[Lace Watkins]

Article: Meet the Black Women Who Turned Georgia Blue

Discussion

[Christina Sonas]

This makes me think of how upset people get when the Time Magazine Person of the Year is a group of people, or when anything they think should be a single person gets credited to a group. White supremacy culture is about supremacy at the individual level as well as at the demographic scale. We need a single person to laud or to scapegoat. White people need self-help books about networking, whether it’s for business or for personal, and about the skills that help us connect with other people (those Lace is training us in here). I definitely need to take these skills to the next level: community.

[Emily Holzknecht]

I am connecting this to Terry Real from the starters when he says “How can you join and be a member of something if you’re beating them?” and Lace’s pivot to white women’s relationship with Black women. That same go-it-alone quality of whiteness even when trying to work together. With Stacey Abrams, as you say, the individualism is showing up again. And I also see it as related to setting RGB up as a hero and then tearing her down when she shows herself to be human. Stacey Abrams is getting set up as a hero in an inhuman way. We want to be saved and do none of the work of saving ourselves, so we need her to be an inhuman hero who can solve all our problems.

[Elizabeth (she/her) Wheeler]

I hadn’t thought of it like that. No-one exists in a vacuum. Value should also be placed on community, people giving and receiving help.

[Rebecca McClinton]

These women are the definition of relentless reliability. I am humbled and convicted by their example. I’m also thinking how white liberals have been focusing on Abrams, one person instead of acknowledging all the efforts of all individuals. I have done that too. It’s an example of where white liberals can really be especially problematic promoting the seemingly more subtle but equally harmful aggressions.

[Rhonda Freeman]

I appreciate what you are sharing, Rebecca. One of the gifts of practicing anti-racism is centering black and brown leaders. I can follow just fine. I can see how these organizations support each other and look at how their strategies can be used in my white spaces to support anti-racism.

[Clare Steward]

From the article:

Abrams told the Washington Post back in May. “And the thing is, if I had fought back and said, ‘I am going to contest this election and make myself governor,’ then everyone who loved me and stood with me would have thought, ‘Well, this is about her fight.’ My responsibility was instead to focus on the right to vote and not my right to be governor. I had no right to be governor, but I have an obligation to do the work that I said I would do if I were governor.”

This stood out to me as it demonstrates the obligation we should all have towards the betterment of our community and de- emphasizes individual progress. As others have commented, individualism is a pattern of white supremacy and the focus is on climbing as high on the ladder as possible with no regard to who we’re climbing over. The importance of rejecting individualism and of working in community and in relationship with each other as well as working with relentless reliability is a central focus in this article and of course central to what Lace has been teaching us.

There are a lot of really good resources and links in the article as well. I’ve spent a couple of hours this morning looking at the website for The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and launched into an exploration of the local political landscape in Colorado based on links provided to contact elected officials and as inspired by the article and Lace’s recent video on the GA election. It’s clear to me im only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the work I need to do to engage effectively politically.

[Emily Holzknecht]

Stacey Abram’s efforts to de-emphasize the individual and what you are writing about that is so different from how progressives on my feed are reacting to her and her work. I too have missed the point in the past, admiring her rejection of individualism and white supremacy culture ideas of success by focusing on the individual and using tunnel vision to rewrite the story into something closer to white supremacy culture ideas of success. But then a full rejection of that narrative could easily be buying into the white supremacy culture belief in the binary. “Stop trying to recognize Stacey Abrams for her work. It took a ton of people to get that done.” But it’s not about a binary. We can recognize Stacey Abrams without making her out to be superhuman and also recognize other Black women leaders for their work. And we can recognize too the many people that worked on this following the lead of Black women and giving them the resources they needed to get it done. And recognize our own responsibility to put in the hours and the resources to be one of the many in our own areas too.

[Emily Holzknecht]

This article is a rejection of the white supremacy culture lone superhero. This work takes all of us and when possible is best done with Black women leading the way with the resources they need to get the work done. Our bodies, our minds, our time and our money are part of those resources. I heard Stacey Abrams talk elsewhere about her rejection of the idea that one of either public service, non profit or corporation is the best and we must reject all the others. She talked about how each one has its strengths and how she uses all of them for different specific jobs. That really helped me to see how limiting the “one right way” white supremacy culture thinking can be even at the level of types of organizations. We have so many possible tools to use in our toolbox in service to the North Star. It is madness to throw away all but one out of principle…and then throw that one away too when it turns out that it is problematic too, instead of addressing the problematic aspects of it and keeping the tool. Relentless reliability is doing the job anyway even when and if you don’t get the recognition you thought you would. I can be relentlessly reliable here without recognition.

[Author]

Replies