I almost wish someone would ask us: how does it feel to be a pit stop? To be a refuelling station where sputtering-out political campaigns pull up to receive a laying on of hands; where a Black baritone reverend holds the president’s shoulder and between benedictions issues forth some version of the declaration that “We know Joe”? And that president passes the torch to a Black candidate who can siphon Black popular culture and sponge down a government busy giving standing ovations to the Butcher of Gaza.
I almost wish someone would ask before the politicians slip off their oxfords: how does it feel to know that they are only here for the night? To know (what is by now an open secret) that although they promise that we are in this together they have only stopped by to use us. To make us promises and then dart off to fundraising dinners before we can whisper, “Hush now, don’t explain.”
Is it not time, now, to refuse to be ping-ponged between those who stand with genocidaires and those who dream of a day of retribution for our surviving them? Can we not saddle up and build a world away from those who dance to our music in the clubs but turn us away at the entrance? Who shoot us when we call for help and circulate minstrel memes of our killed as if they were digital lynching postcards?
Why resign ourselves to wait for the enlightenment of evil? To be mules beaten from four years to four years, promised this time really “change is gonna come” as the Earth shrivels, Nazis are inspired, and presidential candidates openly challenge one another to golf.
This time will not be different. It is either victory for the lynch mob who marched on the Capitol building with nooses and Confederate battle flags, or those who ask us to look past the slurs they spit at us to “what we have in common”. It is a battle between those who celebrate the reimposition of castration as punishment in a carceral system that disproportionately arrests and sentences Black people and those who are proud to “prosecute the case”. It will be “triumph of the will” or “Be quiet about the genocide. I’m speaking.”
The US has proven itself to be a state where a leftist Black candidate who is not accountable, first and foremost, to white liberals is unelectable. The daring few who speak up against ethnic cleansing abroad are cane-hooked from the stage by Super PACs.
As for the rest, if they pay lip service to our liberation, it is openly confessed by their surrogates that this is a trick to gain our support and that they will eventually “pivot” to the centre. That is, after teasing freedom they will move closer to the people who ridicule “wokeness” – ie Black conscious scepticism about the good intentions of the settler-colony – and who prefer the more sober soap box proselytising about the deep state and secret, globalist, Jewish conspiracies in their fake Viking helmets.
US electoral politics remain hostile to Black liberation. While racists bask in the likely return of a president who promises to be their “retribution”, no Black candidate can win if they utter a word about reparations for slavery, or agree that Black Lives Matter, or make statements seen as sympathetic to the Defund the Police movement. Criticising the inflated budgets of institutions that hire and protect the men and women who shoot us in our nightgowns and leave us to die on our kitchen floors when we call them for help is toxic in a US political campaign.
Yet we are asked to be excited. Thrilled about representation and Black “ascendancy” into the degeneracy of colonial office. Happy for Eric Adams despite his fight to keep solitary confinement in prisons. For Barack Obama despite his imperialist wars. Kamala Harris despite her perp-walking parents of “truant” children. Cornel West despite his love will find a way. Tim Scott.
Should such a system that punishes any agenda for Black freedom be rewarded with Black energy? Should we still accept as wise the maxim that “progress is slow” when Nazism makes gains overnight? Should we accept to stand by the door, cap in hand, as they speed by in their motorcades? To be lectured, again, about pragmatism? To be told that we must place our hope in a society where one cannot win an election without appealing to racists?
Vote if you must, why not? But this time, when we close the voting booth’s curtain, perhaps we should pivot as well. And turn our backs on a system that still sees our liberation as a liability. Reorient our political identity towards the rising Black anticolonial internationalism that does not, after promising to fight racism, shift to winning over racists. That seeks not to “make our voices against lynching heard” but to make those who would lynch hesitate.
We must push past the merry-go-round of leaders that say every four years “This is our time” then “We must wait more”. We must pour that snake oil out onto the road. No more waiting on the messiah Democrat politician. None seeks to be our “retribution”. Patience has only led us to the gate of lynch mob rule.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.