Pressing Post-Election 2024 Thoughts, Recent Photo Work

Soiled US flags removed from veterans’ grave at Richmond’s Evergreen Cemetery for proper disposal on Veterans Day. 9 November 2024

17 November 2024. Richmond VA

Days and days after the election of Donald Trump and defeat of Kamala Harris we're still bathing in a soup of recrimination and allegation served by corporate media. Such as: Harris failed to separate herself from the unpopular Joe Biden. She lost her edge with voters of color because: wokeism. "I think this calls into question a lot of the traditional identity politics," said Julián Castro, on MSNBC, as quoted by USA Today. An especially interesting take, given Harris's near-silence on "identity" issues and her overwhelming focus on policy, the middle class, Trump's unfitness for the office of president. And, of course: It's inflation, stupid.

"The economy is just a variable that was tied, tethered to a deep racial anxiety about demographic shifts," just as the data showed it was during the rise the Tea Party, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude said on the Nightcap, an MSNBC talking-head show. "It's BS because we don't want to confront what the hell it means for us to have elected a convicted felon, who has also been held liable for sexual assault, who's a pathological liar."

Glaude reminds us that though there may be merit in the heavily cycled and recycled charges about economy and message, this is America, where delusions about our natural nobility are enshrined in national myth and, too often, policy; where white citizens executed, tolerated, and ignored genocide, slavery, and apartheid because it benefited—or didn't directly hurt—them; where many of the marginalized themselves, the affected and afflicted, lay low. They endured, occasionally enjoying quiet vengeance or vindication in their small victories. And some folks o’ color collaborated, siding with power and brutality to the detriment of their community members. Still, a handful fought back, spoke truth to power, built resistance movements, started winning. A brutal white backlash inevitably followed. These folks were jailed, punished, killed; just and inclusive policies were rolled back or eliminated. This is where we are now, I think.

This is not an admission of defeat. It's my attempt at clarity as rage and disappointment gurgle inside me and occasionally rise and leak out, onto the good people around me. That problem has remedies that I have written about before. Breathe, rest, connect, get back to work.

Erin at work, Evergreen Cemetery, the “kudzu section,” which is now mostly broomsedge. 10 November 2024.

Pointy hangers-on attached to Erin’s glove as she cuts out-of-control vegetation at Richmond’s Evergreen Cemetery. 10 November 2024

BP dumps rotten log on brush pile for the City of Richmond to haul away, Evergreen Cemetery. (I know, too much bend in that lower back. Use the knees…) 10 November 2024.

18 November 2024. Richmond VA

People at the front the stage during US Senator Tim Kaine’s election night watch party. The Hippodrome, Richmond, VA. 5 November 2024.

Erin asked me why I added this photo, the silhouette of the locced Black woman against the podium at Tim Kaine's watch party, to my original IG post, the one with the soiled US flags. Kaine won, she pointed out. Yes, but we spent hours waiting for him to come out just as so many of us spent months waiting for Kamala Harris, Kaine, and other Democrats to say and do something different. Maybe take brave stands that should be no-brainers for a party widely regarded as the humanist alternative to the autocratic Republicans, like speaking out and acting against the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel. Or speaking forcefully and unapologetically on climate change, LGBTQIA rights, the right to asylum. Harris instead embraced the conventional tack-to-the-right playbook of the punditry and corporate-friendly donors: avoid "identity politics," say "middle class" and not "poor," as Bishop William Barber spelled out eloquently on Democracy Now, etc. That strategy worked for Bill Clinton, after all, though he was a white man in a different era.

US Senator Tim Kaine’s election night watch party before the reality of Kamala Harris’s probably loss kicked in. The Hippodrome, Richmond, VA. 5 November 2024.

My point isn't that Harris would have won by aligning herself publicly and vocally with the communities that support Democrats even when they ignore them (us)—progressives, African Americans and many folks of color, queer and poor people. She might very well have lost. But she might have looked deeper into our history and then built something better, even in 107 days, to face a wily, immoral and, I'll say it again, evil wannabe autocrat, a man who weaponized age-old white grievance, entitlement, and willful ignorance. No, her loss/his win is not only about race and/or sex. There are other powerful factors that Trump rode to victory, among them the rightwing disinformation machine, which has been with us in one form or another for generations, plus social media and the toxic manosphere. Trump also exploited the timidity of a temporizing, proximate-to-power corporate media. They both-sides and sane-washed a clear, present, and existential threat to democracy and human life. Again.

The Trump table at Tuckahoe Elementary School, a polling station in a wealthy section of Henrico County, VA, on Election Day. 5 November 2024.

To those who write their entire election-analysis essays without naming race or who say race and sex are overblown, I say, bless your privileged hearts. The recent one that grabbed me was Ross Douthat's massive word salad in the Sunday NYT. "[T]here is no cultural forcing mechanism to make the radical and reactionary go away — to rout the woke from their institutional redoubts, to exile racist or anti-Semitic figures from the discourse (or the podcast charts) or to establish a zone of respectability and marginalize everything else," he writes. When did such a "cultural forcing mechanism" exist? Was it in the NY Times or Edward Murrow's and Fred Friendly's CBS? No. The cultural-challenging and changing forces came from below, those proto-woke folks who fought slavery, racism, sexism, peonage, antisemitism, homophobia, death by studied neglect during the AIDS crisis, and so many other pestilences.

Can one explain the ascendancy of India's Narendra Modi without contending with the tsunami of Hindu supremacy he rides, Benjamin Netanyahu's hold on power without examining how he exploits Jewish holocaust trauma, or the resurgence of the rightwing across Europe without taking into the account the anti-immigrant hammer they use to bash darker-skinned newcomers with? Can one honestly and credibly explain the rise, fall, and re-rise of Trump without understanding American race politics and racial history? They're lying if they say they can when the evidence is so clear. Yes, a higher percentage of people of color voted for Trump than other, but the Democrat voter turnout was sad, the exit polls tell us. And white folks once again rallied around the rapist.

M. Gessen's post-election column ran right under Douthat's in the print edition. I respect their work. Gessen, author of Surviving Autocracy, doesn't focus explicitly on race/ethnicity in their piece, but it's implicit in what they write about how Viktor Orban engineered his "autocratic breakthrough" in Hungary. (Gessen also takes on race and racism in other places.) Gessen quotes scholar Balint Magyar on Hungary to help explain how we got here and where we may be headed. "Trump promises that you don't have to think about other people." That promise, in the hands of majority population, aggrieved in their minds but empowered in reality, is a lethal weapon.