10 THE GREENSBORO TIMES I’m A Brown Woman Who’s Breaking Up With The Democratic Party


BY SAIRA RAO, CONTRIBUTOR


The first vote I ever cast, at 18, was for Bill Clinton. The last vote I cast was for his wife, Hillary. My adoration for Hillary bordered on mania. In college, I named my ficus plant after her. Twenty years later, I canvassed, held fundraisers, dragged my 8-year-old daughter door to door, proudly wore HRC’s face on T-shirts and housed campaign volunteers in my home.


I loved you so much that I cried each time I voted.


Thinking about the women who died fighting for my right to vote did it every time. I cried when I voted for Bill. For Barack Obama. I wept when I voted for Hillary. You’ve been that kind of mad love to me.


And now I want to break up. I realize now that the love has been one-sided,


unrequited. You’ve never recognized me, as a brown woman. You’ve taken my love, my money, my tokenism, with nary anything in return. You married the white woman and hooked up with me on the side.


Black Lives Matter is a second ― or third ― Hillary Clinton with author Saira Rao in her college days.


Dear Democratic Party: You were the love of my life. I fell in love early and hard. I have been


the kind of party loyalist ― the kind of sappy, soapbox-y, clichéd devotee ― that makes Fox News moonwalk with glee.


thought. Where is your outrage over the national epidemic of police brutality against black people? You continue to call angry white men who commit mass murder “lone wolves.” But if someone who looks like me screams “Allah” and fires a gun, it’s “terrorism.” And you wonder why angry white men are gunning down innocent brown men at bars, in their yards, on the street.


For all your talk about Dreamers, there’s been little


action. You don’t seem to give a crap about kids of color who will be kicked out of this country, the only country they know. What if all those Dreamers were white? I suspect there’d be a very different outcome.


You spend a lot of time and energy wooing white voters, while giving short shrift to voters of colors and assuming we’ll always show up for you.


To be fair, there’s no reason for you to assume otherwise. We always


show up for you. Take, for example, the special election in Alabama on Tuesday. Had black people not shown up, an accused child molester would be our newest senator.


What will Doug Jones do for the black folks who put him in the Senate? If history is any indication, very little.


The Women’s March on Washington in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration.


This past year, I held and attended numerous fundraisers for your


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candidates. I donated money every time I was asked. I marched: for women, for children, for reproductive rights, for science. I traveled across the country for the March for Women in Washington, D.C. It was there that I got the first hint that you weren’t that into me. The giveaway? The sea of white women in pink hats with brown and black women dotting the waves like debris. I let it slide but I kept my eyes and ears open.


My fellow brown and black sisters started to notice, too — and the


chatter began, in whispered hushes at first, then loud and clear. You are a party of white feminists. Of white feminism, the kind of feminism that focuses on the struggles of white women. It was the first time I’d heard the term, most likely because self-awareness is hard and I was a brown woman trapped in a white feminist’s world.


But then I woke up. I saw you with clear eyes for the first time. For every Kamala Harris and Pramila Jayapal sticking their brown


and black necks out for me, there are dozens of white female Democrats who want me to shut my trap.


Your advocacy for reproductive rights zeros in on wealthy white


women. Women of color and other marginalized women get sidelined. The gender pay gap is worse for black and Latina women than it is for white women. Women of color make up 64 percent of women in U.S. jails. Why isn’t the Democratic Party talking about this and trying to fix it?


My own “liberal” white congresswoman in Colorado has given me


a hint as to why. At the congresswoman’s town hall in February, Neeti Pawar, the


Breaking Up > page 11


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