Irregular

I was getting caught up on my podcasts, and was  listening to "Checks and Balance: Donkey years" from the Economist.

Charlotte Howard: Idrees [Kahloon], you've written a cover for us over the summer about the way Democrats talk about social issues; so beyond abortion, this sort of broader "wokeness" within the Democratic party. Have Republicans been successful in painting Democrats as culturally "out of touch" or focused on the wrong things; issues that regular voters don't really worry about? Or has the center of gravity in political debate really shifted from anything related to wokeness and cultural stuff back to the economy.

Mr. Kahloon's response was interesting. He talked about Democratic candidates who described themselves as Socialists, "Defund the police," what James Carville calls "faculty lounge talk" and gender inclusivity as things that Republicans were keen to talk about. But of those topics, only "Defund the Police" has anything to do with "being woke." Not that people understand "Defund the Police," either.

Because later, I was listening to "The Issues Worth $9 Billion In Ad Spending" from the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst, said that attacks against Mandela Barnes for supporting "Defund the Police" were inaccurate. Host Galen Druke pointed out that Mr. Barnes was in favor of moving funding from police to social workers and other services, such as crisis intervention/violence interruption. Which is pretty much the definition of "Defund the Police," regardless of whether Mandela Barnes has used the term directly.

Mr. Rakich noted that the popularity or unpopularity of the policies behind "Defund the Police" depend on how pollsters ask the question. Which is reasonable, but if people don't actually understand what the original policy description was, does that really make a difference.

My takeaway from all of this, as a Black American is that a major part of the problem that "Black America," as a population of people, has with advocating for its interests is a fundamental inability to shape and communicate perceptions around those interests. Staying woke, Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter all have this problem, in the fact that they have become cudgels for Conservative Whites to beat up Liberal Whites, rather than language for Black people to tell one another to remain aware of racial prejudices/biases, to advocate for reducing the law-enforcement response to disordered (rather than illegal) behavior and to hold themselves up as deserving better than to be treated as expendable props in public safety theater.

As much as I disliked "woke" as a term, and felt that "Defund the Police" was more or less asking to be misinterpreted, opening these up as fronts in the Culture Wars does a disservice. And the fact that the people for whom these issues are important were completely unable to prevent that demonstrates the degree to which Black Americans are sidelined in political discourse. Because aren't Black Americans who understand (correctly or not) that they live in a culture pervaded by racism "regular voters" too?