First, an acknowledgment: You don’t care about my opinion. You have likely already made up your mind around what you’re doing, what you’re not doing, and how you feel about it. And nothing I’m going to say or do, or nothing *she* can say or do will likely change that in 4 months.
That said, a bit of caution: if your opinion is so set that it can’t be changed, even when new facts are introduced, then your opinion, even if you articulate it well, is ignorant. That goes for you, me, and everyone else under the sun.
She is not Black like me. But she is a Black. Just. as Black as The Notorious BIG and Louis Farrakhan, both sons of a Jamaican immigrants, or Tracee Ellis Ross and Lenny Kravitz, both mixed kids. The beauty of Blackness is in its diversity, and to limit what it means to be Black is inherently anti-Black.
She is also a she, and your daughter, who you took a #girldad pic with, will learn more about you and herself from how you treat a woman in power than what you posted to mourn your (male) hero.
She was the top cop. Those are her own words. My opinion on cops, as you know, is not in the least bit positive. So I understand, in ways both logical and emotional, apprehension about voting for law enforcement. But, just as her Blackness is multifaceted, so is her career.
She has consistently been lenient around marijuana usage and convictions. She created a reentry program for first time offenders that allowed their records to be expunged. She is a senator who pushed for extended unemployment benefits. She opposed Betsy DeVos, the woman causing irreparable harm to American children. She is one of, if not the best interrogators on the Hill. If we are going to tell her story, then we need to tell all of it, in context, so our challenges to her positions are based on specific critiques, not Facebook Memes.
My vote is not for my preferred savior; my vote is for my preferred adversary — the persons I have a better chance at extracting compromise and (un)conditional wins from. I vote not for health, but for harm reduction, for the Empire is not designed for my health. Not yet. And while I do not vote solely for an image — identity politics, as the white men who believe their identity is the baseline call it — I do vote for a government that looks like me as an homage to…
