Where do we go from here? That’s a question I’ve been asking a lot lately as, from trying to redefine what it means to be an American to pushing their plan to cut healthcare for our veterans, the priorities of President-Elect Donald Trump and the MAGA GOP have come into sharp relief. From the looks of it, they don’t want to roll back prices at the grocery store. They want to roll back progress, especially progress that impacts us. So, for us, 2025 is about keeping hope and progress alive while we fight against their agenda project 2025
Of course, while some may be surprised by this blatant about face from campaign rhetoric, we’re not. There’s a reason 78 percent of Black men and 92 percent of Black women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. We knew the truth from the beginning. We knew the consequences of Trump the sequel…and there’s no education in the second kick of the mule.
So, let’s be honest. It’s bad folks, especially if you’re Black. Can Black folks expect to be targeted with increased oppression, suppression, incarceration and injustice over the next four years? Yes. Will the MAGA support of white supremacists like the Proud Boys translate to a further rise in domestic terrorism and racial violence? Yes. Is it going to be a fight every step of the way for Black folks even to be considered real Americans in the MAGA administration? Of course it is…and that barely scratches the surface.
But you know what they’re not counting on? Us. You see, Black folks don’t scare easy because we’ve seen it before and if we can survive 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK and worse, then we can survive four more of Donald Trump and after this administration is long resigned to the dustbin of history, we’ll still be here.
We are descendents of men and women who refused to die, a people of unflinching resilience and boundless strength and while we may have lost an election, we didn’t lose our purpose.
So where do we go from here? Forward.
Look, I don’t mean to pretend that there isn’t real cause for frustration, anger and alarm. You don’t have to tell me about institutional racism and generational poverty. I grew up in rural Swansea, SC. I’m the grandson of sharecroppers. You think I don’t know? I don’t feel your pain; I’ve seen it in real life and, in some ways, have lived experiences with it.
You don’t have to tell me about the disappointment and anger you feel right now. I feel it too. It’s like Dr. King said speaking at the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago in 1967, “We were the hardcore activists who were willing to believe that Southerners could be reconstructed in the constitutional image. We were the dreamers of a dream that dark yesterdays of man’s inhumanity to man would soon be transformed into bright tomorrows of justice. Now it is hard to escape the disillusionment and betrayal. Our hopes have been blasted and our dreams have been shattered.”
But that wasn’t all he said that day because, in the darkness he challenged us to fight even harder for the light. He challenged us to rededicate ourselves to moral justice and practical action. He challenged us to choose community over chaos saying “Cowardice asks the questions, is it safe; expediency asks the question, is it politic; vanity asks the question, is it popular, but conscious asks the question, is it right. And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular; but he must do it because it is right.”
It’s up to us. Maybe it’s insulting and it’s certainly unfair. After all, we didn’t cause this crisis so why is it our job to cure it? I understand that frustration. I understand that anger. But while that chaos may feel cathartic, it doesn’t get us where we need to go. We need community because our voice is loudest when it is united.
Roughly 12 percent of the folks in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Congressional district are Black. But that’s still more than 92,000 Americans. What do you think would happen if they all spoke together?
More than a third of the families in Speaker Mike Johnson’s district are black. What if they all showed up at the Capitol calling on him to stop blocking the Freedom to Vote Act and let voting rights come to the House floor for, ironically, a vote.
There are nearly 170,000 Black and latino Americans in Matt Gaetz 1st Congressional District in Florida. That’s about 40,000 more than the margin of his last election. Doesn’t that look like power to you? It’s like that in even the most segregated communities in America. We’re told we don’t matter. We’re told we don’t count. But when we come together, when we choose community over chaos, our strength can do anything.
So here do we go from here? We go forward. It won’t be easy. But nothing worth doing ever is.
We go forward because that’s what we do, from the freedmen who escaped the chains of slavery to the high school student filling out a college application. We go forward because our parents and grandparents and all those who came before refused to give up no matter how bad it got. So neither will we.
Sure, we’ll have to work longer and fight harder but that will just make the victory that much sweeter.
We move forward because, at the end of the day, it’s the only way left.
Antjuan Seawright (@antjuansea) is a Democratic political strategist, founder and CEO of Blueprint Strategy LLC, a CBS News political contributor, and a senior visiting fellow at Third Way.