Not Another 2024 Election Post-Mortem

(postcard said to depict Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion)

I don't know who said it first, but there is a saying I heard many times growing up in the Black community: "Don't get mixed up in white folks' business."

More than a saying. It was definitely a warning.

I thought many times of the saying as sort of a backdrop to my visceral reaction to those pre-election cries that "fascism" was coming, how Trump's election would be this nation's last, and all the terrible things a Trump victory would bring. The deeper and more hysterical much of the left went into this narrative, the more disconnected my visceral reaction, and the more those old words resonated. At this point, I must clarify that the "left" in the US presently is the Democratic Party - therein lies the problem that all of their post-mortems will not address.

The other movements have been hollowed out and become wholly or indirectly and philosophically supported by the Democratic Party.

"Don't get mixed up in white folks' business" says at least two things: that white folks are a thing unto themselves and a warning to steer clear of it.

My own indifference to the hysterics is rooted in recent history. What did these white people who were uttering these dire, serious, and credible warnings think was our experience in the Black community, de jure, up until 1965?

My own proximity to this nation's most enduring achievements is not remote.

I am the grandchild of Black grandparents who grew up knowing people born in this country and into its worst institution, chattel slavery. That's how close that is. 

I was born two years after voting rights were enshrined into law for Black people the right to vote. 

I attended a junior high school in 1977 that had only been desegregated a few years before, by federal court orders, in a state that stubbornly held on to a school system for whites and another for "coloreds" until after 1970 - 15 years after the US Supreme Court's Brown decision.

Since Trump's win in the 2024 General Election, I have tried to compose my own post-mortem, but I realized since I wasn't part of the hysterics, I had no post-mortem to offer.

I could not get myself mixed up in "white folks' business."

They are telling us the sky has fallen. I look back and know it fell a long time ago.

So, the thoughts running through my head are not about the election between two horrible candidates and two horrible campaigns, nor are my thoughts about the outcome - which would have been a loss either way (can you imagine the precedent this would have given the Democrats to move further from their deep indifference to the working class?!).

My thoughts are pondering how little this country really knows its history. If it did, it would know how it surmounted that history, little by little. It would recognize the nature of the forces of reaction - comprised in both major political parties - and how we faced those forces of reaction.

If this country understood this, knew this history, we may not have even gotten a Donald Trump [or a Kamala Harris] but we sure as hell wouldn't be afraid of him.