During my time at Harvard, I invited a couple guest speakers to my class, young people who are standing up and making the statement “This isn’t right,” and doing something about it. I wanted my students to see examples of people involved in actively agitating for policy change, rather than only studying or talking about it. One of them was Samuel Sinyangwe. Here’s the one-sentence version of Sam’s early life: he has a Tanzanian dad and a Jewish mom, grew up in Florida, graduated from Stanford, and started working for a nonprofit in Oakland shortly after graduation. Then George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black seventeen-year-old, in the neighborhood where Sam used to go to soccer practice. Sam’s life changed that day. He immediately felt the impact of what had happened. “I could have been Trayvon. That’s why it hit me so personally, and that’s why I realized that I needed to be doing something [about the problem].” He started feeling distracted at work, but instead of wasting time on Instagram he got involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. But he wasn’t content to stand on the sidelines of the movement; he wanted to use his knowledge and skills to make a real difference, to look for actionable policy solutions to the problems of violent police encounters with young Black people. So Sam cofounded Mapping Police Violence—the first comprehensive plotting of incidents across America. He then helped launch Campaign Zero, an organization focused on ending police violence, with fellow activists Brittany Packnett Cunningham and DeRay Mckesson. And so, at a very young age, Sam found himself inside the apparatus, speaking his radical message face-to-face with presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, offering advice about ways to address racist police brutality in America.
Another guest speaker in my Harvard class was Alencia Johnson, a young Black woman who served as director of public engagement for Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, but at the time held the same job title at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Planned Parenthood is an essential American institution now at the center of an epic battle for women’s reproductive rights in this country, which are under assault in a manner not seen in fifty years. Alencia went to Planned Parenthood after working on Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 because she wanted to “shift public opinion and influence culture change among perceptions of reproductive rights, particularly among communities of color as well as young people.” After joining PP, Alencia created her own department called Constituency Communications, in which she pushed Planned Parenthood to participate in the immigration fight, invest in Black women’s leadership, and focus on women “left at the margins: women of color, trans people, young people, low income folks and people in rural areas. [At the time] there was no campaign to speak to them specifically.” Alencia made it her mission to change that, and PP is now at the forefront of the fight to maintain and strengthen women’s reproductive rights.
Stories of people like Sam and Alencia remind us that it’s important to consider that factions in the Democratic Party—millennials of color, Black women, activists—overlap, but they contain different constituencies, different communities of people with different needs and goals and priorities. Yes, the factions of the Democratic Party power the apparatus, but they also shape and drive the conversation. For many factions, that is their principal aim: to move the conversation, not necessarily to win mayoral elections, gubernatorial races, or seats in the House and the Senate. The members of these factions and their leaders care about the future of the issues of police brutality, marginalization of Black women in the workplace, justice reform, reproductive rights, and much more, but they do not necessarily care about the future of the Democratic Party as a whole. If the Republican Party was suddenly willing to push their agendas, some factions might find themselves moving to the other side of the congressional aisle. For some, party affiliation matters less to them than their issues and who will support them.
Now, I don’t think there’s going to be a major defection any time soon. But it is worth considering, and it’s also worth recognizing that factions themselves can fall victim to the same predilections of the apparatus. While we are correct to critique the apparatus, we cannot forget to examine the factions too. A faction like some of the women’s movement groups who have historically written checks they couldn’t cash: some claim to support all women, but center around the perspectives of white women; some advocate for women’s right to choose, but aren’t making sure Black and Latino women have the choice to equitable treatment in the workplace. Before any intersection of coalitions can occur, those coalitions respectively must be honest in keeping to their goals and delivering on what they say they are going to do. A collective mission cannot be achieved when everyone is operating with a to-each-their-own kind of attitude.
So how can the factions on the left best intersect? Where do we—millennials of color, Black women, progressives—go from here? First off, it’s good to recognize we have made strides in shifting the status quo in the apparatus. For example, Tom Perez, the chair of the DNC, is the first Latino chair in its history. But what’s most important is not that we have a colorful apparatus that functions the same way as it always has. We need a colorful apparatus that reflects the wants and needs of the colorful factions.
We also need more substantive color in the Democratic Party—Black and brown mayors, governors, senators, and congresspeople not asking for but demanding change. Key leaders in factions of the Democratic Party need to look outside their straight line of vision to the others in their periphery working hard to achieve their own worthy aims. Perhaps we, as members of seemingly separate and independent factions, haven’t yet tried hard enough.
