No, You Shut Up

by Symone D. Sanders

  When I had my fellowship at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, I talked to young, incredibly bright, and engaged people about what they wanted most from the Democratic Party. They said they wanted a voice, one that would be heard and acknowledged by the apparatus. To that I said: “Sure, the American people, you included, should be involved in the messaging of the Democratic Party. But we still need a leader.” So, I challenged them, “What does that leader need to look like? Who does that leader need to be?” The answer I heard was that they wanted somebody who is authentic, with real stories and a real heart. Someone who has a vision, who is looking to create an America that includes all the factions (a difficult task that requires a true visionary). We want someone with a diverse team so that the American people can see themselves in the president’s entourage. And we need someone who truly cares—about the people of this country, and the future of this nation. The American people want to see more folks who honestly, authentically, and genuinely give a damn about our democracy. And the only way for this to happen is for a candidate to communicate their authenticity effectively.

  That’s where I come in to play my part. I believe that Joe Biden has the qualities we need in our next president, and I’m out there just trying to contribute what and where I can to get him elected. I am just an operative, like others who are working their tails off this cycle. I am just an aide trying to do the best job for the candidate that I signed on to help; I am somebody who wants to get the VP across the finish line. Everything that I do on this campaign is in service of that. But I’m also somebody who knows exactly who I am. I don’t have to be the Black political person; I’m a political person. Yes, I’m Black; yes, I’m a millennial; yes, I’m a woman, and I bring my whole self to work every day.

  To be clear, I’m up for the job, for the hard work and the second-guesses and the shade. In some respects, it’s like being a broker: you can take credit when you advise someone to take stock in a company that skyrockets, but then you also have to take responsibility for one that tanks. You gotta embrace it all.

  Moving forward, instead of ragging on young people and the young at heart, the country needs to embrace us. Instead of downplaying our contributions, people need to recognize our power, especially now that we’re more ready than ever to wield it. Millennials are generally defined as those people born between 1980 and 1997. We are the children of the baby boomer generation, the largest generation in the history of America, and we compose a third (!) of the world’s population. In numbers alone, we are a force to be reckoned with. However, this is only one of many reasons why polling and engaging young people are so important. Our opinions matter because we are the up-and-coming businessmen and -women, entrepreneurs; we are college students, mothers, and fathers; we are also the first generation that came of age in the technology era.

  We are vital to the future and the current success of politics as a whole. Young people are quite literally the future of Democratic and Republican thought, and if the political powers that be do not engage us effectively, the apparatus will cease to function. So, the big question: How can we best be engaged?

  Any meaningful conversation about young people must look at the changes in this faction over time. Before the terrorist attack of 9/11, young people weren’t overly engaged. After 9/11, the consciousness around politics grew tremendously, and young people were voting more than ever. Since then, our opinions and priorities have continued to change. In the last five years, we have moved the political conversation to a more progressive place around issues ranging from affirmative action and trade to climate change and health care.

  While I was at Harvard I regularly spoke with young people about how to engage other young people in the political area. I dedicated a whole class to it and I invited John Della Volpe, director of polling at IOP and founder of SocialSphere, to join me for that lesson. The IOP’s Public Opinion Project was started by students in 2000 to gauge the opinions of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine on national politics in America. Eighteen years later, this poll was still running, producing annual statistics concerning the civic engagement of young Americans. It provides clear evidence of the progressive shift. IOP polling in 2018 found that the portion of young people who feel that immigration helps the country rather than harms it has grown, even in the span of four years, from one-fourth of the young people polled in 2014 to one third in 2018. On gun control, five years ago 49 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds supported stricter laws. Now that number stands at 64 percent. At the same time, young people’s identification with the Democratic Party specifically and its beliefs has waned: only 19 percent of young Americans call themselves capitalist, and only 66 percent of young Americans believe the Democratic Party cares about them. Accordingly, the Democratic apparatus is losing its sway with young people, and losing it fast. How, then, can we get them back? Or rather, what can the Democratic Party do to get us back?

  In speaking to Harvard students and also many other young people across the country, I have been reaffirmed that politics feels tangible for many of us today because of how we’ve broken through and commanded space since 2016. The change we have seen and the victories we have won are a direct result of our engagement. In the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, a movement led to an intergenerational coalition of people organizing around the ballot box. Thanks to that work, Wesley Bell, a young, Black leader in criminal justice reform, now heads the same prosecutor’s office that once failed to deliver justice to Michael Brown’s family. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s career ended with the election of Democratic Governor Tony Evers and Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes and history was made. Mandela is the first African American to be elected lieutenant governor in Wisconsin’s history. The people did that work. As we have already discussed, the 2018 midterm elections ushered in a class in Congress that is more diverse in thought, geography, background, and experience and more representative of the country than any other—we, the people, made that happen.

