After my time on air, I was set to host a watch party at a club in DC. We snuck in Kai, who was then only ten years old, but I would do anything to make sure she was with me to watch the first woman become president of the United States. But, of course, that didn’t happen. I felt I had let Kai down. I didn’t want her to experience that type of disappointment, but she, like so many others, was so distraught. Ellen, Kai, and I left before the race was called and went back to our hotel room. I switched the TV off. I think the race wasn’t called until 3:00 in the morning, but we were already asleep by 1 a.m.—I was already a few sheets to the wind, as they say, just trying to drink away my sorrows.
Kai woke up the next morning crying and worried that her tennis coach would be deported. She had a real fear because of the rhetoric, xenophobia, and bigotry that Donald Trump expressed. It filled a ten-year-old girl with terror. When I look back at that moment, it’s emblematic of some of the larger fissures we have in our country.
The Myth
There’s a direct and ugly line from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. The Obama era was a period of what Slate magazine’s Jamelle Bouie described as a racial detente, or a temporary easing of racial hostilities, which subsided early in the Obama presidency but then boiled over into the election of Donald Trump. I bring this up because I want to dispel now and forever this so-called theory that voters in this country were economically anxious. I just don’t believe that. It would take a whole hell of a lot of financial anxiety to be able to set aside a candidate’s racism, bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia. The overarching fear was not economic but cultural—the fear that somehow, black and brown people were going to replace whites. In 2042, the United States of America will be “majority minority,” meaning that nonwhites will comprise the majority of US citizens, and that scares the shit out of some people. That’s what’s driving our current political discourse and rhetoric. Donald Trump speaks to those fears, and he pulled off the greatest con on Earth.
And yet, I don’t believe voters are that stupid. I don’t believe somebody who shits on a gold toilet can all of a sudden speak for what it means to be a factory worker or someone who toils on a farm every single day. I don’t believe someone who started off with a multimillion-dollar loan from his father understands the plight of working-class Americans. Nor do I believe, by any stretch of the imagination, that all of Trump’s supporters are racists; however, people were willing to set aside Trump’s bigotry.
After the election of Barack Obama, there was talk of a postracial America. But in his 2017 farewell speech, Obama said that “such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.”
Obama won the presidency because he turned out a diverse electorate to build on existing Democratic turnout, and he was a once-in-a-generation political talent. Still, it’s impossible to understand the past years, or the election of Trump, without fully grasping the prominent role of race in US politics.
Yes, racism has always been there, but a black president just damn near took the country over the edge politically. The toxicity surrounding Obama boiled over into our state politics. In South Carolina, political folks, including my friend Nikki Haley and my old opponent and now governor Henry McMaster, were unwilling to consider measures that literally would have kept white voters alive and kept all of our hospitals running. Medicaid expansion would have added four hundred thousand jobs in South Carolina and billions of dollars of revenue. But they, and virtually all other Republicans, were against it on the basis of their opposition to Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Trump’s win is a clear example of voters voting against their own self-interests. This is a not a new phenomenon, of course, but it’s never been enough to win an election—until now.
Racism is deeply rooted in our politics, and in our political relationships, as my father’s textbook demonstrates. Poor white people in South Carolina are not in any better position than poor black people—yet I’m not sure they understand that. My father often talks about an elderly white couple in Bamberg County who are so poor that they drive their lawnmower to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store—just like their black neighbors do. They prop a wooden board on the back of the mower so two can ride on it.
This couple is struggling like everyone else in the rural South. The fact that South Carolina is a deep red state makes it pretty likely that their friends and relatives will vote Republican, and have in the past, and therefore against policies that could help them eat and help them survive. But the legislators whom they choose vote against such policies because some people in certain political and media circles consider those policies to be geared toward helping only poor black people. How do poor whites square voting against their own interests?
My father believes that it all boils down to stereotypes and the alternate history South Carolinians have been taught to believe—that we black people didn’t have a thing to do with building this country, that we are lazy and childlike, that we were treated kindly by slaveholders. Some people still to this day believe that the Civil War was not fought over slavery and that we nearly destroyed South Carolina during Reconstruction. Some writers have observed that South Carolina exists in a parallel universe. Well, just maybe that has something to do with miseducation.
Don’t Be Selfish in Your Struggle
My grandmother always said, “You can’t fall off the floor.” It’s one of those sayings from older people that you never fully understand when you’re a kid. However, as time passes and you mature, you understand exactly what they were saying.
A lot of black folk have been on the floor with this gut punch of Donald Trump’s election, but a lot of others are joining us down here: gay Americans, Muslim Americans, the disabled, and women of every race. The rural white poor are down here too, except they’re just unreasonably expecting someone, Donald Trump, for instance, to help them up. So, we’ve been thrown to the floor—but now we can’t fall, or be pushed, any lower.
The challenge is getting people to understand that we can’t be selfish in our struggles. Yet a lot of my political allies, for some reason, are selfish.