That said, in further proof of progress, we now have some young radical revolutionaries sitting in some of the highest offices in the land, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Lauren Underwood, Ayanna Pressley, and Sharice Davids. When you are an activist and you enter into education, politics, business, or other realms, sometimes you have to rethink your own activism and radicalism. What used to be a demand becomes a conversation, a collaboration, even, with people who are of a different mind-set than you—AOC now has a job to legislate, make deals, get things done. She’s no longer just sitting outside protesting; that worked before, but her tactics have to shift now that her position has shifted. She’s inside the apparatus. She has more access to real power. To yield that power to its greatest effect, she has to know how to work the apparatus from the inside out. We’re all waiting to see how it’s going to shake out in terms of her ability to create measurable change over the long run, but I admire what she’s doing in the meantime.
For instance, she has been willing to call out Democrats just as loudly as she does Republicans when she sees them falling down on the job, or just not living up to the expectations that people have of their leaders. AOC is out there, taking on her allies as well as her adversaries.
Piece of Advice
Be Ready to Take on Your Allies as Well as Your Adversaries
Everyone reading this book, whether in your head or IRL, is willing to take on that person who is very obviously, and obnoxiously in many cases, ideologically different from you; you know you are waiting on them to say something so you can pounce, like waiting for the kid sister you’re jealous of to screw up. It’s easy to go to war when you have an enemy. But far too many of us are not willing to take on our allies, accomplices, friends, sorority sisters, fraternity brothers, when we see them acting in a way that’s not in keeping with our values or beliefs. We’re scared to upset the circle of people around us, to cause trouble in our own lives. But that’s where real change and conversation happen.
Dr. King took on his allies when he stood up and questioned the same senators that helped him pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act—when he went to them talking about fair housing and poverty, and these folks could not be bothered. The only reason we have the Fair Housing Act today is that in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination, Congress rushed to pass the act to pay homage to him. Because when he asked for it,
they told him no, he was crazy.
In a 1967 TV interview, MLK said pointedly that he realized a lot of the folks on the front lines with him in the lead-up to the Civil Rights Act weren’t marching because they cared about racial activism. These were people who were responding to the extremeness of the treatment of Black people in the South. They were responding to the images of the fire hoses and the dogs. They weren’t responding to the underlying issue. Much like now. We hear and see a lot of responding to the extremeness of our current political climate—to the president, to the kids in the cages at the border, separated from their families—but for the most part are we really thinking deeply about the actual issues? There are people who say about the Democratic Party, why are we eating our own? But just remember, Dr. King spoke out against the Vietnam War when it meant going against people who had supported him on other measures. We need to learn to speak up and speak out, sometimes against the people who have always been with us. Because guess what: truth and justice don’t care if I know you, whether we are friendly, whether we have a history. Sometimes to pursue the greater good, you have to be blind to personal allegiances and do what the situation demands. That’s what this is really about.
Everybody knows about the Dreamers—the young folks brought to this country as minors by parents who immigrated illegally. Everybody wants to talk about them, but nobody wants to talk about how we got here. Back when Obama was president, Congress, as usual, failed to act. The immigration activist community, the Dreamers, all these groups felt defeated. There was a segment of folks that said, “We are going to keep fighting.” Some people said, “Don’t take on Obama; just wait, he’s going to do the right thing.” These other folks didn’t wait; they didn’t listen. They backed the White House into a proverbial corner. They made it very uncomfortable and politically untenable for the White House to not do something on this issue. That’s where DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—the policy that allows some individuals who arrived in this country as the children of undocumented immigrants to defer deportment and become eligible for work permits) came from—not because President Obama woke up and said, “I want to do something good today,” but because he had to act (thanks in large part to Congress’s inaction). It was demanded of him, by an ever-bigger, ever-louder group of people. The people fighting for the Dreamers were willing to take on their allies. It’s a lesson for the rest of us. We need to get serious about what it means if we want to be on the side of truth and social justice.
When people claim to be radical revolutionaries in the spirit of X or Y, they claim to be doing that really important social justice work; they claim to be the next Malcolm, Coretta, or whoever else. But they aren’t doing the hard, uncomfortable work of being unpopular. In the weeks after Dr. King’s assassination, some opinion polls said that Dr. King had brought his assassination upon himself. You know, he was a very hated man at that particular moment. Even people who had once been with him, who had supported or followed him, had turned against him. This was partially because people were pissed off that Dr. King had started going on about all this other stuff instead of civil rights, which was what the proverbial they thought Dr. King was only supposed to be about. According to them, that is. When Dr. King started pushing hard on issues of poverty, he wasn’t just talking about Black people. He was talking about poor white people. Poor Asian American people. Poor indigenous people. Dr. King was saying that no one can truly enjoy the fullness of the American dream if he or she is hampered economically. Eradicating the slums, solving fair housing. These were things that some people said did not concern Dr. King, but he disagreed. That’s what being a radical revolutionary requires: if we want to be good leaders, we must be good community members. You can’t do that without standing up, even to people who have supported you in the past.
