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“We celebrate this electoral victory today, but what about tomorrow?” Tavis Smiley asks at the Huffington Post.
This past Sunday on “Meet the Press,” the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said the following, “Latinos, women and young people — that is the new governing coalition.”
OUCH.
To be sure, there are Black folk in each of those categories. But since President Obama’s victory on Election Day, I have been troubled by the paltry attention paid to the record turnout amongst African Americans to make Mr. Obama only the fourth Democrat in a century to be re-elected to a second term. I know Doris Kearns Goodwin, so I don’t think she intended to suggest that Black votes don’t matter. But there is this creepy sense that in the midst of this historic moment in Black history, Black Americans are being pushed off stage. And while Black Americans are being pushed off the stage, there is a growing debate on the internet and in the mainstream media about whether and how Black folk should push President Obama now that “he has nothing to lose.” …
The poet Gwendolyn Brooks had this wonderful refrain, “the last of the loud.”
Respectfully, somebody has to remind the president day in and day out of the debt he owes Black America. After four years of being sidelined and silenced, it’s time to get loud. We have to be willing to engage even if we are “the last of the loud.”
https://www.theroot.com/buzz/black-people-its-time-get-loud
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