Moving often means downsizing and making little decisions about what comes with you and what stays. As I was preparing to move from Montreal to Toronto, I decided to clean out my closet and donate what I could. My rule of thumb was that if I hadn’t worn it within the last six months, it was time to give it a new home. I landed on one sweater I’d had since 2008, and no matter how many times I thought about parting ways with it throughout the years, I cannot.
In 2008, my father and uncle, who flew in from Paris, met in Washington, D.C. to personally witness the inauguration of the First Black President of the United States. The pair didn’t have tickets to any event nor a planned itinerary, but being a part of the atmosphere, absorbing the energy and the chance to glimpse a once-in-a-lifetime scene from the streets surrounding the White House sufficed.
Like any enthusiastic traveller, my dad’s return home was filled with stories and souvenirs for each family member. He handed me a black sweater with President Obama’s face and “The 44th President of the United States” written in grey. I felt such a sense of pride, holding my own piece of history that I could keep for the rest of my life. I felt such a sense of optimism.
With Vice-President Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee, my optimism is now tempered with the knowledge that we must organize for a better version of democracy centred on honesty and justice.
Hope in fiction
My sweater is about the same age as my younger sister. I think it’s hard to part ways with it because to me it represented what Canadian historian and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo, Rinaldo Walcott, might call glimpses of Black freedom, “those moments of the something more that exist inside of the dire conditions of our present Black unfreedom.”
We are experiencing a false optimism fueled by representation politics with the announcement of Kamala Harris as the presumptive nominee for the Democratic party. Within 24 hours of announcing her candidacy for president, she raised more than $1 million, and two days later that number had soared to $126 million. My TikTok feed was filled with glowing videos of Vice-President Harris, with cheering comments sections. Groups of Black women and white women for Kamala held fundraising calls, urging each other to show up for VP Harris as a means to save America, save rights and preserve justice.
To me, this mass mobilization of support from liberals and progressives represents the hope in fiction—the fictional version of Harris as the sole key to preserving democratic principles and institutions. The hope in her, as a person, a political character, a meme, a brat (?) who has awakened at the 11th hour ready to save America. In this story, she emerged as America’s saviour from an underwhelming vice presidency.
The fundraising, the endorsements from prominent Democrats, the online hype, are all signs of a mobilization—under the panic of a potential return to Trump—that is turning Harris into a hero. Like all hero stories, the narrative relies on fiction. Further reading of Walcott’s The Long Emancipation, however, calls us to look at Black freedom as “Blackness’ refusals…to presentative democracy…[and] reformist logics that retain the present shape of the world.”
It has been disappointing to see revisionist narratives of her past policies and practices emerge to justify voting for her, or the simple notion that “she’s just not as bad as Trump”. The Marshall Project notes that her history as a “progressive” prosecutor is complicated. German Lopez for Vox writes:
“A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions. She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings”.
We must be honest about Harris’ past policy record rather than take revisionist approaches to her past as California’s Attorney General and Vice-President. The first one that always comes to mind is the truancy program she had pushed through the state legislature in 2011, which gave district attorneys the ability to charge parents with crimes if their child was absent for 10 per cent of the school year without a valid reason. Cheree Peoples, who was arrested in Orange County for her daughter Shayla’s repeated truancy “despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia,” leaving her in constant chronic pain, often requiring hospitalization. In 2019, Harris expressed regret over the program.
Some say that Kamala was operating in a different political climate, one in which being “tough on crime” was the only ticket to power. This perspective erases local community activists who opposed her policies while they were happening, in that climate. It positions racial justice, progressive, and abolitionist movements as something of the 2020s—specifically summer 2020.
Writing about Kamala’s law-and-order period, legal historian Lara Bazelon wrote:
“It is true that politicians must make concessions to get the support of key interest groups. The fierce, collective opposition of law enforcement and local district attorney associations can be hard to overcome at the ballot box. But in her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away”.
This cognitive dissonance—between Kamala’s actual record and the fictional version of herself projected by her campaign—results from some young progressives feeling the need to justify voting for Kamala despite knowing her record. The notion of voting for her to protect rights, or that she is likely to be more open to hearing demands from social movements than her Republican counterpart, is effectively the same set of messages that Biden ran on. “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” Biden and Obama, of course, both responded to protests with police.
Why are we so fixated on protecting this version of democracy built on genocide and colonization? Why are we so quick to believe that individuals can shape institutions, not institutions shaping them? Who is this democracy for? What about those who have never been able to participate in democracy?
Walcott writes, “All of our present conceptions of freedom, understood within that linear progressive narrative, actually prohibit Black subject’s access to that very same linear modernist freedom.”
My political compass is guided by Black feminist theory and seeks the liberation of Black people in Canada and globally. Turning to Walcott again, in his book The Long Emancipation, he writes, “anti-Blackness continually produces Black people as out-of-place in (post)colonial locations and white settler societies with numerous and devastating consequences.”
Harris is now campaigning on her history upholding the criminal justice system. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said at a campaign rally. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Such discourse signals a belief in an anti-Black rule of law system.
As the next federal election in Canada nears, I feel the same rhetoric brewing here. I don’t want revisionist narratives of politicians and political parties’ records as a means to pacify profound anxiety about the future. Change is rooted in reality, and Black freedom is only possible in distinct opposition to capitalism. The only way to move forward in justice is to never lose hope.
Maybe that’s why I continue to hold onto my Obama sweater despite having a deeper understanding of how harmful many of his policies were. It’s my way of holding onto hope and believing that we will someday experience that feeling of political transformation again. Reproductive justice giant Loretta Ross says that “hope is so vital to everything that we do because we can’t only be defined by what we’re against,” she says. “We have to be defined by what world we build and want.”
We must move beyond identity politics and mobilize around community-based justice, which centres the most marginalized in our communities while supporting Indigenous sovereignty and dismantling and reimaging institutions founded on colonization, settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. As Dr. Ruha Benjamin said, “Black faces in high places are not going to save us.”
