Before the election, C-Dog revealed to Lemont that he was considering voting for Trump. Here is why:
The quiet rock stars
I met the reporter Hillary Louise Johnson about a year ago, by my favorite duck pond. She’d driven there to interview me for SacTown Magazine. She wanted the story behind the story in my new graphic memoir THE TALK. But I probably asked her as many questions as she asked me. At the time, I was obsessed with van life.
I created The Talk during the pandemic. I drew the first chapter in my downtown office, until the bail bondsman across the hall from me walked up and down the hallway hacking up a lung. After that, my office basically became a pricy storage unit. I’d visit it once or twice a month to sweep away cobwebs, but I spent most of my days in my car by the lake, drawing and writing on my iPad Pro. Or I’d work at home, while Makeda gardened and tended to the chickens, and the kids played in the back yard.
On my TV, van life videos would play on a loop. While I was reliving disturbing memories and pouring them into my graphic memoir, I’d also vicariously travel the highways of four continents and half a dozen languages, in the vans of those strangers (probably the only safe way to get into a stranger’s van). They didn’t so much brave the pandemic, as escape it. They became nomads, roaming the post apocalyptic roads of Europe, the USA, New Zealand, and Asia, alone. Tabi Ie, in particular, was good company. But several of them had become quiet rock stars, to me.
And now I felt as if I’d just seen one of them exit what was clearly a home on wheels, and cross the street to the duck pond to interview me.
Those were storm clouds gathering on the horizon
She wanted to talk to me in my office. I gestured to the park itself, which was devoid of humans, but full of ducks, turtles, and Canadian geese, and she seemed to understand. I needed to make this my office, I told her, because I’d spent more than two years reliving some of the hardest moments of my life. Memories I’d successfully spent half a lifetime burying, until Derick Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and a goon squad with badges assassinated Breonna Taylor, and my publisher asked me to write a book that spoke to that moment. While I worked on that book, I needed to feel a breeze, and to hear leaves rustling. I needed to be in the company of animals who wore beaks and feathers, and who knew nothing about the savagery of the animals who wore clothes and badges.
After a couple hours, she asked to finish the interview in my office, so she could see me in that element. I took her there, even though it felt as if I were putting on clothes that didn’t really fit anymore. She asked whether I’m hopeful for the future. I replied that these years we were living in – the Biden years – were just the eye of a storm. Heavy turnout among Black voters that tipped the scales in 2008, 2012, and 2020. But the rest of America wouldn’t be able to count on Black voters to save them this time – partly because of Republican voter suppression efforts, but also because the Democratic Party had just played one too many games with us.
The precedent that wasn’t
In 2004, as Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom directed the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This sparked a backlash from those who insisted “marriage is between a man and a woman.” For much of a decade, it was a losing battle. Dozens of states passed laws or constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage. But years later, when the laws eventually wound their way to those states’ supreme courts, they were struck down, one by one. In 2015, the Republican Supreme Court stepped in and recognized once and for all that marriage was a Constitutional civil right that belonged to everyone, no matter their orientation, in all fifty states.
I had no illusions about that court, though. They’d stolen the 2000 election for George W. Bush. They’d permitted racial gerrymandering (as long as the people doing it weren’t stupid enough to admit it was racial). They’d just eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, allowing the former Jim Crow states to immediately begin purging millions of Black voters from the rolls without having to pre-clear their schemes with the Federal government (last year, another Federal court hammered the final nail into the Voting Rights Act’s coffin). And just a few years earlier, they’d ruled in Citizens United that Elon Musk could buy himself a presidency in 2025 (not the exact text of their ruling, but that’s the gist of it).
But still, Gavin Newsom was the bold visionary who set it all in motion at time when nobody thought it was possible. He opened America’s eyes. He made the impossible seem inevitable.
If he did it once, he could do it again
So in 2020, when Newsom said it was time to make reparations a reality, Black Americans paid attention. After the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a summer of protest and a supposed “racial reckoning,” Newsom signed bipartisan legislation establishing a reparations task force. Other cities and states followed his lead. Some came up with concrete proposals, the centerpiece of which were cash payments.
Some of the pillars of American history – the ones white supremacist movement wants to erase from history books – are grotesque. The more well known are slavery, the North standing by and watching the South murder Reconstruction, the Black codes, the razing of prosperous Black towns and businesses, and Jim Crow. But there continues to be a constant hailstorm of creative methods of preventing Black people from getting ahead.
HOAs, for instance, were created specifically to keep Black people from buying homes, and those “racial covenants” are still on the books in most states. I might buy that these are just vestigial laws that nobody ever got around to deleting, if it weren’t for cell phone videos. We’ve seen countless videos of HOA board members (and random white homeowners who seem to believe they’re one-man or one-woman HOAs) harassing Black residents and visitors.
