No, You Shut Up

by Symone D. Sanders

  Dedication

  To Averi, Daniel, Jose, Madre, and Daddy

  because each of you believed I could and are a large part of the reason I can.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Who Is “We” Anyway?

  Chapter 2: Power (Hint: It's Really About Influence)

  Chapter 3: Redefining Normal (or: Why Be Normal When You Can Be Fabulous?)

  Chapter 4: Calling All Radical Revolutionaries (And the Rest of Us Too)

  Chapter 5: Get Out of Line

  Chapter 6: Stand in the Gap

  Chapter 7: Don’t Take No for an Answer (But Do Your Homework First)

  Chapter 8: The Moment Is Now

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Greetings! Let’s get down to business.

  Have you ever been making a really great point when someone tells you to shut up? As if you don’t know what you’re talking about or your point isn’t valid enough? As if you did not have permission to give your opinion? As if you weren’t qualified to speak on something in the first place?

  Well, I have.

  In August 2017, I was on air at CNN discussing the atrocities at the hands of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. What was a far-right protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee had quickly turned into a display of violent aggression against marginalized people: one counter-protester. She was killed when a neo-Nazi drove a car into the crowd, and nineteen others were injured. The CNN segment I was taking part in came after Trump’s comments blaming “both sides” for the violence, though of course only one side had committed any.

  I was appearing live on New Day on CNN with Chris Cuomo alongside Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia. My argument was that what happened in Charlottesville was a gruesome manifestation of white supremacy, a problem that has grown more virulent and violent since Trump took office. Cuccinelli disagreed. He claimed the violence was an aberration, the result of an individual organizer’s plot to disrupt what was billed as an innocent protest.

  I was, I admit, annoyed at this rationale. These were neo-Nazis and white supremacists that had come together to inflict terror upon this community, with advance planning; this was not a peaceful, spur-of-the-moment gathering. The debate got heated, and we began talking over each other. Cuccinelli accused me of jumping from one thing to another; I replied that I was being factual, and he was hedging to avoid the heart of the issue. Cuomo jumped in to ask Cuccinelli what, exactly, he was disagreeing with. “You know what white supremacists are about,” Cuomo said. “You know what Robert E. Lee evokes. That’s what they use for the basis for coming to gather. What is your point of disagreement exactly?”

  Cuccinelli again tried to redirect the conversation, drawing attention to “the local blogger who got the permit to protest,” saying the protest was an “excuse” on his part, not a part of a larger scheme. By that point I was fuming.

  “And now someone’s dead,” I cut in.

  Cuccinelli did not like that.

  “Can I finish, Symone? Will you just shut up for a minute and let me finish?”

  “Pardon me, sir,” I began, my voice getting louder. (He was no match for me on that front.) “You don’t get to tell me to shut up on national television.”

  Cuomo agreed, and he said so.

  “Then how do you make them stop talking when they keep interrupting you?” Cuccinelli continued.

  “‘Them’? ‘They’?” I said. “I’m sitting right here!”

  It doesn’t matter what Cuccinelli looked like, how old he was, or how powerful (read: old white man politician), we all know that isn’t an acceptable way to speak to anybody. And I told him so, on national television: “Under no circumstances do you get to speak to me in that manner.”

  YUP. He told me to shut up on national television. I had a right to have my voice heard, and my perspective was crucial to the conversation; however, when you’re speaking truth and spitting facts, sometimes the powers that be try to shut you down. Well, just like I had to claim, reclaim, and assert my power on CNN that day, in the iconic spirit of Auntie Maxine Waters (one of my heroes) . . . the time has come for all of us to band together and do the same.

  We are at a pivotal moment in our nation’s history. I’m not only talking about the lead-up to the next election. I’m talking about this very moment, where white supremacy is no longer being quietly tolerated or waved away, but is being actively promoted by our own elected officials. When I had my tête-à-tête with Cuch, he was just a former state attorney general. You know what he is now, as I write this? He’s the Trump administration’s acting director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services office. And you know what he said on Erin Burnett’s show on CNN today, the day I recount that story to you? Of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, from the iconic Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus”—you know, Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore—he said, “Of course that poem was referring to people coming from Europe.” Not Black or brown or melanated people, of course. He spent the rest of the interview essentially advocating for policies that make our country whiter and less welcoming to diversity. This comes a few weeks after the president of the United States told four congresswomen of color to “go back” to the countries “from which they came,” even though three of the four were born RIGHT HERE and the other has been a naturalized citizen since she was a teenager.

  More than ever, we need to stand up, not shut up. And so this book is for all the people who have ever been told to turn back or go quietly. I know folks want us to pipe down, wait our turn, earn our stripes. Folks want us to temper our expectations, be respectful, and just let the “seasoned adults handle things.” This book is for any person who has been told they dream too big. Anybody who has been shut down, shut out, talked over, ignored, talked down to, or dismissed. This is for every single young person, and young person at heart, out there who has a passion, an idea, a spark, but the powers that be just won’t let you live.

