Published at the Black Commentator, November 12, 2020
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 struggles 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 came 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 standing at the polls last week with Trump on their minds. Biden, at the time of this piece, 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 this local radio host. And the radio is loud, so loud that I actually can't hear 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"
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