Lace on Race
Lace on the Race

When white people have, as they have since the whole Dem race shook out, agonized over what they should do, or more often, wanted to know about black voter behavior, what I say first and foremost is: the first thing to do is ask us.

This is not just about how politics play out, although politics informs policy and public opinion, attitudes, biases, and behavior.

We could take a look at each of those as discrete units, but for the sake of brevity, let’s lump them together for this discussion.

In a lot of workplaces, leaders are leaders until they actually have to make decisions. Then you see endless meetings, and edicts written by committee, and no one wanting to actually stand up, risk, and do what has to be done, until they absolutely have to.

You see this in this current coronavirus crisis. People who cared more for their own position afraid or unwilling to use their power. Holed up in their own homes, directing whole swaths of people to sacrifice on their behalf, whether they were *eventually* allowed to shelter in place, or if they were directed to stay at the job site.

“Leadership” isn’t really. Leadership is getting out of the meeting or, more accurately, the Zoom chat, and telling people to go home at the first sign of trouble that they knew of. Leadership is risking by walking as an example, and never asking anything more of your subordinates than you are willing to do yourself. My supervisor couldn’t even look me in the eye as she went home and left me for three weeks to drive each day in fear and anger to my job, putting me in what could easily have been grave danger. Leadership is, at core, a narrow, but real, type of friendship, one that has the Other’s best interests at heart, and then leverages the power and capital inherent in the positions they have. They make so much more; have the ear of those with even more influence and power than they have.

Sometimes I think the extra money they make is something like hush money; blood money that keeps them quiet and complicit.

I’m a Navy brat. My father served on flight decks and ships, much like the one Brett Crozier commanded before he got fired. Captain Crozier stuck his neck out; took real risks that did not ultimately result in best case for him, but did result in best case for his crew. He tried to work with chain of command, until it was plain it was fruitless, Then he pivoted out of structure and hierarchy to save his fellow sailors.

That’s how it’s done, y’all.

If America is a ship, hidebound by tradition and rules and unspoken mores and systems and institutions, and it is, you can see where I’m going with this.

It’s an easy pivot to race.

White people asking, actually insisting, that Black and brown people do what they themselves are not willing to do.

White privilege acting as hush money.

Having said that, let’s keep walking along this thorny path.

So then, a direct shot across the bow: White people dictating how Black people should vote, when history shows there is but the slimmest glimmer of daylight between a lot of Dem and GOP positions, both de jure and de facto, is the height of supremacy.

White people need us to push the limits of policy and social change, because they sure as heck won’t. White people like to think they align with Crozier, but actually, nope.

What they align with are the same institutions they expect Black and brown people to push against or circumvent. Who they really are is Thomas Modly, the Navy Secretary, who has never swabbed a deck or brought in a plane or trained in Sonar. Who has never slept cheek by jowl with 5000 seamen and women. Who they are are people who have never done the work with intention telling those people who do know what 4am muster looks like what to do and how to live. Modly, who called the Captain ‘stupid’, because he embodied honor and integrity and a keen sense for the lives of his crew, because he stood out front, instead of rattling a saber from a safe distance behind, because he refused to allow those rules and guidelines and tradition and institutions to deter him from the right.

White people have done so little of this, even in the last four hellish years. It took the mainstream media fully three years of this before they could even find the fortitude to use words, however diluted to begin to tell the truth about this president–only after individuals of color, particularly Black people, particularly Black women, sounded the alarm on deck thousands of times; by that time the ship was already taking on water. The coronavirus was a blow, but hardly the first one, or the only deadly one to compromise this ship in the last three years.

Starting the clock at 1954 at the earliest, we should be way further ahead than we are now, on every axis: housing; education; employment. We are not, and it is not because of our deficits. Every gain we have made as Black people has benefited white people more. That includes white women. Affirmative action was an Easter Basket for white women; housing policy (including credit policies that allow us to have credit in our own names) benefited white people more. It was a Democratic president (Clinton) who, while holding fried chicken in one hand, signed legislation that decimated Black and brown communities. It was the DNC that kept telling us to wait until their own planks in their platform to come to fruition. That needs to be unpacked.

Yes, arguably, having a Dem in office will help America. It will help white america more. Asking us to sacrifice talent like Harris, Booker, Adams, and more to be cannon fodder for a man who’s more like Clinton than Obama is galling.

In the last four years what concerted effort have white people made to address not just the optics of white supremacy and racism, but, with relentless focus, to actually dismantle? Why am I having the same conversations, and facing the same behaviors and whitesplaining than I was four years ago? Why *didn’t* Harris or Booker or Castro get more traction with white people? Why haven’t key indicators changed?

Why aren’t there more Croziers? Why do white people hide behind Modly?

This is not about what anyone ultimately does at the ballot box. But expecting Black people to carry the Democratic party for white people’s reasons is wrong. White people disregarding religion, when most Black and brown people embrace it; not looking, really looking at the spectrum of opinion on abortion and LGBT rights; white people still looking at us with a mixture of charity and contempt (and that’s the progressive ones) all combine to make for a dynamic that is toxic.

Black people have literally died to turn a lever or fill in a bubble on election day. White people lecturing us on how we should do, or blaming us when things don’t go their way is, again, galling.

It demands a pivot. Black people and white people vote for different reasons. Even when they pull the lever for the same person.

And it demands a discussion. Let’s have one.