‘Let this radicalize you’: Long Beach civic leaders face fears after election letdown
With hopes for the first woman president crushed, some are turning toward community to help their neighbors and protect their rights.
Rather than wallow in disappointment that voters failed to elect the nation’s first woman president this week, some Long Beach community leaders are urging friends and neighbors to work on bettering their community – and bracing for attempts to roll back existing rights and benefits.
“I’m scrambling to figure out how to explain to people what happened,” said Zoe Nicholson, a longtime feminist activist and vice chair of Long Beach’s Commission for Women and Girls.
While a number of pre-election polls showed the race between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump nearly tied, on Tuesday Trump won a decisive victory, stoking concerns that he’ll carry out campaign proposals of mass deportations, cuts to social safety net programs and further restrictions to women’s reproductive rights and care.
Nicholson thinks the outcome was a shock to some – like “you woke up in an enemy camp” – because the political left and right each have their own sources of information and may not know what the other side is hearing.
After being a bit surprised by Trump’s first win in 2016, Lori Baralt was more prepared for Tuesday’s outcome.
As a professor and chair of Cal State Long Beach’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department, Baralt said she sees how it fits into the pattern of U.S. political history.
Some Americans are upset because they’re suffering financially, she said, while others feel left behind by the pace of social change.
“I think that’s sort of the perfect storm for someone like Trump to reclaim power – he mirrors back their feelings,” she said.
When Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders sought the 2016 Democratic nomination, his target for voters’ frustrations was billionaires, Baralt said; for Trump, it’s immigrants.
She’ll be closely watching the new administration’s immigration policies. Some of her students who grew up in the U.S. in mixed-status families have said they’re already making plans for what to do if they or their parents get deported, she said.
For Sharifa Batts, a community leader and vice chair of the city’s Equity and Human Relations Commission, a big concern is the potential erosion of opportunities and rights for younger generations like her daughter, who is now 30 and has children of her own.
Trump has multiple criminal allegations against him, has shown a public pattern of disrespectful behavior to women and continues to deny that he lost the 2020 election – and none of that prevented him from winning the highest office in the land. “These are all things that I would not be teaching my grandchildren,” Batts said.
But all three women have similar prescriptions to move past an electoral loss that for some was a devastating blow: start close to home by helping and drawing support from people in your own community.
Baralt said she thought about skipping work on Wednesday, but wanted to be there for her students.
“Being in community is the number one thing that gives you hope,” she said – and getting involved with local organizations that are doing good can happen anytime, not just within the election cycle.
Baralt’s advice to keep moving forward is a quote from anti-prison activist Mariame Kaba: “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”
Members of the Equity and Human Relations Commission will be attending upcoming “listening sessions” (held by the city’s health department and community groups such as Long Beach Forward) to learn about the needs of different segments of the Long Beach community, Batts said.
“We need to focus on things we can control in our own city,” such as planting community gardens to provide people healthier food, she said.
Nicholson said she’ll keep teaching women about their rights and how to protect them, and she suggested people work on fixing the problems right in front of them.
“Is the woman next door hungry, does the woman next door have shoes – that’s where it starts,” she said.
Nicholson had hoped she’d be looking forward to the next president’s inauguration, but instead, she’ll continue her activism.
“I have the same small bottle of Patron from 2016 (intended) to celebrate Hillary, then it was waiting for Kamala,” Nicholson said. “I guess it’s going to be waiting for somebody else.”
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