Or maybe Black workers have accumulated for themselves, through close
study of our national customs, traditions, habits, and sensibilities,
the kind of time tested, hard-earned practical wisdom, nuanced tactics,
and talent for improvisational strategizing that other working-class
Americans would have done well to have followed.
As we go about the important business of performing our quadrennial, post-election post-mortems, understanding why these second-sighted
Americans voted against reelecting Mr. Trump, while struggling with
their own economic anxieties, may disclose important and unexpected
findings. It will also guarantee that we give ourselves the best shot at
examining all the causes that contributed to Trump’s reelection.
Which is to say that if, as a nation, we understood the pain and the power of what it means to have been shaped by the peculiar and strange institutions that inform the more beautiful and more terrible,
and singular, experience of working class Black American, I’d think
we’d all be just a little bit antsy about wanting to know why working
class Black Americans are so dramatically out of syncopation with other
working class Americans when it comes to the reelection of Donald
Trump.
Unsurprisingly, the question of why working class
Black Americans didn’t vote for Trump, is precisely the kind of
complicating—or is it clarifying?—question our twenty-four-hour cable
news media information complexes have not been airing out in one segment
after another, not even with their casts of fast-talking weathervanes,
news performers, and opinion spinners, also known as pundits. Instead,
our national punditry has leaned into lobbing the same critiques they
have been lobbing since the Age of Reagan was ushered in forty-three
years ago: the Democratic Party had better get about the business of
catering to the economic anxieties and working-class resentments of
White Americans if they want to be returned to political power. Never
anywhere in this truncated conversation does our punditry ask if
working-class Black folk have resentments. Or why even why some
working-class White Americans, a third, didn’t for Donald Trump either. I
mean shouldn’t we want to know why all the working-class Americans who
didn’t vote for Trump found a way not to give into their anxieties? And
while we’re at it, what accounts for why all the economically wealthy
Americans who are not experiencing the economic anxiety of precarious
living at all.
But to ask complicating questions would be to
render visible the confluence of difficulties facing our nation, and
would require our pundit class to toss aside the ratings tested plots
and simple stories they love to tell us in favor of telling thicker,
difficult, more honest story about who we have been as Americans, and
are. It would also render visible the uneven and unfair, often times
discriminatory, circumstances working-class Black Americans have always
had to navigate.
And isn’t it curious that in a country so
studiously committed to avoiding, at all costs, talking about wealth
disparity for fear of igniting a class war, that when we are permitted
to talk about class it is to remind ourselves that when fail to cater to
working-class White American resentment we do so at our own political
peril? Only White working-class resentments is given a fair hearing by
our punditry even if it places our constitutional arrangements in
jeopardy. My hunch is that all working class Americans have resentments.
I’d think, in a democracy as plural as ours is becoming, we’d want to
give those a hearing as well.
At the same time, and on the hand,
I, for one, don’t find it the least bit curious that resentment is not a
privilege extended to working-class Black Americans, even if, they,
more than most Americans have past and present reasons aplenty for
feeling resentful.
And I honestly don’t believe that
working-class Black folk—the very same Black folk who raised and
nurtured and loved me into existence—would trade-in resentment even if
it were a commodity that they could purchase, because it runs so counter
to how they got over
in America. It runs counter to what they’ve learned about and how
they’ve responded to generations of hard, unrelenting experience. Which
is that resentment, regardless of its color, is not only a privilege, it
is an indulgence and a corruption that warps the soul and the mind and
leads inevitably to blaming some other, any other, for having to share
something you believed you, and only you, were all along owed. There is
no possible way Black folk could come through all that we’ve come
through with our humanity fully intact if we had given into resentment.
Something
else that our close study of our national customs, traditions, habits,
and sensibilities of this nation has taught us is that bad things can
always get worse. More, we also know, that when the fire of populist
resentment—are we at the point in the story when we discuss, honestly,
the rise in hate crimes during Trump’s first term?—is
supplied oxygen by the toxic winds of xenophobia, it is always the most
vulnerable Americans who suffer. Of course the practical wisdom of
working class Black folk (known in some quarters as phronesis) has never
been taken seriously, instead it has been much more politically
expedient to characterize them, falsely and cynically, as welfare queens, one of many, in a seemingly endless flood insulting characterizations.
(My God what we have and continue to endure in our own country—my soul looks back and wonders, indeed.)
I
was born at Howard University Hospital when it was still named
Freedmen’s Hospital in 1969. So, like every other native Washingtonian, I
claim as my birthright, Mambo Sauce, Go-Go music, and the verbal
practice of dropping my “g’s.” Suffice it to say that I was not at all
surprised when the opening lyrics of Chuck Brown’s (The Godfather of
Go-Go) 1979 hit Bustin Loose was one of the first things to come to my mind when last week’s election results were returned: Keep what you got until you get what you need y'all. You got to give a lot just to get what you need sometimes y'all—the
song, itself, displays that strange irony, present in all good Blues:
the feeling of wanting to bust loose and go all out balanced against the
reality of keeping what you already got—I digress.
These
two lines capture, make vivid, for me, why working-class Black folk
voted for Kamala Harris instead of Donald Trump despite the economic
precarity they face in greater measure than most Americans. (There is no
doubt that pride in her played a part in casting a vote for her, like
it was for Obama, and if you believe working-class Black folk would have
voted for Tim Scott running on Trump’s platform because he’s Black,
there’s a large structure in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.) But rather
than compromise their sense of what is decent in leaders and good for
the most vulnerable Americans, and not just their own, working class
Black voters kept faith (an unrequited faith to be sure) with our
founding principles, while so many other working Americans cast those
same principles aside, unable to resist the siren call of Trumpian innovations
and the promises For working-class Black Americans, who do not enjoy
the privilege of indulging our resentments, we know that sometimes the
smart political play is to protect what you have while always vigilantly
working to secure all that you need.
We also know that
voting your conscience includes thinking about how your vote impacts
others, especially the most vulnerable, and not just your own most
vulnerable.
It is, I fear, a lesson many more Americans will learn
over the next four years. One that I’m happy and sad to report that we
have already learned. This is why even through these next four years we
will get over and come through, whole and human and fully intact, just
as we have gotten over and come through before.
And even with all
that I will be fervently praying that things don’t go from bad to worse.
For the sake of the most vulnerable, ourselves included of course, and
for the preservation of our Union, I sincerely pray that, in this
instance, we, Black folk, are wrong.
