Wrestling with Privilege Because Change Can't Wait

So already, "Change can't wait." Those were the first words I heard from my car radio around ten o'clock on Monday night. They were spoken so gravely I didn't know if I was hearing a victory speech or a concession speech.

And then the crowd cheered, and cheered again, and I knew it was a victory speech*: Ayanna Pressley had just scored an upset victory over Michael Capuano. She'd just earned the right to run to represent Massachusetts' 7th district in November.

Suddenly I felt really emotional. Change wasn't waiting, and that was because so many people who felt it mustn't and couldn't had headed to the polls. I had thought Capuano would win because I'm so accustomed to Massachusetts incumbents winning, especially if they've done really good jobs over the years. But history didn't repeat itself this time.

I actually don't live and vote in the 7th district, but I live so close to it that the Pressley-Capuano contest had been much on my mind. Multiple times I'd debated with myself about what mattered more at this point, Capuano's Washington experience or Pressley's lived experience as a minority woman public servant in Massachusetts' only majority minority district. "Too bad they both can't win," I'd said to myself. But it always comes down to making choices.

Over dinner one night late last spring, I had confessed to a 7th-district friend that I was really bothered by my personal voting pattern. Generally, I tended to stick with "proven" progressive candidates. And I had been realizing that my strategy was preserving the status quo rather than making the changes I thought--and these candidates professed--were essential to the health of our society. I understood that this would predispose me to vote for Capuano rather than "risk" voting for Pressley, even though I viewed her as the change candidate, as someone who had ample if not national-level experience representing people, and as the person who most understood the 7th District constituency. In other words, I knew I should vote for her, but I knew I might not. That was pretty screwed up.

Again, I said it: "Too bad they both can't win." But isn't that the essence of privilege--wanting it both ways and being able to have it that way? Not needing to choose, or to give up anything? I began to get it that, once again, my problem was my privilege--specifically my white (and therefore) economic privilege. I'm used to things working the way they do. I'm used to them working "well enough" if not as well as they could. I'm used to not being unduly burdened when they don't work well enough. 

And there was another possibility. Maybe, as a person with privilege, I was not admitting to being worried that "too much" change would mean that I'd feel "too" uncomfortable, that I'd need to adjust, that I'd have to give up something.***

Privilege is one tough opponent in the battle for transformation, personal and societal. Frankly, it makes me think of Jacob wrestling with the Angel**** (or the man, or G-d, depending on how you translate it). The battle lasts all night, and Jacob survives it and is blessed and given a new name at the end of it. But he goes forth from it with a limp.

So how did I finally cross over to Pressley? I give a lot of the credit to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her spot-on comments on Meet the Press***** after her own upset victory--that the Democrats are and should be a "big tent" party with plenty of room beneath it for different Democrats who are particularly suited to win in and represent different districts--really resonated with me. The residents of different regions of the country, and different districts within those regions, need different types of Democratic representatives in order to feel and be genuinely understood by those responsible for thinking and acting on their behalf both locally and nationally . There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all Democrat in this vast and varied country; the diversity of Democratic leadership could be the party's strength, with the right leadership. In my book that's a hope-inspiring idea, and the only idea that makes sense.******

Last Monday night's sultriness reminded me of the weather in Kampala, Uganda on what was Election Day 2008 in the United States. On that Tuesday evening as we exited from the Kampala hotel where we'd just made an education presentation, a colleague and I saw Kampalans clustered around parked cars everywhere. They were listening intently to election coverage on the car radios even though, because of the time zone difference, it would be many hours before we would learn that Barack Obama had been elected. Still, people's attention throughout the city was already trained on the election.

The next morning, my colleague and I arrived at the school******* where we were consulting and learned that Obama had been elected. There was jubilation in the school's main office: tears, hugging, every form of euphoria. Explained the soft-spoken, dark-skinned school secretary who was busily keeping things running amidst the celebration, "Now we have a president, too."

There was so much hope that day, and I felt that same kind of hope the other night when Pressley won the primary--not because Michael Capuano hadn't been a good representative--but because change can't wait, and it wasn't going to. I'm going to try to make sure that privilege, my own and other people's, doesn't get in its way.

* Screen shot of photo included in the following online magazine article:
Buell, S. (2018, September 4). Ayanna Pressley Will Become the First Black Woman to Represent Massachusetts in Congress. Boston Magazine. Retrieved September 6, 2018, from https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/09/04/ayanna-pressley-beats-mike-capuano/
** Screen shot of photo of the Center Street Cafe on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/9710955416730616/?lp=true 
*** All of that said, I'm writing this as I watch Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, which means I'm listening to a group of mostly white men, many of whose priorities don't align with mine. While I have white privilege, there are other kinds of privilege I don't have. At this moment, they're talking about Roe V. Wade.
**** Genesis 22-31. 
***** Screen shot of video on this link: https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/full-ocasio-cortez-there-was-a-lack-of-listening-on-the-ground-in-surprise-ny-primary-1267953731855?v=raila&
* (6) By the way, there was another thing I loved about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez--she actually responded to Chuck Todd's questions, as opposed to parried with him to avoid answering his questions.
* (7) Screen shot from a video still on the International School of Uganda Web Site on the "Our School" page: https://www.isu.ac.ug/our-school