For instance, it was a sad and difficult moment when on the first day of Black History Month in 2019, a story broke that the governor of Virginia had appeared in a picture in his 1984 medical school yearbook dressed in a costume and blackface or as someone dressed up as a Klansman. Fast-forward a week; then we found out that the Virginia attorney general acknowledged that he had worn blackface at a party while an undergrad. Then the next thing you found out, hours later, was that the lieutenant governor was accused of sexual assault. I know the lieutenant governor; I considered him a friend, I worked on the campaign to elect him. When the news broke that a second woman had come forward and accused him of raping her while in college, I was on CNN. The producer came on during a break and said we were going to take the news live. Oh Lord. I had heard allegations earlier in the week and honestly hoped I would get through this segment without the news breaking. I was unsuccessful.
Jake Tapper came back to the panel, and on the air he said, “Symone, I don’t want to put you in an awkward position”—in my head I was thinking, Well, it’s about as awkward as it gets—“but you know the lieutenant governor; what do you think?”
Now let me tell you, at this point it was three months after a moment in the Kavanaugh hearings where I felt it necessary to share my story of assault. One night in college, I’d had too much to drink and someone whose advances I had previously rebuffed on numerous occasions took advantage of the fact that I could not consent. The next morning he denied raping me, but that is exactly what he did. I sat at that little clear Plexiglas table on CNN, and I shared what had happened to me.
Now I was sitting at that same table, on that same program, being asked how I was going to react to these allegations against the lieutenant governor, who was also a friend. So I said, “Jake, I know the lieutenant governor as a colleague, a friend, a brother, but I must say, I have been disappointed with how he initially chose to handle the allegations—disparaging the women’s character. It has been disappointing, but hearing this I think he has to resign. I also think it’s unfortunate that it seems the only person in Virginia who may suffer the consequences of their actions will be the Black lieutenant governor. I think some other people made bad choices and they gotta resign too, the governor included.” And Jake went, “Even the attorney general?” And I was like, “If you ever wore blackface, assaulted someone, etc., I do not think you can serve. I think service is a privilege; it is not a right.” Then the segment ended.
I knew what was coming. That night and weekend I got a lot of phone calls and a lot of emails from people I know personally. Folks telling me, You didn’t have a Black man’s back. Why would you throw him under the bus? But like I told y’all, it’s not truth and justice with an asterisk that says *unless you know them. We will be faced with real-life decisions on a regular basis about who it is we really want to be, and where we want to stand when it comes to our values and allegiances.
Chapter 5
Get Out of Line
Who doesn’t remember being told to wait your turn as a kid? Who doesn’t remember being admonished to “be nice”? With apologies to Ms. Goose, my kindergarten teacher, I’m now going to have to tell you that if we want real change in our country, if we really want to address racial inequality, climate change, the mess that is our health-care system, the eroding quality of our public schools, our country’s opportunity gap, we have got to wake up and get out of line. We need to act with the urgency that these problems require, and with the attitude that we can and will find solutions. Waiting in line and being nice aren’t real options anymore.
I often wonder why everyone except older white men are constantly being told that they need to “wait their turn.” We need to deprogram ourselves, get over the brainwashing we’ve endured by hearing this message over and over and over. Growing up, folks told me that if I put my head down and worked hard, my talent and contributions would be recognized. I have since come to realize that this is simply, unfortunately, not true. Sometimes you can be the best—by virtue of natural talent, grit, intelligence, or hard work—and the proverbial “they” still might not pick you. Why? Perhaps because they don’t think you’re palatable enough. Or experienc
ed enough. Or a good “fit.” I’ve certainly been told each of those things.
But whatever the reason for the no, don’t let them keep you from what’s yours. I wouldn’t be where I am today, working as a senior advisor to a Democratic presidential candidate at twenty-nine years old, if I had waited for permission or stepped back to let others who seemingly knew better pass. The most inspiring change makers I know grabbed their seats at the head of the table without waiting for a place to clear, or hanging out hoping for “the right time” to squeeze in.
Here’s another thing. And now I’m looking directly at the ladies. We don’t HAVE to be nice. We should all be kind, men and women alike, but this concept of “nice” in the sense of being deferential or accommodating is patriarchal bull. Niceness is a concept that only ever applies to women. Rarely do we hear someone telling a man to be nice! Men who are aggressive are told they are determined, competitive. Women are told they are being bitches. Be aware that fading into the background and putting aside your opinions if they aren’t popular won’t get you rewarded; more often it will just leave you frustrated. Don’t get it twisted—I hope people think I’m a kind person, and a good person, but nice? Nah. I don’t really care if they think I’m nice.
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