A cis, white Councilwoman's path forward

Like so many of you, my head was swirling yesterday. Wanting to move back the clock hands once more, to understand how and why. I was so hopeful on Tuesday until I wasn’t, and I know that whiplash was shared.

I am still numb, scared just like you are and devastated. I am a cis, able bodied white woman in a heterosexual marriage where my husband supports me and my bodily autonomy, and I have far from the most to lose. I have also not lost the most already.

I am also a City Councilwoman, in a small but 40% Hispanic (I’m using Census language here) city on the western edge of Denver called Edgewater. My (very part time) job is to protect it. And even though I’m in Colorado, a blue state, in a nonpartisan office, that job makes me scared and unsure. I know this may not be what you want to hear from those of us inside systems of power but I need to be honest.

Yet I can see forward much better today. In the clarity that has come as my tears have cleansed me, I remember this: Power for the few was once again obtained by pitting vulnerable people trying to exist and take care of their loved ones against each other with populist lies. We’ve watched it nationally and we’ve watched it in Aurora, Colorado locally. None of it is new. It breeds individualism and hate no matter the power brokers’ label. It’s why my great grandparents, each a Jewish young person on different sides of the revolution, all fled Russia and nearby states in the early 1900s.

It’s an easy narrative to reconstruct and sanitize from the webs of our nation’s history. And this con man from Queens and his cosplaying cronies have done so brilliantly, despite every gaffe and obscenity that’s accompanied it, while adding fuel to the fires of hatred against all who are not their base . . . including against an extraordinarily qualified Black and South Asian woman running for president.

This message has been force fed to the widest demographic of hurting folks: working middle income and poor people – even those who are not white – as long as someone else (mainly recently arrived immigrants and Black folks) can be the scapegoat. It’s been fed to folks – not many, but some – inside of Edgewater and I’m still reconciling that and my job. And as we saw on Tuesday, only Black voters were able, en masse, to refuse the bullshit lies. The rest of us must be humbled, especially those of us who thought we did something at scale after that man murdered George Floyd.

So how do we move forward. Honestly, I don’t fully know. Maybe everything I share from here down is wishful naïveté. But I don’t think it is.

First, we grieve and hold space for our pain that likely will never leave us. When we’re ready, we shift the energy we put into this national election toward what we can see and access in front of us 24/7/365: to building constructive power on our front lawns and stoops while continuing to dismantle power’s ugliest edges in the systems – almost all of which are upheld to some extent in our local town or city hall – that eventually hurt us all. We know we need to root ourselves in tangible community and continue the work; a thousand people including our candidate have said it. And one of the most effective places to do so, now, is inside local politics. Be present, literally.

Let the work we did the last hundred plus days remain exceedingly relevant as a basis for what’s next.

If you already lead community work, help ensure your work and spaces are cognitively and physically safe upon entry for our most traumatized neighbors. If they felt safe last week, that might have changed. It may never be safe again for some folks and some of our most hurting neighbors may feel completely disenfranchised from it all after this, and the rest of us need to be ok with that. Hold them. I don’t know what to say to Black women when the rest of us were so wrong. But I know that those of us who can have to really show up this time.

In a very tangible example of this I am thinking nonstop now about our immigrant and undocumented neighbors in nearby Aurora, Colorado and inside our own towns and cities. We have many such neighbors in Edgewater, where I serve, both recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants and folks who have been here way longer than I have. I don’t know exactly what we in local elected office can and will do to help keep our neighbors as unharmed and held as possible but it will be something, and we will organize and coalesce, and we will do it propped by the power of our communities’ advocacy and partnership.

Show up and tell us at council and school board meetings starting now how you feel about the threat of mass deportations and more. Text us or grab coffee with us if you can’t or don’t feel comfortable showing up. Sign up to support community-based nonprofits helping immigrants locally. Lay the groundwork for us on daises across America to invest in these conversations and subsequent action. Know that many of us willing to do this work in local office are thinking about our and our families’ and our colleagues’ and staffs’ safety as well. Know we have networks already established to help.

Build power and community in tandem. I would have suggested the same if she had won. Because here’s what’s undeniable: ugly power is volatile, and nothing and nobody can hurt us and our loved ones fully when we are held by the layers of our collective embrace.

The Democratic party has healing, reconciliation, and recalibration to do as well. Let’s be its model and foundation as new leadership emerges, and listen to what young people tell us, while holding space to mourn our candidate and others who got us this far, this close. We can’t toss them into the archives of our fragile democracy; that’s so not productive and right now it’s rooted in racism when we know that Harris and the Obamas carried our party as far as it got. Refuse nihilism. Read Bernie’s statement and watch AOC’s live and listen to what our candidate had to say yesterday. And we’re still the bosses of Biden and Harris for a few more weeks, let’s not waste that either.

May we chip away at the darkness with impenetrable systems of connection. May we be stronger, together, than the bankrolled egos and mandates of hatred and individualism. And may we all, one day and once again, exhale fully.

P.S. to Colorado, we did well. Not perfectly, but well. If you dig into the nerdy bits, we are foil to the margins Trump and R’s gained elsewhere. We built. I haven’t looked at precinct data for Edgewater yet, but I know there’s nowhere else in this country I’d rather be.