I see a lot of valid commentary about Kamala standing alone in her advocacy at the criminal justice forum but at the same time I feel like that was absofuckinglutely the precise point she intended to make. What better platform to set herself apart, and with what better audience?
This wasn’t just about denouncing the sham award given to Trump or the attempted whitewashing of his racist legacy, it was about asserting herself as a leader in criminal justice reform, speaking directly to Black SC and drawing a distinction between herself and the frontrunners.
It was also a premeditated and fearless confrontation of the “Kamala is a cop” propaganda, truth be told. She isn’t afraid to put her entire record under scrutiny, in fact she reformed the whole forum to make sure ample Black stakeholders/voters were in attendance.
Oh and she didn’t just want more folk in attendance for her turn on the stage, best believe she also wanted the audience to hear directly from all the frontrunners who conventional wisdom holds can do criminal justice reform better than a former AG who’s actually done it before.
In other words...
Ultimately the original criminal justice forum and sponsorship tried to take Black people out of a conversation about helping Black people, so a Black woman who’s spent her entire career being a voice for the voiceless and vulnerable spoke up and said not on my fucking watch.
Likewise, folk think they can create a propaganda based narrative about Kamala’s criminal justice bonafides without her joining the conversation to speak for herself or her agenda. They don’t want her speaking directly to Black people about Black issues.
They preempted her campaign with bullshit about Black folk distrusting her (b/c implicitly we all want rapists, murderers and child abusers/neglecters to go free 🙄) in order to give the White candidates a head start on alienating us with unexamined privilege and wack allyship.
If you think the narrative is gonna stop Kamala from speaking directly to Black voters or that Black voters will dismiss her out of hand and just flock to a White candidate who can’t speak to our basic humanity & survival without sounding like a damn dummy, watch less cable news.
Y’all are letting the Bros scramble your neurons and it needs to stop.
Folk are resting on their laurels abt how great the frontrunners are polling with White voters in 90% White states and how “solid” Biden’s Black “firewall” is while the majority of Black voters remain undecided. Kamala is on the ground in SC engaging Black voters on their terms.
Kamala isn’t waiting for the game to catch up to her, she’s changing the game on the ground in real time. She was ready for every question that came from the audience she cultivated, but the frontrunners weren’t. That’s not ‘standing alone’, it’s leading and rallying the troops.
It’s not Kamala’s fault if the other candidates aren’t willing or able to live up to their *own* reliable ally hype or provide receipts for their alleged civil rights advocacy as this primary ventures into Black territory. It’s not her job to uphold a narrative that erases her.
She’ll gladly ‘stand alone’ and up for marginalized people on everything from busing/segregation to kids in cages, guns, LGBTQ rights, banning Trump’s stochastic terrorism from twitter, and criminal justice reform. You can’t erase her out of leading, plus why would you try? 🤷🏾♀️
On criminal-justice issues, Kamala Harris leads the pack washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/… via @JRubinBlogger @washingtonpost #FearlessJustice #ForThePeople
