My tendency was upward... and I was still a slave. These thoughts aroused me-- I must do something. I therefore resolved that 1835 should not pass without witnessing an attempt, on my part, to secure my liberty.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
The day after the November 5, 2024 vote, I was running errands with my caregiver. A thirty-something black woman with two children. One thing led to another, and I heard the word, immigrants . I listened but offered no comment. Given what she was telling me, I felt I needed to have the facts. But I listened and, when I was alone in my home, I did a little research.
Poynter's Institute mentions emergency medical assistance. That seems compassionate. Another report, from the liberal NPR, entitled, "More States Extend Health Coverage to Immigrants Even as Issue Inflames GOP", explains that a "growing number of states" want to open "taxpayer-funded health insurance programs to immigrants, including those living in the U. S. without authorization". Even Republican-controlled Utah is up for "covering children regardless" of their immigration status.
I can understand the drain on the healthcare industry in the US. As it stands, that is. If the US had single payer, for Americans, the issue of migrants and the cost to an inadequate healthcare system wouldn't be a one-sided issue.
I can understand why my caregiver, like many black American mothers, is struggling to care for her American-born children. I can understand why she is angered by immigrants receiving medical care and more, if entitled by law. I hear what she was trying to convey, even while I would like for the two of us, for starters, to ask why migrant workers come to the border, with their children, sacrificing everything? Risking everything, including the loss of their children to detention centers in the US.
On the other hand, I would have liked to discuss the plight of her children and those of the Haitians and Salvadorian children, and of the Palestinian children. to me now as I write this article. I would have liked to discuss ways of connecting these geographic hot spots, rejecting them, for a way to see the humanity of all these children-- hers Haitian children or Gazan children. I would have liked to say that many have sought ways to think about our future, the humanity of these children. Those, that is, who didn't see the issue of American or Haitian or Gazan children the way politicians and capitalists do. What if it wasn't a matter of them , those children, and us, our children?
What US policies and downright racist exclusionary tactics, such as embargoes and support for dictatorships sends people fleeing their native lands to risk it all at the US border? The existence of multi-billion dollars industries, such as Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and others assures both those running for the US border and mothers like my caregiver that only profits from war matter. Unless there's money to be made by pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, the working class on both sides of the border won't see change anytime soon.
Note how the policies of American exceptionalism and capitalism pit the black and Latino/a people against one another!
Politicians, on both sides of the aisle in Washington, D.C., sit at tables where the place settings and food is supplied by capitalist donors. So they listen to capitalist donors rather than listen to working class, at least to those not hopelessly lost to the lost cause ?
Why can't politicians listen to the suffering and struggling?
Because most are busy speaking !
Vice President Kamala Harris, similar to the likes of Donald Trump or Israeli PM Netanyahu, aren't really about a democratic collation that would, by definition, contain diverse speakers. And diverse speakers would include pro-Palestinian protesters, repeatedly dismissed at Harris rallies. "I'm speaking now", she stated one too many times! For the benefit of her donors, huh?
Americans have heard politicians like Harris, speaking down to them, about the issues that won't rattle the donor class. Harris speaks of Liz Chaney, a war hawk, someone who voted with Trump 90% of the time, with butter on her tongue, as my deceased grandmother would say. They've heard Harris applaud the bravery of Liz and father, former Bush II VP, Darth Vader.
Harris, however, has yet to speak of the bravery, true bravery, of pro-Palestinian protesters.
Apparently, Harris has never heard Frederick Douglass speak on freedom!
Like so many American seniors, I worry that politicians, eager to find more capitalist contributions to keep them in office, will not find enough funds to booster social security and to keep us, at least, one step from being homeless seniors!
All I heard from President Joe Biden and then Harris is this campaign to lift the middle class. To do what? Spend more? Chase the almighty dollar? The middle class, the middle class, the middle class...
My caregiver barely receives a living wage. Until last week, she also had to work at Amazon. Standing for hours, destroying her knees along with her spirit? Did Harris state that she would do something to help this woman?
Young people with no hope of becoming middle class ! Young people would like to go to college but can't afford to do so. Most young people in this rich nation who do, owe loans.
Hounded by loan agencies and the US government while dealing with a preexisting heart condition I was born with and couldn't tell anyone, including administration or colleagues at the many teaching positions I held throughout the US and in Ethiopia, I also had to confront white supremacist chairs of English as the only black or one of two among the department faculty. Health insurance to pay for a cardiologist to treat my WPW and prescribe the beta blockers? No. I paid when possible. Otherwise, I restricted my intake of my beta blockers. During my years of part-time teaching for the City Colleges of Chicago, I was reminded by chairs and colleagues about the benefits of moving from the working class to the middle class!
Joy will be in abundance on that day! Yeah.
Imagine young college students struggling to pay tuition and eat and drive to work, listen about the AKA and the Divine 9. How many think they were struggling to push a rock up hill? How many think of themselves fools for even trying to attend college. Among the elite! The "successful"! The well-dressed!
I remember many a colleague, white and black, spitting the word "decision" in my face. That was the decision you made in reference to my study of slavery (said with a snarl) and white violence. Faulkner. Fascism. Focus on the working class! As the late bell hooks once stated, rarely do "educators acknowledge that equating education with whiteness is a way of thinking that most black folks acquired in predominantly white school systems." But has Harris ever read bell hooks? More important, has my caregiver?
In January 1986, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She died that year in September. My father died a few years later from cancer. In 1986, I bleed while standing in front of classrooms of students. I bleed on city buses and commuter trains. I bleed in lines at grocery stores and in lines at banks. I bleed as a volunteers at public housing sites, teaching literacy.