  And as 2020 rolls around, I am encouraged by the potential of our progress. This is our moment to reach higher, to show up where we failed to be present before, and to further influence the conversation and trajectory of our country.

  I truly do believe that we are at a pivotal moment in our story as a nation. I believe that the history books will review what happens over the course of the next year and a half and that that will literally dictate how life unfolds for the next twenty years. There are lasting implications for what is happening right now. We cannot afford another four years of this type of damage. As it is, it will take another generation and a half to recover from what has happened in the Trump administration thus far. We have to stand up and say this is who we would really like to be, and I and my colleagues need to go out there and make that case to the American people.

  That said, as a Black woman, I don’t believe anyone should blindly give their support or votes to any one political party or candidate, and no one should expect us to. The life and legacy of one of my idols, Fannie Lou Hamer, teaches us that we have to demand what we are due. Fannie was born in 1917, the last child of twenty (twenty!) born to Ella and James Townsend, who were sharecroppers in Montgomery County, Mississippi. By the age of six she was out in the cotton fields working alongside her siblings and her parents. The Townsend children often ate nothing more than greens with flour gravy or cornmeal with an onion for dinner, and tied rags on their feet when the weather got cold. Despite how hard it was just getting by, Ella and James saw to it that Fannie went to school. She continued her education until the eighth grade, which was rare for Black children (the school “year” for Black children ran only from December to March, so as not to interfere with field work. White children went to school three months more). The fact that she could read and write came as a surprise to the man she married in 1944, Perry Hamer. He put her in charge of keeping records for their own sharecropping work on a plantation in Ruleville, Mississippi. Fannie and Perry didn’t have any biological children
of their own, but they adopted two girls; then, in 1961 when Fannie had surgery to remove a benign tumor, she was unwillingly and unknowingly given a hysterectomy—the forced sterilization procedure was so common among Black women in the South at the time that it was called a “Mississippi appendectomy.”

  The tragedy was a call to action for Hamer, and it planted the seeds for her work as an activist for civil rights and human rights that took root and bore fruit over the rest of her life. In 1962, she went to her first Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting, where she learned that Black people were allowed to vote and immediately volunteered to register at the courthouse the next day. She later said, “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d a been a little scared. But what was the point of being scared? The only thing the whites could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” When she got back to the farm after visiting the courthouse (and being turned away for failing a rigged “literacy test” that asked her to interpret elements of the state constitution), she was fired from her job. In 1963, she went to a training hosted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and on the bus ride on the way back, she was arrested at a rest stop when the restaurant refused to serve some members of her group. She was taken to the county jail and beaten to within inches of her life for refusing to say, “Yes, sir,” to a police officer.

  Fannie Lou Hamer walked with a limp for the rest of her life, but she didn’t slow down. She helped form and then joined the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and in 1964 she ran for state Congress. She didn’t win, but her campaign speech still echoes: “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired. For so many years, the Negroes have suffered in the state of Mississippi.” Also in 1964, she gave a speech before the Democratic National Committee’s credentials panel to protest the all-white delegation representing the state of Mississippi (Martin Luther King Jr. also presented at the same event). By the 1968 convention, Hamer was seated as a delegate at the Democratic presidential nominating convention. The next few years she continued her antipoverty and civil rights work, but suffered from bouts of ill health. She died of cancer in 1977, but her legacy as one of the most courageous and powerful orators of the civil rights era endures.

  If Hamer can speak out so courageously, with her life at risk, you and I can stand up and say something too. We have to be willing to march into the convention hall and make our case in the face of misogyny, racism, and classism. We have to be willing to actively participate in order to put pressure on the levers of power to bend to our will. Because if we don’t, we have the most to lose. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it is Black women and women of color who will suffer the most. If the current administration and their allies are successful in gutting the Affordable Care Act, it is Black women and women of color who will be locked out of viable health-care options for ourselves and our families. While the wealth gap is already a chasm that deeply separates black and white Americans, it is Black women who are disproportionately affected. Literally, our issues, our lives, are on the ballot.

  These are pivotal times in our nation, especially in politics. The pendulum is swinging right now; there is movement and energy—but eventually, this battle will be over. The question becomes: Where will Black women, and marginalized voices of all kinds, sit on the political spectrum when the pendulum comes to rest? Will we have increased the number of Black women in elected offices around the country? Will we be able to claim victory in the form of a more equitable health-care system, economy, and criminal justice system? Will our political prowess finally translate to the financial resources and the power we are due, so that we can continue the work? None of the answers to these questions will come without our active participation. We have to vote, we have to march, we have to protest, we have to organize, we have to support local organizations, we have to leverage our positions to help create a more equitable environment for all of us.