  I’ve come to say: NOT TODAY!

  So, how do we get started, you say? First off, let’s not waste our time looking for a magic wand that we can wave and suddenly solve all of our country’s problems. How many of you have heard the expression “If I had a magic wand, I’d . . .”? Well, guess what? I don’t have one in my handbag, I can’t pull one out of thin air, and you’re not going to find one buried in the back pages of this book (there’s some other great stuff back there, though, I promise!). So let’s not wait for a fairy godmother or a magician to save the day. We don’t need to wait for anyone or anything.

  Also, getting started is exactly that: it involves a beginning, taking steps in the direction you want to go. Some people want to think we can just wipe the slate clean and start over, just take down the whole darn thing and create a new government from the ground up, with our designated survivor leading the way. What’s that, you say? Oh, whenever all of Congress comes together for the State of the Union address, a cabinet member is picked as the designated survivor (DS); he or she is kept in an undisclosed location in case all hell breaks loose and the Capitol building gets blown up with all of our leaders inside (you know, or something like that). The DS then becomes acting president of the US.

  There’s actually a show on TV right now with this premise. In the first season, this new president and his team are working through the crisis, trying to figure out how it happened; they are actually presented the opportunity to rebuild
democracy and do things differently. But it ain’t going down like that—unless we are blowing up the Capitol, which I don’t think anyone reading this book seriously wants to do (I hope to God). It doesn’t work like that in reality.

  What we do want is to be heard. To be taken seriously. To have the freedom to pursue our goals of a more equitable, inclusive society where everyone’s future looks brighter. And to achieve that, we will not shut up. We shall not back down. We won’t be quiet. The world needs us now more than ever. We are the change agents, the gurus, the masterminds, the artists, the entrepreneurs, the business folks, the politicians, the elected officials, the activists, the radical revolutionaries that we have been waiting for. IT IS US. And the time is RIGHT NOW.

  Because have you seen the world lately? I mean, goodness.

  Chapter 1

  Who Is “We” Anyway?

  Before we can take on the world, or at least the political establishment, there are a few small details we need to take care of. First off, who the hell is “we” anyway? There needs to be some kind of understanding of who “we” are before we storm the gates together. Otherwise, it’s going to be pretty damn difficult to work together and move forward when we get to the other side. In order to parse who “we” are, I’ll give you a little history lesson, because we aren’t the first to try to define a “we.” Although this feels like a watershed moment in American history as far as politics and revolutionaries are concerned, it isn’t the first time we’ve been called to bang on the gates, demanding entrance, demanding change. And demand we must. Frederick Douglass said it over 160 years ago, but it’s still true today: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

  Speaking of which, power is something of a dirty word nowadays. But we have to address it—who has it, who doesn’t, how to get it—if we want anything to change about the way our political system functions in this country. Part of gaining power comes from participation. You can sit politics out, but it is happening whether you choose to participate or not. If you don’t take action and get involved at a local level, and if you don’t vote in national elections, well, guess what? Someone else will. And then they will be the ones whose voices matter, who make the decisions that impact your daily life and your future.

  So who is the “we” with the greatest impact on how politics happens in our country today, right now? Just start with the preamble to the Constitution. Back then, “we the people” was rich old white men. Not poor people, working-class people, women, people of color, young people. And how much has changed? Who is the “we” now?

  Here’s how I look at it: Think of the idea of “we” as a set of concentric circles. The closer you are to the innermost circle, the core, the more power you have—and the smaller the number of people around you. The deeper in, the more decision-making abilities you have, both as an individual and as someone who can influence politics on a local, state, and national level. Unfortunately, in our society, one of the shortest ways to increase your power is to have or make more money than everyone else. Other ways to access the core circle of power are proximity and platform. Proximity to those who are already there, or a platform that allows your opinions and ideas to matter because they can travel far and wide. On the positive side, take a look at the outsized impact of a movement like Black Lives Matter, which achieved incredible reach in a short amount of time thanks to a powerful and mobilized platform. But let’s also take a look at the Koch brothers: two individuals with such enormous wealth that it allows them to directly influence national elections in an outsized way.

  So again, let’s go back to the “we” in the very center, the area inside the smallest circle. Here’s where you’d see your billionaire one percenters and your highest level of elected officials. Here’s where you’d also find the easiest access to the machine that powers the political parties—let’s call it the apparatus. Step back from that inner circle into the next level, a slightly larger circle, and you’d find people like the CEOs and lobbyists and venture capitalists. Step back again: within the boundary of each circle you’ll find more and more people of a greater diversity, a larger group, further from the center of power, with less and less access to the apparatus. Sometimes the borders of these circles overlap, allowing people to cross into multiple categories, like a Venn diagram. But overall, the borders are rigid. If you are in one of the larger circles, you’ll have a damn hard time finding your way into a smaller one, or anywhere near the apparatus.