I always tell people, you’re never going to find anybody who believes in a woman’s right to choose more than I do. I’ll be out there on the front lines, marching; however, when another young black man is murdered in the streets, a man who looks like me, who doesn’t get the benefit of his humanity, I expect those same white women I was marching with to march with me. This struggle against oppressive political power now requires accountability.
* * *
I’d have to write another book to explore the issues surrounding race and religion. But if I did, I’d argue that one of the more disappointing narratives of this racial divide in our country has been the silence of white, male, Christian evangelicals. People may roll their eyes about this, but I firmly believe that in my relationship with God, I’m probably going to be in line ahead of Jerry Falwell Jr. and other evangelical heirs like Franklin Graham III as they try to get into heaven.
Why haven’t these Christian leaders spoken up about the killings of black men by police? Why haven’t they supported the #MeToo movement or railed against immigrant children being taken from their families? Why were they silent in the aftermath of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia?
Race, religion, and power might be complicated, but ignoring compassion is malpractice.
* * *
Barack Obama was way too cautious about race, and black folk often got reactive measures that were insufficient for the occasion. Unless you ask conservatives and many white people, who often viewed Obama as siding with African Americans over the police, the thorniest issue for Obama was the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement, the police attacks it was confronting, and the white resentment it precipitated are partly attributed to Donald Trump’s political victory. A great deal of white frustration stemmed from the rise of Black Lives Matter and Obama’s tepid defense. I say, If you’re go
ing to go in, go all in, because you’re going to get blamed for it anyway.
Oftentimes, there’s a group of people who have been yelling at the top of their lungs for a long time but who have gone unheard. Back in the 1960s, some nameless civil rights protesters and marchers would carry signs that simply said, “I am a man.” Now we have a new wave of Black Lives Matter activists who have reignited that passion for activism—not out of some want, but out of pure necessity.
The question is, How many of us have to be murdered before someone does something? And if we wait on older Americans to do something, then the likelihood of it getting done isn’t high at all. It’s an undeniable fact that black lives matter, but some people like to say, “All lives matter.” However, that’s like saying at a breast cancer awareness rally that all cancer matters. It’s true: all lives matter; but there’s not a question about the value of police lives in this country or of white lives in this country. There is a question about the value of black lives—as there has been for about four hundred years.
Now, I may not be a card-carrying member of Black Lives Matter or an organizer for the movement, but I support them in everything they do. We have some disagreements about policy points and how things are done, but that’s how protest movements are—they’re messy.
A lot of my colleagues feel that activism must be accomplished outside the system. That’s necessary for some, for sure, but I look at the Julian Bonds and the Andrew Youngs of the past and know I want to be an activist from within. And I’m not alone. There’s Wes Bellamy, a city councilman in Charlottesville; Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin; Michael Blake, a New York state assemblyman; and many others. There’s Florida’s Andrew Gillum and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams. We’re a new generation of activists, and we believe our task is to deconstruct these systems of oppression from within.
There are many people and groups who, rather than being the antitheses of each other, are attacking the virus of hatred and racism, oppression and bigotry, from different angles. It’s all necessary. We would not have a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act today if we hadn’t had a black power movement and a Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and everything and everyone in between. Why attack from all fronts? Because you can’t merely protest in the streets without policy initiatives. It doesn’t matter if you’re chanting “I can’t breathe” to protest the death of Eric Garner if the police are not held accountable, legislatively and under the law.
So what do I want? I want the same thing my father wanted. I want what all of my “aunts” and “uncles” who were part of the civil rights movement wanted.
I want freedom.
What does that look like? Freedom from discrimination, including at the ballot box. Freedom from violence—from the domestic terrorism that took Clem Pinckney to the violence at the hands of police, who killed unarmed black folk like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Keith Lamont Scott, and Walter Scott. Freedom to live in communities where our children are not drinking water that contains lead, communities that have hospitals and safe neighborhoods. I want us to live up to our potential, which means equal schools, economic opportunity, and entrepreneurship.
Our challenge is broader than that of my dad’s generation. His generation was focused on equal access; they wanted to empower their communities economically, politically, and socially—but they also wanted to sit at the same lunch counters, drink from the same water fountains, go to the same schools.
I want this country I love to atone for slavery, for Jim Crow, for the prison-industrial complex, and for the attitude of ambivalence toward state violence against unarmed black men.
Like my father, and his father, and—I don’t doubt—his father too: we all deserve to be free and equal.
Afterword
Their Eyes Are Watching
We’re not sure where Stokely and Sadie get their large eyes from. When they look at you, it’s like they’re peering into your soul. Maybe their wise gazes come from them entering this world fighting, overcoming, and now they’re just watching for their mom and dad to make their next move.
After my wife barely survived their birth in January 2019, we were all able to go home, but the visceral terror of our next chapter had only begun to unravel. Ellen and I watched Sadie die a little bit every day. Sadie was born with biliary atresia, a rare condition in infants. Simply put, it’s a disease of the bile ducts and liver. The illness strikes about 1 out of 12,000 babies in the nation.