  Epilogue

  Our country is in a dark, strange place. We are keeping children in cages. We are taking away rights that women have held for half a century, after generations of sacrifices by so many to achieve them. We have a president that consorts with our sworn foreign enemies. We are desperate: socially, economically, psychically. We are also more informed, diverse, and determined than we have ever been: as a country and as an electorate. And, perhaps most important, we are pissed as hell.

  We’re standing at the threshold of a transformation. But in order to achieve it, we need to commit to radical, revolutionary acts. I don’t mean lying down in the street or giving speeches to thousands of people. One way we can begin is by having constructive, uncomfortable conversations—in our homes, in our communities, on the national political stage—about the issues that matter to us. I’m not talking about having debates (though I do know a thing or two about prepping for them: Ugh. Eighteen-hour days in a bunker-like room eating sandwiches). So instead of debates, let’s start having constructive, critical conversations. Doing so leaves space for divergent views. For difference. For questioning. For innovation and creativity. For change.

  Yes, we must question the apparatus. But let’s start taking the next steps too. We must also work to refashion it, with new materials. We can’t simply critique the machine that makes the Democratic Party or the Republican Party run; we have to conceptualize ways to change it. Here’s how we can begin. First, if you feel called to represent the people of this nation, on the most micro or the most macro levels, DO IT. Don’t let the existing conditions of the apparatus deter you. Don’t let anyone tell you that someone “like you” has never done what you are attempting before, or never served in such a role before. You don’t need to wait your turn. And you sure as hell don’t need to apologize for being the first young person, Black person, Latino person, non-cis person, differently abled person, to do something. Second, for too long politicians have focused on answering the question of what “kind” of campaign we need to mount or run in order to win. As opposed to who am I and how can I run a campaign that is authentic and representative of who I am and what I believe. Third, (and this is for the Democrats in the room) we need to get more involved in party-wide organizing: when Democratic politicians rise in the ranks of American politics, some develop a sudden amnesia about the down-ballot positions they just held. As a party, we care too much about the big races and not enough about the small ones. Which is crazy because *taps mic* AMERICA’S POLICY IS MADE IN STATE LEGISLATURES! Priming young politicians through small offices is a central pole of the Republican Party tent that the Democrats don’t have, or it doesn’t seem very sturdy. It’s something we can learn from them. If we want to get past the GOP in 2020, we might need to adopt a tactic or two. We can begin with small victories and fill local and statewide positions with folks who really represent their constituencies. Democratic officers need to be representative of the changing times.

  As we head into one of the most bizarre presidential elections in history, the Democratic Party is at a crossroads. Some of the most pressing questions remain to be answered: What role will millennials, particularly millennials of color, play in the next chapter of American history? Will “progressives” be able to come together as a coalition and take their place at the table, adding strength to a party that many feel has betrayed them? Will Black women continue to support a party that has often viewed them as an afterthought, and if so, what does their support in 2020 look like? Where does the Democratic Party go from here?

  Our institutions are only as strong as the people who support them. The Democratic Party and our democracy as a whole are no different. Communication, I believe, is an art, and where institutions and organizations fail is communication and engagement. How long can a political party truly thrive without the support of the people who make the institution what it is? There is a price to pay for ignoring the will of the people and failing to engage with them. The crossroads we stand at in the Democratic Party specifically and in Ame
rican politics in general as we approach 2020 speaks to this very problem.

  I believe now more than ever that unconventional coalitions and movements are the key to shifting the conversation; they will put us on the right path toward a brighter tomorrow. I know because I’ve had a front-row seat, participating in events and coalitions that have resulted in actionable policy changes that have improved and will continue to improve lives. Young activists took to the streets from Ferguson to Baton Rouge to ring the alarm on police brutality while simultaneously launching policy and organizing platforms. Young people rose up after the Parkland shootings to demand that we rethink gun control. Young congresswomen of color are rethinking the economy and pushing the government to take action, real action, before climate change wreaks complete havoc on the world as we know it. People all over America right now are doing what they can where they can to save the republic. It is happening.

  It may not feel like it every day, but I promise you, we have the power. We can do this. From the office to the classroom, to the ballot box and the strike line, we have the power. Whether you live in a rural community or an urban center, our voices can and do change things. Find your place, ladies and gentlemen. Rise up. This is our country and our participation is mandatory for change. It is our engagement that is the source of the gains we have made and can continue to make in our country toward a more equitable, safe, healthy, and hopeful future for us all.

  Acknowledgments

  I never thought I could write a book, so I have to start by thanking the people who made this all possible. Sarah Haugen is not only my editor at HarperCollins, but one of the people who believed I could do this even when I did not. To my amazing agent team at United Talent Agency—Jennifer Campanile, Lia Aponte, Brandi Bowles, and Maddie Landon—thank you for stalking me on email, for your unwavering support, the real talk, and your repeated reminders (I read them). To Shannon O’Neill, the GOAT of all collaborators, who understood my vision, my passion, and my voice—you are now in the family, Shannon!