No, You Shut Up by Symone D. Sanders

Author:Symone D. Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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