For the greater good
3rd August 2020 · 0 Comments
Here we go again!
As we watch Congressman John R. Lewis, who marched and bled for the right to vote, be honored and laid to rest, we, who are darker than blue, are facing, once again, insurmountable odds in our attempt to vote for the next president of the United States, judges, school board members and other elected officials.
Reports are that Russia is continuing its election interference campaign, Trump and Republican elected officials are fighting against emergency mail-in ballots, while the deadly Coronavirus pandemic shows no signs of slowing down – which means those of us in states with absentee ballot restrictions will have to risk our lives to go to polls to vote – and Trump’s assault on the U.S. Postal Service (no COVID relief funding) is a sure way to slow down the delivery of absentee ballots to voters and Secretary of State offices.
None of Trump’s efforts to suppress the Black and brown vote is surprising, not even his lack of a national testing program, which has led to the unnecessary deaths of 150,000 Americans (most of whom are voting age; many of whom are Black and brown essential workers).
Nothing Trump does should surprise any person of color. What is gob-smacking, though, are comments by high-profiled Black progressives, who have supported U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during each of his presidential runs and who outright attacked Hillary Clinton and now they are attacking the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in The Atlantic magazine.
“We have to be true to ourselves and acknowledge that Biden is a mediocre, milquetoast, neoliberal centrist that we’ve been fighting against in the Democratic establishment,” Cornel West, the Harvard University professor and a Bernie Sanders supporter, told staff writer Peter Nicholas.
Nina Turner, a Sanders campaign co-chair and former Ohio state senator, who runs a political organization and teaches college, told Nicholas, “Choosing between Trump and Biden is like having a bowl of s**t in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it.”
Of course, they are entitled to their opinions, but haven’t we learned what happens when people like Turner and West levy such verbal attacks?
In 2016, some Sanders supporters vowed to vote for a third-party candidate and, according to news reports, at least 12 percent of Sanders’ supporters voted for Donald Trump. Others said they would write in Mr. Sanders’ name.
But here we are again. What we have here are Black intellectuals, who are obviously paid well for giving speeches, doing campaign work, and for political commentary, bashing the only person that can restore our democracy and move us forward into the 21st Century. West, himself, is remembered for bashing then-candidate Barack Obama.
As for Turner, it must be remembered that Jill Stein, the former Green Party’s presidential hopeful in that election, offered Turner the VP slot on the Green Party ticket. Later, news reports showed Stein at a Russian TV event, sitting at the table with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn, who became Trump’s National Security Advisor and was convicted of lying to Congress about his connections to Russia.
Turner and West are doing their skin folk a great disservice. No matter who wins, their bank accounts won’t suffer. But if the status quo remains the same, we will have four more years of the destruction of the progress Black people struggled to make over the past 400 years.
As for Ms. Nina’s nasty comments, we want her to know:
Black people have been eating s**t for decades and that’s the genius of us. We know that all s**t is not the same. Knowing the difference means surviving to fight another day to get to your goal. Starving yourself, on the other hand, is fatal.
This article originally published in the August 3, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