Black people often can’t even cash a check in this country without bankers and police trying to put us back in the place where they think we belong. None of this is by accident. The country is so steeped in a ubiquitous and concerted white supremacist effort to prevent Black people from attaining generational wealth, that it’s become a reflex. It’s why the footsoldiers of that movement tried so hard to stigmatize and discredit any successful effort to educate people about that movement. It’s why they foamed so much at the mouth over the 1619 project and the teaching of “critical race theory.”
So many promises
Reparations task forces across the country figured cash payments would go a long way toward making up for that.
The racial reckoning was a big deal. Democrats in Congress promised meaningful structural change and criminal justice reform, and a new, stronger voting rights act. Nancy Pelosi and other leaders – many of whom were about 1/3rd as old as the country itself – even wore kente cloth and took a knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in honor of George Floyd. I ignored the cringe. Well, suppressed it. Well, experienced it, but then tried to forget it right away. There was always the chance they’d rise to the occasion, I thought, before I saw staffers struggling to pull the politicians back onto their feet because after nearly nine minutes of kneeling immobile in silence, their legs had gone numb.
Surely this moment wouldn’t become a metaphor for anything, right?
A few years later…
When San Francisco decided to give Black residents $5 million cash payments, the local NAACP leadership – of all people – objected to it. They said they’d rather have a new community center, or new programs, or some other grift that would fall far short of compensating all the city’s eligible descendants of slavery for centuries of denied opportunities and stolen wealth.
Instead of direct cash payments, Brown and the NAACP called for investments in “five key areas,” those being education, jobs, housing, healthcare and a cultural center for Blacks in the city. – ABC News
Everyone I cynically vented to about this calmly discussed this with seemed to agree with both of my hypotheses:
(1) The San Francisco branch of the NAACP wanted the state to funnel any “reparations” money through them so those corrupt motherfuladies and gentlemen could siphon as much of it off as possible and deliver nothing life-changing to the people.
(2) This rejection of cash payments had the fingerprints of both state and national Democratic Party leaders all over it. I’m more convinced of that now, after Newsom echoed the San Francisco motherfuNAACP in rejecting the state task force’s cash payment recommendation. Just as the NAACP did, Newsom tried to make it seem as if a cash payment would be some sort of insult to Black people. Something insufficient to remedy the situation. Something that would be better handled by funneling money to cronies to manage a few nebulous programs.
Newsom, Harris, Biden, Pelosi, Jeffries, Schumer… They were all loudly supportive when the task forces began working, but then deathly quiet once the task forces finally recommended action. For an understandable reason:
White Americans overwhelmingly voted for Trump in every election (not to mention for Republicans up and down the ballot, in every race from governor to HOA board, to dog catcher), to the tune of about 60%. If Democrats actually delivered cash payments to Black people, that 60% would probably become 28,980%, give or take.
It’s an understandable reason. But then, there usually are understandable reasons for betrayal.
The endless game
I told the interviewer, these people aren’t amateurs and they’re not stupid. Their rejection of cash payments wasn’t something they came to after a careful consideration of the task forces’ findings, it was something they knew they would do from day one. They caused Black Americans to set aside our well-earned cynicism about the country ever making good on its promises to our ancestors and to us. They caused us to hope, all the while knowing they would one day dash those hopes. But in the meantime, they could squeeze at least a couple more election cycles out of us.
I said that whether I’m right about that or not, that’s the impression they’ve created, and it’s going to take root, probably in time to help Trump win in 2024. I firmly believe in the virtue of voting for manipulative and weak when the alternative is malice and evil. Even if social justice turns out to be just words to them, words can inspire entire generations to believe that the impossible is inevitable. It can inspire younger generations to make good on the promises older generations never intended to keep.
Not enough people seemed to agree with me on that this time. Like Clyde, I’m hopeful that another four years of Trump will change that. I’ve been wondering for the past couple weeks why I’m not as devastated about the election results now as I was in 2016, even though the outcome is likely to be far worse. Then I stumbled upon that 2023 interview conducted in the wake of Newsom strangling real reparations to death, and I remembered everything I told Ms. Johnson. I knew then, that it was going to lead to this:
But it’s okay. This too shall pass, because just a few weeks ago, Newsom signed a bill apologizing for California’s participation in slavery. All is saved. I didn’t watch the signing, so I can’t tell you whether he was kneeling in a kente cloth when he did it.
I’m not sure how this next Candorville cartoon (today’s cartoon) is related to all this, but somehow I feel it is:
