Respectfully to @POTUS, @TheBlackCaucus, and others: voting rights is not the most important fight. When we say that we separate issues, that should never be. If you have voting rights but don’t have an agenda that takes us forward, it’s not enough.
If you have voting rights, but lose the planet? If you have voting rights, but poverty is destroying the lives of millions, you still have an impoverished democracy. If you look at voting rights only through the lens of race, it becomes a Black issue rather than a democracy one.
We have three fights we must see as non-negotiable and inseparable if we are going to address the issue of racism, poverty, militarism, etc.:
1) The infrastructure of our democracy, voting rights, redistricting, etc.
1) The infrastructure of our democracy, voting rights, redistricting, etc.
2) The infrastructure of our daily lives—human rights, health care, living wages, climate, education, etc. and
3) The infrastructure of our roads, bridges, technology. All three are important, not one more than the other. In fact, each informs the others.
3) The infrastructure of our roads, bridges, technology. All three are important, not one more than the other. In fact, each informs the others.
And just in case you want to critique my point, let me share with you who taught me: John Lewis in 1963. He refused to speak at the March on Washington on only one issue, because he knew that’s not a winning civil rights strategy.
Therefore, he said: “We march today for jobs AND freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. For they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all.
“While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than $3 a day, 12 hours a day. … It is true that we support the administration’s civil rights bill. We support it with great reservations, however.
“As it stands now, the voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of Black people who want to vote. We must have legislation that will protect the Mississippi sharecropper who is put off of his farm because he dares to register to vote.
“We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We are tired ...”
We must recover this kind of ethic. Which is why, no matter what happens this December, the deadline for the movement is when we win.
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