Eleven years ago, I started my position as executive director of one of the oldest anti-racism organizations in the United States. Founded in 1968, we believe there is only one other anti-racism organization that is older than us. When I came on board, it was seen as a new beginning. I was the first Black person and woman to head the organization. Given our mission has always been to work with white people, it was breaking with organizational norms to bring me on. There was a lot of excitement and trepidation as to what my appointment would mean for our future.
To celebrate the board’s choice in bringing on a Black woman to lead the organization, a longtime major donor and friend of the organization pledged a major gift over a 10-year period as a sign of confidence in my leadership.
Two years later, in 2016, the donor revoked her pledge because she felt that she needed to focus her giving on electoral politics after Hillary Clinton was defeated by Donald Trump. She wasn’t the first major donor after the 2016 election to decide to stop giving to our organization and instead focus on electoral politics.
In 2016, I gave a TEDx talk in which I discussed racism in the United States. In my talk, I referenced racism as being woven into the fabric of our nation and being the third rail of discourse that we rarely ever discussed in this country in meaningful ways—though from 2016 to recently, we did start talking a bit more about racism and white supremacy, especially after the killing of George Floyd.
As I have written before, in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, for a brief time it did appear that we might be turning a corner on dealing with racial injustice in this country. Corporations and communities vowed to make diversity, equity and inclusion part of their core values. But in the last 100 or so days, we have seen most of those commitments fall to the wayside as the Trump regime made attacking equity its priority, just hours into the new term. Corporations that invested heavily from late 2020 until recently have all had a change of heart or, rather, have decided they don’t want to run afoul of this authoritarian operation that has hijacked our country.
The thing is though: If your values cannot withstand scrutiny and attacks, are they really your values? Values are our north star that guide us and if we can so easily fold on them, they were never really our values. In the case of diversity, equity and inclusion, for most, it was a feel-good measure that was popular until it wasn’t.
We find ourselves in a moment of reckoning with what our true values are. The truth is, as I said many years ago and have written ad nauseum about over the years, racism is a core value of the United States. It is literally embedded into our institutions and structures and while many words have been spent in recent years about interpersonal racism, not enough has been spent acknowledging how deeply embedded racism is in the institutions and structures that impact people of color and now are spilling out to impact all of us.
In movement spaces, we often focus on those most impacted by injustice, understanding that when we lift up the most impacted, we are saving all of us. If we had let this mindset guide us in recent years, we might have been better protected to fend off the white nationalism that Trump has reignited in this country.
Earlier this week, almost 60 “refugees” arrived from South Africa—white South Africans whom the Trump administration claims have been the victims of a “white genocide” at the hands of the Black-led South African government. These refugees are the minority white descendants of Dutch and French settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 1600s, who were leaders of the apartheid regime that only finally ended in 1994.
Let me repeat that: These so-called refugees fleeing supposed racial persecution are the descendants of those who led the apartheid regime that subjugated nonwhite folks to second- and third-class citizenship and now that their whiteness isn’t paying the dividends that it used to, they are claiming to be victims.
In the first few days of his new term, Trump not only declared all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and investments in this country, he also shut down the arrival of all refugees to the United States, leaving many who were already cleared to arrive in limbo. To add insult to injury, the same day that the white South Africans arrived, the administration announced it is ending the temporary protected status of Afghan refugees, who after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan were offered this status (many of them had worked with the U.S. military, so staying in Afghanistan would not have been safe). The administration now says it is safe for them to return to the Taliban-controlled country and if you believe that, well, we aren’t sharing the same reality.
While we have been scrolling, feeling anxious and hopeless, and fitting protests into our weekly or monthly rounds, the United States over the past hundred or so days has moved to competitive authoritarianism. But know that what is also undergirding this is profound white supremacy run amok.
Part of why our country is do divided and unable to see clearly is because a good portion of our populace is profoundly racist. To the point that they are going along with the plans despite the pain that it is causing them, because they hate those they deem “other,” starting with Black and brown people, LGBTQ+ folks (with a heavy emphasis on trans people), and pretty much anyone that threatens their lily-white cishet fantasy world.
The majority of so-called policies coming out of this regime are about restoring what they consider to be the proper order, where white people run things—specifically white men—and where white women are under the rule of white men and those white women are making plenty of new white people. If we really were concerned about falling birth rates in a general sense, as the administration claims, we sure as shit wouldn’t be deporting immigrants and their children. We would be welcoming these folks into our fold.
While there is a growing awareness that the United States has fallen into fascism, there is a disconnect with how deeply racism is tied in with this. In the past few months, I have had too many conversations with people who support my work, or who consider themselves to be anti-racists, who aren’t grasping how deeply this is about racism and how we are inching closer to a race war in this country. Too many people dropped the ball in 2016 after Trump’s first win and instead of doubling down on anti-racism work and diving deeper into white communities to break up the roots of racism, they instead doubled down on electoral politics.
It was only in the weeks leading up the last election that larger anti-racism groups decided to do outreach to working class white communities, hoping that the transaction of mutual survival by voting for Kamala Harris might go through and save us all. That didn’t work. It also didn’t work because in too many instances there was no ground game built on trust in these communities to sway people. Well-heeled white folks trying to appeal to the working class and rural white folks with no connection to them was faulty logic. We build and organize together when there is trust.
Trust is the foundation for organizing that is sustainable and that yields results that lift us all up. It is why in many of my recent pieces I have been coming back to the need to build community. Organizing isn’t about the easy stuff; it isn’t about being with like-minded people. It is more often about connecting across our differences. Community works the same way. We don’t have to like each other, and we don’t have to agree on everything, but at a moment like this, I fear we are squandering real opportunities to build multi-class coalitions.
Like it or not, as the regime grows bolder and alienates its base, there are real opportunities to build with those people. If you can connect on the larger issues, and start to build a modicum of trust, that can be your entry into the harder conversations, like race. You are never going to change the mind of a racist-leaning white person by beating the drum on whiteness and white supremacy if those are the first words out of your mouth. You build by connecting where you can; often it is the simple things. At the end of the day, most of us want affordable housing, food, healthcare, and a few bucks left over to pay the rest of the bills—save a little and maybe even have the occasional splurge.
As more people speak out, there is a sense that we are, as the young people say, cooked. I think we are inching closer to that space, but I don’t believe we are there, and I also believe that we still have a chance to push back, but pushing back will require more of us and, frankly, not leaning on Black and brown folks to lead the charge.
Unlike many well-meaning white folks, we know these people want a race war. They would love to crack our heads, they would love to have the media portrayal that we are unruly and ungovernable. We aren’t giving them that and it doesn’t mean we are sitting this out. It means we are working smarter. What we need are more white folks to find their courage and willingness to get out on the front lines and disrupt, as well as white folks willing to build across their differences with other white folks.
Less time scrolling and sitting in fear in your silos and more time having uncomfortable conversations, knowing that this moment didn’t just happen in 100 or so days. Trump started building toward this moment when he helped to kick off the birther movement and the GOP and others realized they may have found their guy to bring their racist authoritarian fantasy to fruition. They played the long game and now we must be ready to play the long game to reverse course.
Never forget, we build at the speed of trust, so start thinking about how you can build trust across differences and let that be your foundation for your work in your community.
If this piece resonated with you, please consider a tip, or become a monthly patron, if you aren’t already. I offer my work freely, to ensure that it is accessible to all but if you have the means to support it, please do so. Remember, I do work with groups and organizations, if you want to work with me, please reach out for details.
Image be Aurvant Picture via Unsplash
