Vice President Harris ran a beautiful campaign. She worked like a trojan,
traveling from city to city, sometimes as many
as three or four in a day. She did interviews,
town halls, television shows and one on one
interviews with both national and local media.
In a scant one hundred days, she built a
dynamic and credible campaign, and many of us
anticipated a victory, if not on election
night, then a few days later.
Instead, we
experienced the excruciating pain of watching
delicate glass shatter at our feet. I hung out
with the Roland Martin crew from the Black
Star Network from about 9:30 until nearly 3
am, hoping and praying for Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Arizona, or some darn place to break
our way. But the results came back like body
blows. We were losing. Then hope was gone. The
numbers did not break our way. The Orange Man,
with his Elon Musk-funded ground game pulled
out not a win, but a rout. He now has the
White House, the Senate and maybe the House of
Representatives, not to mention the Supreme
Court and many other lower courts. Unless
Democrats can hold the house, he can do pretty
much anything he wants to do. He and his
cronies have already started picking staff,
but we should be clear that they have been
picking staff since they issued Project 2025 a
couple of years ago.
So, what are we
supposed to do, especially if Republicans have
a clean sweep? They don’t have the House of
Representatives yet, and we pray they don’t.
What if they do? What do we do?
Vice President
Harris and President Biden offered great
messages about accepting the vote, embracing
the vision, and moving ahead. They exhibited
the grace that the President-elect was
incapable of in 2020, when he led a rabid
insurrection to protest the outcome of the
vote. What if Vice President Harris had
exhibited the same vitriol? Blessedly, she is
more passionate about our country than he who
debased our entire nation (calling people
stupid and low-IQ and worse) in his campaign.
No matter. Dr. Maya Angelou said that “when people show
you who they are believe them”. Believe that
the 47th President will have no respect for
the law or for the Constitution. Believe that
he will attempt mass deportation and even mass
firings of federal workers. Believe that he
will eviscerate our regulatory agencies,
especially the ones who protect our workers -
the Occupational Health and Safety
Administration (OSHA), the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB), the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau (CFPB), and more. If Dems
can’t hold the House, there will be few tools
to stop the carnage, but there are laws and
there are tools.
The justice
community can come together to plan, to
monitor the regulatory agencies and stop any
chicanery. We can monitor the integrity of the
Department of Education, and legally fight to
ensure that Title I programs are maintained.
We can challenge cuts in block grants. We
cannot roll over and allow the forces of Trump
and Project 2025 to vanquish us.
It won’t be easy,
and it will be challenging to overcome the
smugness that comes from a community that is
enjoying their unexpected victory. But there
will be allies at the edges. Will conservative
environmentalists be willing to sacrifice the
future health of our planet to mollify Trump?
Will conservative labor activists be willing
to weaken the NLRB? Is there any wiggle room
in Project 2025 or is Mr. Trump willing to
come in and start slashing and burning on day
one?
What about deportations? Can the soon-to-be 47th President
really organize mass deportations and border
controls on day one? And we’ve seen from voter
roll purges, these folks don’t always get the
right people. There must be lawyers lined up,
especially to contest illegal deportations.
I’m willing to give
Republicans credit for their ground game,
their hard-won gain, and the election they
purchased. I’m also putting them on notice. We
will fight back. Those anti-education
Republicans don’t want people to know Black
history because they don’t want our young
people to know that we’ve surmounted racism
before. In the wake of the Red Summer of 1919,
when rabid whites attacked more than 30 Black
communities in Washington, DC, Chicago, St.
Louis, and other places, the poet Claude McKay
wrote of this resistance, a fitting anthem for
our time:
If we must die, let
it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned
in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark
the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock
at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O
let us nobly die,
So that our
precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even
the monsters we defy
Shall be
constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must
meet the common foe!
Though far
outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their
thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before
us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face
the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the
wall, dying, but fighting back!
Fighting back –
that’s what’s next.
