My African American great grandfather was a tailor in South Carolina. In the 1930s, he owned a small shop and was able to support his family. One day—as the story goes—a white man came into his shop and became abusive. He yelled at my great grandfather. My great grandfather asked the man to leave. The man refused, and I can assume he called him all kinds of n-words. My grandfather kept a gun in his shop for protection. He pulled it out and forced the man out at gunpoint.

Before sundown, my great grandfather and all his children left town to avoid being lynched. This is how my grandmother ended up in New York City and my family became Northerners and—a generation later—Californians. My family never looked back. I have never looked back to the South.

As a progressive African American, Biden’s win in South Carolina deeply upset me. Those are my people voting for the genteel racist, the hair sniffer, the medicare slasher. My people settling for the lesser of two evils, instead of fighting for something better.

Many hot takes on the primary blamed Black voters, particularly older Black voters, but activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham pushed back on that narrative:

“There are offensive votes and defensive votes. Many older Black voters sacrificed by making defensive votes their entire lives in order to free up younger generations to be able to step out on faith and make more offensive votes.”

I also carry the terror of our ancestors. I smell it in our preference for Biden, who kills, jails, crushes, humiliates us with legislation, but not guns and burning crosses.  My family’s terror and internalized racism shows in how we never looked back. We live and move like The South doesn’t exist anymore. We have a sort of trauma-induced amnesia. To the degree we participate in political organizing, we don’t organize there. Then we get shocked every four years. To the degree that I am an organizer with anything to offer, I have to ask myself why I never considered organizing in The South? The answer is I was too scared to face a legacy of terror or the current risks that Southern Black folks live with every day. But Biden is still a bitter pill. My people, voting for him in cities and towns I’ve never visited, on red dirt where I’ve never set foot.

Until this election, I shared some of their pragmatism. In 2007, when John Edwards dropped out of the Democratic primary, I literally said to my friends: “Only Obama and Hillary left? Where are the white boys? We need a white boy!” I was one of the last Black people to believe Obama could win. I voted for him in the primary and was stunned when he won the presidency. I thought the US wasn’t ready. But in reality, I wasn’t ready. External conditions in the US had changed, but I was still on a dark road in South Carolina running from getting lynched.

In 2016 I voted for Hilary Clinton in the primary. In California. All my politics align with Bernie Sanders but again, I thought the US wasn’t ready. I had always said that moderate Democrats were harm reduction on Republicans. Democrats let us continue to organize, while Republicans do everything they can to crush our movements. We’ll never know for sure if Bernie could have won in 2016. We only know that Hilary could win the popular vote, but not the electoral college. With the Russian interference and the voter suppression. At this point in the history of our democracy, those are a given. We have to win in spite of that.

Sanders Campaign Co-Chair Nina Turner asks: “How bad do things have to get before we demand real change?” For me, that change was Hurricane Maria. I’m African American on my father’s side and Puerto Rican on my mother’s side. The hurricane brought the climate emergency home to me in a way that Hurricane Katrina had not. We—as a nation—weren’t putting those pieces together in 2005. But in 2017 it was clear. This brutal intersection of the climate crisis and colonization had devastated my maternal homeland and left nearly five thousand dead. Then to watch disaster capitalists descend in a bloodthirsty land-grab, or as Rosa Clemente says: “They want a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans.”

As I sobbed through the grief of that brutality, I came to accept that I would need to be a climate activist. I would need to integrate climate information into my worldview. Which meant that when scientists gave us twelve years—then ten—then less—to move to zero emissions, I integrated that into my calculations for survival.

It is not always easy for people of color to integrate the climate crisis into our political analysis. The climate crisis has historically been framed mostly for middle class white people whose lives have been going reasonably well. For people of color—particularly poor and working class folks—the daily violence of white supremacy and capitalism have our lives in a chronic state of emergency. We think the climate crisis will need to get in line. We resent the racism in the traditional environmental movement. Many environmentalists still see themselves as white saviors of the planet, as opposed to understanding that white supremacist capitalism is the destroyer of the planet.

But we can’t wait for them to do better. We need a vision now, a vision that integrates racial justice, class justice and economic justice. That vision is the Green New Deal. As Naomi Klein lays it out, for the first time our lifetime, progressives have proposed an integrated and intersectional solution that solves so many of our nation’s problems at scale and at a necessary speed for the ticking climate clock.

Which is why Joe Biden is not an option. Which is why Big Structural Change is the only way to go. Which is why I voted for Bernie Sanders. Which is why I loved Elizabeth Warren. We don’t have Joe Biden time to recover from Tr*mp. We only have Bernie Sanders time to fight for a Green New Deal to avert catastrophe. Which is why Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, and Ben Jealous of the NAACP have also endorsed Bernie Sanders. I hope my Souther Black people take note.

Between now and the final primary, I will be calling Southern Black voters to try to sell them on Bernie Sanders. The South Carolina primary is over, but people will need to mobilize against Tr*mp for the general election. Maybe this fall will find me on a darkened road in South Carolina, reversing the path my great grandfather took out of the South. Maybe this fall will find me looking back—going back—to claim my Southern roots. To fight for the victory of the Green New Deal for all my Southern Black people, for all my Puerto Rican people, for all my people, everywhere.

 

 

 

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