Racism robs black women like her while uplifting selfish men like Trump. I wish I could hear what mama would say about all of this. Before she fell ill two years ago, she was asking me, the veteran journalist, why so many white people found it okay to vote for and support Donald Trump.
It was rhetorical. She wasn’t asking for my wisdom. She had more than enough of that. Hers always surpassed mine, particularly on matters of race. She was making an observation in the form of a question, that the idea of whiteness is so powerful and embedded in the nature of this place it convinced a majority of white people to elevate a man like Trump into the most powerful position in the most powerful nation in the world even as that nation was diversifying.
At least that’s how I remember one of the last conversations about politics and race I had with her. She can no longer talk. She hasn’t uttered a word since she was found on the floor of her home one morning two years ago. I’ll never forget rushing to the hospital and looking at her in a nondescript bed in a nondescript emergency room a short drive from where North Charleston police officer Michael Slager shot a fleeing Walter Scott multiple times in the back. She didn’t look at me. She couldn’t. A nurse would later tell me she’d suffered some kind of brain trauma. Her executive function had been severely damaged, maybe irreversibly. She was transferred to another hospital, closer to where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, where doctors told my family she’d never recover and likely had six months to live.
Mama has outlived that prediction, though not in a way I would have liked. I wanted to hear her voice again, no matter if she was expressing pride in me and my siblings or gently scolding us for not staying in better touch with each other. That wasn’t to be.
Before she fell ill, she knew Trump had called Haiti and African countries “shit holes” and claimed that most Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals, and she knew he had spent five years spreading the bigotry of birtherism about Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. But she doesn’t know he had federal officials attack peaceful protesters so he could have a photo op holding a Christian bible or that he approvingly retweeted a video of one of his supporters yelling “white power!”
I think of the suffering she has endured during 78 years of life and the sacrifices she made, knowing her name won’t be written in big letters in the history books, but Trump’s will, even though she’s overcome more and done more good than he has. It’s because of her I’m able to teach at a college and write books, and my siblings can manage the successful careers of Grammy-nominated children, and preach, and serve as air traffic controllers, and build fitness centers, and become loving fathers and mothers and technology experts. I am because mama was. I am because mama is, even as we’ve been forced to confront the reality of her mortality.
That’s what structural racism has done: robbed black women like mama while uplifting corrupt, ungrateful, selfish men like Trump.
There are a lot of things that devastate me about mama’s current state. My wondering if she’s suffering. The uncertainty, the fear that the next call will be the one telling me her heart finally stopped beating, or that that call won’t come for another few years even as she remains in a semi-vegetative state. The anguish her children and last living sister feel. The tension we feel when we can’t agree on what’s best for her, putting in another feeding tube or allowing hospice nurses to guide her into the next life. The silence of her voice.
What really grates, though, is that I know she’s tougher than Trump. And smarter than Trump. And more moral and compassionate and decent than Trump. That she overcame more than Trump could imagine. But because of race and gender and factors outside of her control, she began life in a poverty-stricken home in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era. And she was forced to marry a much older man when she was 13. Trump was rich since he was an embryo and received a “small” loan of tens of millions of dollars from his father, squandered it multiple times and as a consolation prize got to spend four years in the White House with control over the nuclear arsenal of the most powerful nation ever created, and is now pouting like a toddler because he’s been held to account for the first time in his privileged life.
That’s what structural racism has done: robbed black women like mama while uplifting corrupt, ungrateful, selfish men like Trump. And heaping praise on those men. And building monuments in their honor. And having tens of millions of Americans worship them as though they were gods. When they get sick from reckless behavior — like refusing to don a mask or socially distancing during a pandemic — they get top notch medical care at taxpayer expense then brag that their quick recovery must mean they have good genes. When a lifetime of racism and race-related scars finally catches up with black women like mama, leaving their bodies in a near-terminal state, they waste away outside of the spotlight as society wonders aloud if that means there’s something uniquely wrong with black people.
That’s why Trump’s being kicked out of office in large part because black women relentlessly volunteered and donated and strategized feels particularly satisfying. It proves once again that no matter what hurdles this society throws their way, no matter how unfair the deck is stacked against them, they will find a way to perfect this democracy, even if it kills them. Even if they have to drag black men and white women kicking and screaming to ensure that it happens.
And yet, it would be all the more satisfying if I could have called mama on the phone and been the first to tell her that Trump was about to become the rare incumbent president to not have a second term. I wanted to hear her smile the smuggest smile through the phone, to hear her rub it in — just a little. I wanted that because I know that black women like her have been the backbone, not just of their families, but of this country. I wanted her to see Kamala Harris in that nice suit on that big stage as she announced to the world that a black woman like my mama had broken through and was about to become the first woman to serve as vice president of a country founded upon the contradiction of declaring all men equal while enslaving black people and relegating all women to second-class citizenship, at best, with black women suffering from the double barrel force of racism and sexism.
It’s because of women like mama that I don’t dare ever stop loving this country. They’ve given too much for me to take for granted all they’ve sacrificed and all they’ve accomplished. But because of what this country has done — what it has required of and taken from them — that love will always come with an asterisk. Mama can no longer tell me that’s the right way to live even in a place that doesn’t always love us back. Her entire life showed me — is showing me.