A New World Is Rising, And It Looks Like Us
Across the United States, we are experiencing a groundswell. In community after community, people of color, led by Black women and women of color, have ushered in a progressive movement that has achieved historic wins in the midterm election. Texas elected two African American district attorneys and a Latino district attorney, and progressive wins swept local races. In Georgia and Florida, people have fought long and hard — and are still on the election battlefield a week after the election — to ensure that every vote is counted and democracy is upheld. We celebrated as 1.5 million Floridians who had been convicted of a felony were returned their right to vote.
These results did not suddenly appear on the political landscape. They are rooted in generations of leadership of women of color and low income women. This leadership bore fruit in the election of nineteen Black female judges in Houston, TX. These judges were elected because women of color on the ground — including many women who had been incarcerated or whose family members had been incarcerated — threw down and made their life’s work the eradication of the punishment-first and punishment-only system many people of color live within. Over four years ago, the Texas Organizing Project, under the leadership of Tarsha Jackson, whose son was incarcerated at the age of 10, determined they had to take this system on. They realized that doing that meant making sure that the prosecutors and judges were not only reflective of their community but understood what their community needed and did not go to incarceration as the first, only, and perpetual recourse. They determined that if they were going to create a collective powerful enough to change this system, Black people, Brown people, and white people of good intent needed to be in strong coalition. With vision, analysis, and a strategy to build this strong coalition, they set out to create a Texas that allows Black and Brown people to live without fear.
Because they organized from an issue that impacted many people’s lives, they were able to engender the excitement, participation, and determination that laid the ground for the election of this slate of Black female judges. Knowing that no individual is a messiah — a silver bullet — they rejected celebrity and persona and only endorsed candidates who endorsed their platform. They understood that celebrity was nothing more than the latest manifestation of the great white hope narrative so often posed as the only viable pathway out of Black or Brown misery.
The great white hope narrative would have us believe that the magic of one individual candidate — Beto O’Rourke or Andrew Gillum or Stacey Abrams — was the single source of the outpouring of people during the midterm election. But what about the 269,948 early voters the Texas Organizing Project turned out — 126,283 of whom were new voters, or the 140,820 people contacted by Californians for Human and Immigrant Rights Leadership Action Fund (CHIRLA), or the 221,897 people the New Georgia Project reached who submitted voter registrations? No amount of spin can possibly transform Phil Bredesen into the hope Black people are calling for.
Rather, as Brianna Brown of the Texas Organizing Project states, there is a new world rising and it looks like us. Our hope is not a cry for the modern-day Martin Luther King Jr. but rather is centered in the deep-rooted belief in the ability of everyday people, working and pulling together to make significant change. Stacey Abrams’ campaign, the campaign for Amendment 4, the Texas Organizing Project, and so many other grassroots organizations have been successful because they put their time, work, and money behind real people on the ground.
In communities across the country, women of color rode buses, organized block parties and happy hours, and knocked on doors to engage Black people, Brown people, Indigenous people, queer people — in other words, everyone in this moment for future moments. People of color are refusing to be in the shadows or silent — whether that is people who have felonies, Black people who have been shut out from all kinds of processes, Latinx people seeing their lives threatened everyday, or Native Americans holding on to their lands. We are coming out and standing in the sun. We don’t need a single candidate. We need this collective.
We make democracy real through this groundswell of people who refuse to be intimidated or moved to fear, who come together to craft a different reality for ourselves, and who move collectively to make systemic change. Women of color are building that collective power on the ground.
Across the news we have been hearing about a red wave or a blue wave, but there is a bigger justice wave rising — a wave that has been years in the making — a wave that is rising because of the exhilarating, freeing, joyful collective of the powerful WE.
Join Groundswell Action Fund on Wednesday, November 14 at 9am, via Facebook Live or by tuning in to this page, to hear the reflections from women of color leaders on what worked and didn’t on the ground in key states, and their advice on where funders and donors can make the greatest impact to sustain the momentum in coming years.