The first year of Sadie’s life was brutal on all of us, but she’s strong, just like Ellen. I find it sadly poetic that Sadie’s mother would wrestle for her life to ensure our two babies got here and that little Sadie would work just as hard to make sure she stayed. Stokely, my boy, is strong in his own way. Because we had to pick up and move, he was without us for a long period of time. Meanwhile, Sadie got sicker, but there was nothing we could do. There were nights when Ellen would ask, “Did God give us this baby just to take her away?” We were questioning faith and doctors—we were questioning everything. But in the end, all we had was God, our faith, and the good physicians at Duke University.
We waited and waited for a transplant. It was my job to make sure Ellen could make it day by day. Sadie’s belly got really big, she was so thin, and her skin turned yellow. Those months of waiting were pure hell.
We were on the donor’s list for ninety-three days. Each day was extremely difficult because we were watching our daughter die. As fate would have it on Friday, August 30, I received a frantic call from my niece, Skyla, with my wife wailing in the background. Ellen’s father, Dr. Rucker, had just died. They found him on his tractor. He was clearing rocks and boulders in the woods, preparing for deer hunting season. He had a massive heart attack, literally dying doing what he loves. So I rushed out and drove an hour and a half home. I called my brother and sister, who came to the house as well. Ellen eventually traveled to Lancaster to be with her family, but I stayed with the twins. Kai was her mother’s protector. While I was with Sadie and Stokely, she took care of Ellen.
On the same day, Ellen called to say that Duke had contacted her to say they had a liver. I told her not to get excited because sometimes it’s a dry run, and it ends up not really working. I said let’s just keep doing what we have to do. We packed the car on Sunday and drove to Duke. We were at the hospital all day preparing for the transplant. We knew when the liver arrived because we could hear the helicopter land. The entire process was so fascinating. At the time of the surgery, everything is timed out. So Sadie is open, her liver is out, and the other liver is also there, ready to be put into her. There’s not a second to be wasted. It’s excruciating. Our little girl is having a transplant and I’m just sitting there nervous with my wife, but Ellen wasn’t nervous. Her mind was occupied with planning her father’s funeral. After the transplant, I told Ellen to go back to Lancaster to grieve with her family; I stayed three days at the hospital with Sadie. Several days later, Vince Carter would play an important role. He was with Kai before and after the funeral, which was on September 7. Our family might be nontraditional, but we are always there for one another.
After we watched Sadie come back alive after receiving a transplant, we wanted to make sure treatment is accessible to all children suffering from liver disease, so we established the Sadie Ellen Sellers Fund at Duke Children’s Hospital.
Today, Sadie gives you open-mouth kisses and runs around the house. She’s very vocal, but Stokely talks even more. He’ll tell you exactly how he feels, and Sadie will follow her brother, laughing the entire time.
She overcame her illness, and it’s my job to ensure she doesn’t have to overcome injustices. Now that Ellen and I are parents of three black children in Trump’s America we must get to the work of changing the world. It’s our job to help deconstruct the systems of oppression that have consumed the lives of many African Americans. It’s a challenge that has become very real for us as we watch our children grow before our eyes. We don’t want Sadie
and Stokely to live in a world where there’s only dirty water to drink or where there are no hospitals. To be very blunt and honest, I don’t want Sadie or Kai to end up like Sandra Bland, or Stokely like Philando Castile. I want them to be able to live to their full potential. I want them to realize there is a crown above their head.
Ellen and I have a big challenge ahead of us. The repercussions of Trump won’t end in four years—it will be with us forever. The country will need a complete exorcism. Like my mother says, “We are going to need some sage.”
I was thinking about my children’s future while being interviewed by CNN’s John Berman about Sadie’s transplant. I imagined clearing a path for my daughter, who I hope and believe will grow up to have her finger on the trigger of her own future.
“Those ninety days were hell,” I told Berman. “So now we are just paving a way for Sadie to become the next president of the United States.”
Dear Donor Family,
We are writing to express our sincerest gratitude. Words cannot truly do just for the appreciation we have for your family. Our Sadie was very ill and in desperate need of a new liver. Your family member gave our little girl the gift of life.
Sadie is a twin and was born with a rare disease called biliary atresia. She was sick her entire life until her liver transplant. We agonized for ninety-three days on the waiting list just being prayerful and hopeful. On August 30, our lives changed in so many ways. The patriarch of our family, Sadie’s grandfather, who was not sick, died at around 9 a.m. that morning, and at 5 p.m. that evening our daughter’s doctors called and said that there was a liver for our little girl.
We know that this time in your lives is very painful, and we could never truly understand that pain. We are so sorry for your loss. Please know that we will honor your family and be forever grateful for the gift that you have given our little girl. Her life was saved because of you. For that, our hearts are full of thanks.
My Vanishing Country Page 17