People are still coping with the fact that Donald Trump is now our President-elect. At some point, we have to move beyond coping, and determine how to prepare ourselves for the next four years. No one has a perfect answer on where we should start, who we should start with and what the key priories for black people should be. Who are we going to choose as allies? What will be our national cry for the acknowledgement of our pain?
Vic Mensa has some answers to these questions. In a guest essay for Billboard, he shares his hope for what we should and could do next. Right out of the gate, he talks about what it was like for him waking up the morning after the election:
"Then, when I woke up in the morning, I realized that this had to happen because we've been pacified by having Barack [Obama] in office. That pacification would have only continued by having Hillary elected."
Some may say this is a pretty hard way to come at us, but it is a possibly truthful one nonetheless. When President Obama won in 2008, we didn't know what to do with ourselves. We were elated to have a president that was black. But did we become comfortable having a black president the second time around? Think about our children and those who are young enough to be born during his election, but still old enough to understand. All they have ever seen is a black president, Barack Obama. So what do they do when they're forced to go from a president that's inclusive, to one who excludes people based on the color of their skin, their sexuality or religion? Like our children, we are used to this being our reality, one we have taken for granted and hoped Hillary Clinton would protect once she became president. The egg is now on our face as we try to pick up the pieces.
If Trump being elected was supposed to wake Black America up, it did. Not that we were sleep to the constant struggle that comes with being black but sleep to the fact that racism is bigger than we could've ever imagined. For that reason, Mensa tells us that his fight doesn't end here no matter what the outcome." I could have felt a bit more comfortable but a felt sense of security had Hillary won, because the things that I've been talking about this year and going hard on are the same. Those things have not changed. They've just manifested themselves in slavery, Jim Crow Laws, segregation and mass incarceration."
Since the fight is the same, are our allies the same? Vic Mensa believes that we should start to fight these issues by being inclusive. He cites the work of Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton.
"When Martin Luther King starts working on a poor people's movement and he starts organizing people of all races to recognize how they're being oppressed, police start cutting him off. Like Fred Hampton, when he was in Chicago, and the Black Panthers were uniting with Latinos and Asian revolutionary groups, they kill you in your sleep. So obviously, there's something to be found there."
Vic Mensa has a few more good points and stories to share in his essay, like the story of his sisters who don't live in Chicago, but do live in other major cities and feel the fear of being a black woman in America. This is a fear that they voice to Vic who in return tells them: "Well, you know what? You should have already been on your toes. You have to be looking over your shoulders and watching your back before this election if Hillary was elected, because this nation was not built to serve your interests." His response is the truth, but there should also be call to action for black men out there. Don't overlook our fear by telling us what we should've been doing. Instead, do more to protect us and acknowledge our pain in this struggle.
With that being said, all in all, he's right. This isn't our America. This isn't our country. It won't serve our interests. We need to step up with a plan and include allies. We do need to expand the national cry of "Black Lives Matter." We need to start thinking about ways we can promote this idea and fight as a unified force. We have to change our approach from just telling people what they have done wrong. "We can't do that anymore. We've seen how that's not powerful enough. We need to unify and decide what it is that we really believe in – that's what we need to fight for. We can't just fight against injustice. We gotta fight for justice."
Way to start a conversation Vic Mensa, it'll be interesting to see how we continue it.
You can read his full essay over at Billboard.
