to inflicting cruelty on children of
color, on women, on people of color, on the LGBTQ community, on the
imprisoned, on the unemployed, on the homeless, on the uninsured, on
the hungry?
No we can’t embrace hate. We can’t
embrace people who are quite comfortable with the suffering, indeed,
the death of others. A survival of the fittest mentality isn’t a
principle of Democracy. Stand with and work with Black and Latinx and
Indigenous women. At stake is the fate of Earth, the fate of all
humanity.
Are we ready?
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