  We need to find a way to break the boundaries that separate these concentric circles: allowing power and influence and, yes, money to flow more easily back and forth between them. I’m talking about allowing access and flow between the Dreamers, environmentalists, Silicon Valley techies, Generation Z, LGBTQ+ people, progressives, activists, Hollywood, elderly folks, Bernie bros, Southern Blacks, Muslims, labor unions, baby boomers, Latinos, moderates, the differently abled. Just to start. The largest “we,” the one that contains people at the margins, needs to be able to access the power at the core.

  And you know what? It’s happening. The apparatus is being infiltrated. There’s a generation of people, millennials and Gen Zers, those who have been influenced and bolstered by coming of age under a Black president, who feel emboldened by watching Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Sharice Davids, Ayanna Pressley, and Jahana Hayes sworn into the House of Representatives. Young people’s voices and ideas are being reflected in measures like the call for a Green New Deal, a visionary stimulus package that tackles climate change and income inequality, or the calls against Trump’s move to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, which fell flat.

  Slowly but surely, we are inching toward power. But we’re talking about inches of progress. At the time I’m writing this, Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas are passing abortion BANS. Clearly, limiting or dismantling a woman’s right to control her own reproductive capacities exiles a whole hell of a lot of people—anyone with a uterus, that is—from the “we.”

  We must be vigilant, we must be relentless, we must be demanding. No one is going to throw open the doors to the apparatus and let us pull the levers and switch out the cogs.

  Apparatus, apparatus. What is the apparatus, you ask? The apparatus is the machine that makes a political party function. For example, when folks speak about “the Democratic Party,” they are really referring to the apparatus. In part it’s composed of entities including, but not limited to: the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (which works to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives), the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (which works to elect Democrats to the Senate), the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (which focuses on recruiting, supporting, and electing Democrats to positions in local government), super PACS (political action committees that can solicit unlimited donations from individuals), and the Democratic Governors Association (which provides party support to the election and reelection of Democratic gubernatorial candidates). The apparatus also contains consultants and other people who directly impact the choices we have as voters and influence who actually gets elected to office, and then, of course, the elected officials themselves.

  Now, on the other side of the aisle, there is a comparable Republican Party apparatus. The major difference between the two apparatuses are the factions (constituencies, if you will) that fuel the machine, their apparatus. The Republican Party apparatus has only three factions, I would argue: conservatives, Tea Party Republicans, and Trump Republicans. If you put six conservatives in a room and ask them what conservatives believe, they will largely give you six versions of the same answer. Same thing goes for the Tea Party Republicans and for your Trump Republicans. But put six progressives, liberals, and self-identified Democrats in a room, and ask them what, respectively, progressives, liberals, or Democrats believe, and you are liable to get six different answers. Therein lies the challenge and also the opportunity when it comes to controlling the Democratic Pa
rty apparatus (because this is still about power). A wider variety of voices means more excellent ideas. It also means it can be more difficult to get people to agree and align.

  You know what powers the apparatus of the Democratic Party? The different factions of people who make up the wider and wider circles of “we.” We’re talking about the Blue Dogs, Black women, Team Hillary, Democratic Socialists, rural Dems, liberal baby boomers, Obama-Biden Democrats, Labor, Berniecrats, lefty millennials, the list goes on. If we took time, we could list 150 factions, I bet. All of these factions collectively power the Democratic apparatus. Some factions are happy with the way the apparatus runs, and willingly pump their energy into it. Other groups are not so happy and withhold or withdraw their efforts, possibly endangering their ability to be effective. At times, the factions may find it very hard to unite in order to change the apparatus, even if that change is for the better in the long run. But in the end, the apparatus that is the Democratic Party is nothing without the fuel—it can’t function. So the question now is how the party can join its constituent parts to move forward as a collective whole.

  Institutions are nothing without the people who support them; if the apparatus and the factions don’t figure out how to talk to one another, the Democratic Party is destined to perpetual infighting and stagnation. Even beyond the future of the Democratic Party, the very essence of our country, the success of the American experiment, is not possible without the buy-in and participation of the people.

  To date, only some factions of the “we” have enjoyed the benefits of full participation in the apparatus. In reaction to that, over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve seen movements arise that I would call “apparatus adjacent.” These are movements made up of individuals and people who don’t necessarily fit into a preexisting faction, and who point their criticisms at the apparatus from the outside instead of from within. It’s not necessarily that these adjacent movements want to be a part of the apparatus and aren’t being let in; it’s that all of their goals might not be perfectly aligned with the powers that be, so they find it more powerful to agitate from the outside. At one point, the Tea Party was apparatus-adjacent; over time it’s been sucked into the Republican Party apparatus as its goals became more aligned with the GOP as a whole, its ideas became more mainstream, and its leaders started winning seats. Trump Republicans were apparatus-adjacent at one point; now Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America, the head of the Republican Party, and I would largely say that his brand of politics is now representative of just another faction of the Republican Party. As Joe Biden likes to say, “This is not your grandfather’s Republican Party!”