"Some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity."
-Fred Hampton
'If you have trouble figuring out whether you're for Biden or Trump, then you ain't Black! So sayeth the DNC prescribed lord of liberal progressivism.' As shocking as that sentiment may have sounded coming from a career white supremacist like Joe Biden in 2020, this is what marginalized people of all shades have been telling ourselves for decades and that includes pale-skinned Queer folk like me.
By November of that year of our lord Satan, my people in the trans community were practically throwing up blood, living in a nightmare that seemed to get worse by the hour. While Donald Trump gassed churches and starved Yemen, his flunkies across the Bible Belt passed a vile slew of aggressively fascistic laws that seemed to be designed to torture gender nonconforming children into suicide. Doctors were being threatened with felonies for treating them while their own parents were being investigated for child abuse just for acknowledging their right to exist.
I saw the effects of this campaign of cultural terrorism firsthand on the faces of my own friends and family. I also saw the craven way in which the Democratic Party used this fear to hijack their votes without doing a goddamn thing to earn them. Suddenly, Joe Biden, the pitiless architect of a prison system that targets a higher percentage of transwomen of color than nearly any other demographic in the country, became our only hope, the straight white savior who could shelter us from Donald Trump and his hordes of bible-swinging backwoods savages. Sadly, it worked. Again.
This sick game has been going on for far too long. The relationship that minorities like mine have with the Democratic Party is nothing short of abusive. Those super predators have systematically degraded our self-esteem, groomed us into believing that we don't deserve any better and then left us in one ditch after another with nothing to show for our trouble but bruises and track marks.
Republican governors have continued their fascist crusade against the civil liberties and basic human dignity of trans kids and Joe Biden and his handlers have stood by with their filthy hands in their pockets and done absolutely nothing.
And we're not alone. Last time I checked cops were still shooting Black boys on mopeds and migrants continue to get mangled by the flailing police state at our prolapsed border. The Democrats treat us all like sadistic white pimps on a bender but thankfully some of daddy's tricks are getting heroically mouthy.
After months of watching the man they voted for in droves facilitate an open genocide against their brothers and sisters in the Gaza Strip, the long silent Arab and Muslim communities of this country are in open revolt against Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
With a rapidly growing community in the battleground state of Michigan, these folks have slyly recognized their strategic value and told their gladhanding DNC bamboozlers to put up or fuck off, hitting the streets armed with signs that read "Abandon Biden" and organizing a campaign calling on all Democrats with a functioning conscience to vote "uncommitted" in Michigan's Democratic primary.
The Biden junta is listening. In fact, they appear to be scrambling scared and it is a beautiful sight to behold. First, they sent the manager of Biden's 2024 bid, Julia Chavez Rodriguez, to Dearborn to quietly meet with the local officials of America's Muslim capital. These local officials, including Mayor Abdullah Hammoud promptly sent Joe's apparatchik packing and issued a public statement that they would not be meeting with anymore campaign officials, only policymakers.
When Team Biden sent them a groveling national security advisor named Jon Finer for a closed-door meeting, they chewed his head off and leaked an audio recording of that scumbag admitting that Biden fucked up but had no plans to make it better with any actual policy changes.
This may all sound like little more than pageant drama to jaded radicals like me who have long given up on the ballot box as a tool for anything but theater, however, I believe that this clusterfuck might actually have the potential to become something way bigger than 2024. One of the most marginalized minorities in the country has recognized their untapped power and announced that they aren't willing to sell it for empty promises anymore.
All at a time in which the entire third world, from the lawyers of Pretoria to the militias of Hodeida, are uniting against America's latest proxy Nakba. And the once invisible Muslims of the Rust Belt aren't the only irate demographic breaking bad either.
With an increasingly incoherent Joe Biden trailing the openly racist Donald Trump in the polls by wider and wider margins, minorities are leading the exodus. According to the Roper Center, Biden's support among the Black voters who handed him his Hail Mary against Bernie in 2020 has shrunk from 87% to 63% in less than four years. Among Donald Trump's favorite scapegoats in the Hispanic community the plunge has been even more perilous, dropping from 65% to a downright pitiful 39%.
The woke wonks on cable news are scratching their heads and reading the tea leaves for answers but it doesn't take a gerbil-brained talking head to know which way the wind blows. The various fucked-over classes in this country are sick and tired of being pandered to every few years and then left to swing from the branches like strange fruit until the next election cycle.
The mighty Muslims of Michigan have the right idea getting organized and publicizing their grievances unfiltered but if you're asking this proudly radicalized minority, they aren't going nearly far enough. We are all getting pissed and we are getting loud, but we are still essentially demanding a better contract from a party of straight white slumlords.
Their photogenic tokens aside, the Democratic Party is still a machine run by the same predominantly Anglo-Saxon, cis hetero, corporate hegemons who also own their supposed enemies in the GOP. They all talk culture, but they all vote for more war and bigger prisons. It's a fucking scam and even if it wasn't, the notion that one or two universalist parties could ever fairly represent dozens of colonized minorities in a nation built on genocide and slavery is offensively absurd.
The radical reality is that what we really need is our own goddamn parties, all of us. A Muslim Intifada Party, a Queer Liberation Party, a Black Power Party, a Chicano Party, a Queer Chicano Party, a Black Muslim Party, a Queer Black Muslim Party... as many parties as there are tribes disenfranchised by the assimilationist crematorium of the American melting pot.
And our parties shouldn't be modeled after the Democrats and the Republicans either. They should be modeled after the parties of other oppressed minorities throughout history and across the globe. Parties like the Black Panthers, Hezbollah, the Brown Berets, the EZLN, and the YPG. Parties devoted to building thriving, self-reliant communities, totally autonomous from the state. Parties with their own schools, gardens, farms, militias, and hospitals.
And to all my straight white liberal "allies" in the peanut gallery, no, this isn't about separatism. It is about power and self-determination. It's very easy to sing kumbaya and give peace a chance when inclusion means including other people into your culture. Liberalism is a privilege people like me can't afford anymore and we're through begging. We want our communities back and we want the pimps in the DNC to pack up their shit and get out. But more than anything, what I want is what Fred Hampton wanted with the original Rainbow Coalition. I want a radical diversity that reflects the many shades of a truly post-colonial rainbow, and I don't think that's too radical to ask for.
But this all begins with abandoning Joe Biden and the two-party junta that thinks we owe them anything but a kick in the ass. All power to all the people because all the people deserve power.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
* Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday
* Ahead by Wire
* These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra
* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor
* Everything Right Now by Arcade Fire
* What Have You Done for Me Lately by Janet Jackson
* Power To the People by John Lennon
* Bored by Waxahatchee
* Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan
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