With Donald Trump now the President-elect of the United States (still working through my gag reflex when I type that), it’s a scary time in America. It’s especially scary if you’re not white, which is a product of a KKK-endorsed man becoming the most powerful person in the world.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar addressed this hopelessness for black people and what to do about it in a piece for the Washington Post. The entire thing is important and worth reading, but this is the main crux of the points he is making:
What’s important now is to skip the wallowing, finger-pointing, name-calling period and begin an immediate and focused effort on dominating the 2018 midterm elections during which all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of Senate seats will be in play. People of color cannot merely play defense anymore. They must mount a long-term offensive that includes relentlessly challenging every act of institutional racism in the country. African Americans make up only 12.3 percent of the population, so it’s imperative that we form a coalition with other groups that are targeted by Trump, including women, Latinos, immigrants and the LGBT community. We have to ignore the self-loathing collaborators among those groups because they prefer the path that makes them think they will be accepted and prized as equals when, at best, they are merely patsies for Trump’s movement.
So do that. We’ve got two years until the midterms so it’s probably OK to spend the weekend in bed dealing with your devastation. After that, go do what Kareem says.