I wore two sanitary pads. Three. With no health insurance, I had nowhere to turn, and I couldn't stop. I continued to study and teach at various City Colleges. In the meantime, I purchased the sanitary pads on those various campuses. In the restrooms, that is, where the sanitary dispensers, offered pads for 25 cents each. If I were lucky, only 10 cents.
Finally, the year after my mother died, I pursued my MA at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), one class at a time in the evening, while teaching part-time for the City Colleges. It took a total of five years for the two-year degree. I completed in August, 1988 but not before surgery in January of that year, less than two years since the death of my mother. UIC offered it's MA students insurance! I went to the hospital. The excessive bleeding was evident of tumors on the womb.
A five-hour surgery left me free for tumors but also free of a teaching position. I had nothing again, except a long pain and a long scar, and had to start all over again. During my school years, I never thought about joining sororities during the MA or finally while pursuing my doctorate and receiving a stipend of $733 in Chicago where rent was $475 a month.
Years later, I listened as the white chairs and deans at the University of Wisconsin Parkside, for starters, called me "trouble" and told white students I was the "black chick" we hired!
I know people with children and parents to care for while they pursue their education. And then they struggle to locate a full-time position with insurance. Many never think about becoming a member of a sorority. They do note that they are, however, members of the human race, and would never consider themselves detached from the struggle and suffering of others.
Where was the unifying message to the working class, to the underdogs, to the blacks, Latino/a, to the migrant, and to the Arab and Muslim populations. To the indigenous here in the US? Just shut up and listen! It's not your turn! When will it be our turn and politicians listen to us?
As a student of this nation's history, I know that the helix of its DNA consists of the conquest of indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans. Consequently, some Americans, more than half the country, at least, suffer from the anti-blackness disease and are unable, for the life of them, to turn away from their fear of black people gaining advantages over them.
Their fear of black people is so palpable that they see , actually see , like the Nazis saw devil horns on Jewish heads, these Americans see Haitians, the first black people to win their liberation from enslavers, eating dogs and cats. Pets of their neighbors! Innocent white neighbors, for sure.
No matter how many times I hear about the "economy," it's the economy driving white men in particular to the polls to vote for Trump, I think of Reconstruction. And before that white men dying my the thousands and left to die on the battlefields throughout the South. Many feared losing an economy built on the enslavement of black people. And when it was lost, defeated by the "win" of the North, it was as if the first to cry out never again was the Confederates. Never again ! We will fight to the bitter end! Never again will we lose.
And have they lost? Have the Confederates or the fascist-leaning American ever gone away in defeat? Have they ever conceded?
Democrats silencing protesters-- what is that? Shut up and let's not speak openly about our complicity with genocide! Shut up about Palestinian babies starving that's to Israelis' cruelty. Thanks to this government steadily sending money and weapons, effectively telling Netanyahu it's okay. It's okay. And the democrats are that much different from Trump and Netanyahu? And Harris? How different, really?
The black face of empire rises again!
Only 68% of Americans came out to vote compared to over 80% who came out to vote for President Joe Biden. Why? Maybe there's a rejection of what the democrats deem as a priority?
Do democrats listen to the people they claim to represent? Have the democrats ever listened? It's not being heard by any politician because, in the end, Trump, his MAGA crowd will see, is for Trump.
Americans, if we want change, real change, should want to pursue the freedom Douglass pursued.
We can work toward a time when we listen to ourselves and run for office for ourselves because we have read the words of the late Salvadoran poet Rogue Dalton speaking about the "dead", making themselves visible everywhere while becoming more and more "insolent". Where would there be space for the living?
Young Americans are already awake! I imagine them organizing while listening to Bob Marley's "Stir it Up". To Lucky Dube's "Respect".
Don't expect politicians chasing the lost cause , or fascism, or hate to read Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada's dream of a republic of poetry, in which "a train full of poets/rolls south in the rain/as plum trees rock/and horses kick the air,/and village bands/parade down the aisle/with trumpets, with bowler hats,/followed by the president/of the republic,/shaking every hand."
Those of us pursuing democracy and freedom and equality will read to each other the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
"In Damascus:
The traveler sings to herself
I return from Syria
neither alive
nor dead
but as clouds
that ease the butterfly's burden."
What do democrats say about the environment? Climate change? Our relationship to the butterfly's burden? To Rivers?
While we note how the democrats ignored those of us who have "known" rivers, "ancient as the world and older than the/flow of human blood", we must also remember we can't be abused by kinfolk, more akin to the capitalist class.
Having never consulted with the legacy of poet Audre Lorde, the democrats fail to link their work with work that "is part of a continuum of women's work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth", she writes, "nor will it end with my death".
If Langston Hughes were here he would re-work his poem on the US, and ask "Columbia" what has it learned since the fascist took over Madison Square Garden in 1939? What has it learned since the CIA-backed Pinochet in Chile? Remember Victor Jara: "nothing matters to them/Blood equals medals/slaughter is an act of heroism". How about Vietnam?
Hughes would continue where he left off, teaching the young and the pro-Palestinian protesters to connect their struggles with a history of struggles. Resistance!
If the democrats listened to Joy James speak of a revolution of black feminism, a feminism that doesn't emphasize the "economy and political power rather than social service programs for the disenfranchised", they would understand that "challenges basic social tenets expressed in 'law and order' campaigns" is necessary for change. A feminism that is directed toward freedom "does not restrict itself to political dissent channeled through lobbying and electoral politics". Or restrict itself to the acceptance of "the corporate state as a viable vehicle to redress disenfranchisement".
The Struggle is constant! So, yes, there is work to be done!
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