Again — here, after everything African Americans have been through, it might help to exercise some restraint. When seen in its proper historical context, the threats and dangers posed against African Americans and the strategies it has taken them to overcome such threats and dangers, very much outweigh the issues which have encumbered white progressives in recent decades. Lets recall that the much touted New Deal excluded African Americans, focusing on whites: it was very much a policy intended to benefit the “true American nation” while excluding those considered its outsiders, or its subhumans. Lets not narrow the African American experience as well as their voting calculations to a period of decades when white people finally have reason to worry about their political, ecological and economic futures. African Americans have been under a much more severe blight for centuries than this, and have created sophisticated political cultures as well as relationships with an economic system which actively ostracizes them to ensure that they continue to flourish and survive in spite of everything. Lets accord them their due respect.
Thus argument is not unlike the insensitive argument we often hear from white atheists who will often charge: why believe in a God whose edifices and commands were complicit in your enslavement? People ask questions like this without pausing to wonder what a people having been stripped of all their culture, women raped repeatedly, their children dehumanized into “future values”, their love and sexual reproduction tranformed into a factory for the manufacturing of new brown and black bodies for enslavement, and so on; how does a people undergoing lynchings, mob-violence, beatings, permanent negation, survive through all of that for centuries? From the comfort of privilege, its easy to pronounce on what others ought to do or not do, but when you are the one in the situation, your ethics, your calculations and your strategies might be operating on a level those who pronounce over and pontificate about you could never fathom. But lets avoid cheapening the African American experience with patronizing calls for them to join “us” as if they have got neither memory nor political traditions which have seen them through horrors we cannot imagine. Its not this simple.
There is an implicit production of advanced ethics from struggle because it is here were agency must work without power. And it is for this reason that Womanists such as myself are convinced that the future is non-male because all the great ethical systems which could save human kind will be found among those who have used their agency without the backing of toxic coercive power. And it is here where people like Mrs. Clinton have failed, suggesting that murder and violence become okay if they aren’t committed by men.
