Notes from Chicago: Allen, Part III

They got the judges

          They got the lawyers

          They got the jury-rolls

          They got the law

                They don’t come by ones

          They got the sheriffs

          They got the deputies

                       They don’t come by twos

          They got the shotguns

          They got the rope

                We git the justice

                In the end

                       And they come by tens.

                                                            –Sterling Brown, “Old Lem”

Monday, August 19 (Day One of the Convention)

Native American Caucus Meeting.

Now that Cory Booker has finished speaking, many people begin clearing out of the room, reducing the audience from an impressive two thousand people to a modest fifty.

The next panel, “Applying Training to Real Life,” features three women in a discussion focused on Natives running for office, primarily through the success of organizations like Emerge, which trains people of color for public service. Arizonan Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, the Pima Country Recorder, says, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”

The panel moderator is Arvina Martin, the Wisconsin Democrats Native Caucus Chair. She tells the audience that VP Harris and Governor Walz are working on a ceasefire in Gaza. “We understand genocide. This is an indigenous issue.”

I lunch in the dining hall where I share a table with four other people, all delegates. On my left a man and a woman, both Nez Percé in their early thirties from northern Idaho, a heavily Republican area. The woman tells me northern Idaho is beautiful, nothing like the southern part of the state where all the potatoes are grown. In response to a question I ask, she informs me that climate change is the key problem facing her constituency.

“The white people there think climate change is like Santa Claus,” she says, “although they deal with the reality of it every day.”

Because of environmental decline, farming is now done at night. The area suffers from water shortage. Heat ravages in the summer, and many people can’t afford the high costs of air conditioning.

“We are trying to convince the white people that they can invest in green energy and actually improve their farms and their lives.”

She talks about how Natives and other people of color will be the first to suffer fallout from the climate crisis.

The man, somewhat younger than her, listens and looks with admiration. Says, “She’s been doing this forever.”

He works for an NGO that trains Natives for employment making solar panels.

The other two delegates are from Virginia. The older of the two works as a lobbyist for the green energy industry. A portly man with slick black hair, he is also Native and from a tribe related to Nez Percé. He exhibits a relaxed air, confident of his place in the scheme of things. The man sitting across the table from me works, to the disappointment of his professor father, as a defense attorney representing indigent clients.

This meal/conversation will prove to be the highlight of the DNC for me. Encouraging to know that there are such smart, committed, and determined young people putting in work for their communities.

LGBTQ+ Caucus Meeting.

A bustling ballroom in the minutes before the caucus convenes, joyous people mingling and talking. One guy vociferously hands out flyers for a drag queen party. He sports a leather baseball cap and a bull ring in his nose and wears black leather suspenders over a black T-shirt, a sleeve of tattoos clearly visible. The flier reads:

“DNC—Drag Night Chicago

A Voter Registration Kiki”

The drag queens sport evocative names like Lucy Stoole, Detox, Miss Toto, Dusty Bahls, Sheeza Woman, and Sativa Diamond.

I spot a queen seated in the front row, hard to miss her bouffant of hair like a black waterfall. Much to see in the room. Two women wear straw cowboy hats in the colors of the rainbow flag. Another guy with a lei looped around his neck. A woman rocking rubber rainboots with an emblem of the American flag. And so on. Queers in the house.

But what would that gay transgressive thief Jean Genet have thought? No shame in his game. In “The Members of the Assembly,” he lusted over the muscular thighs and long (imagined) cocks of the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Why not? Would Genet have been accepting of queers being welcomed into the political establishment, namely a queer contingent in the Democratic Party, or would he have seen this as selling out? Poor Marx did not understand that capitalism can claim and co-opt anything. I accept this truth even as I long for something truly other, countercultural, whether it be in literature, art, music, or politics.

The meeting opens with the Pledge of Allegiance. (I neither stand nor recite.) When the crowd reaches the words “with justice and liberty for all,” somebody yells out “Someday!” Freedom a yet to be, always yet.

Surprise, surprise: Governor Tim Walz is the first speaker. Greeted by deafening applause, he takes to the podium. He smiles and waves in that way that has become familiar to the nation, to the world, in recent weeks. People like this guy. Rightfully so. One can’t help but be moved by his modesty and sincerity. He doesn’t look like or carry himself like a politician. (He’s two years younger than me but with his bald dome and gray eyebrows, he looks two years older, at least to my eyes.) And he speaks in a natural way, seems immediate rather than scripted. The real deal. What you see is what you get. (Ditto for Kamala’s hubby, Douglas Emhoff. Believe what he says. Recently, via Zoom he assured a Zionist group that Kamala supports Israel.) He draws you in with his off-the-cuff remarks, pithy sayings—“Rights don’t work like pie. There are enough for everybody”—and folksy humor. And you don’t take him as just another wishy-washy politician when he changes his views. His evolving positions seem to be just that, evolutions of thought and belief as opposed to political kowtowing.

Walz is a people person. “You might have noticed that there’s a bit of energy in America right now.”

He receives plenty of applause throughout his speech. The audience likes it when he talks about “Freedom to love whoever you want to love.” And after he says, “We’re not going back,” they start to chant the phrase.

Foretelling the future, he ends his speech with “Welcome, Madame President Harris.”

The crowd starts chanting, “USA!”

On my way to another panel, I see pundit Cornelius Belcher walking down the hall looking trim and fit in a snazzy suit, his gray afro like a tugboat atop his head.

I see Representative Barbara Boxer in a vibrant yellow pantsuit giving an interview to a television crew. Although I escape her notice, I’m tempted to go over and thank her for her stance on the US invasion of Iraq. In 2003, she was the sole member of Congress who voted against George W. Bush’s declaration of war. It is estimated that between 280,000 and one million Iraqi civilians to date have died in that war.

The DNC Environment and Climate Crisis Council session convenes in a colossal ballroom, the largest room I have entered so far. A grand room although those in attendance dress down compared to the previous audience. This will have to do: I see a guy wearing a camouflage hat with a little plastic windmill on top.

The moderator starts the meeting by saying, “We recognize that our country is built on indigenous homelands.” This statement followed by a now familiar “land acknowledgment.”

Whenever I hear such words—at artist residencies, cultural events, and other liberal gatherings—I always feel a bit put off because however sincere the sentiment might be, words, “acknowledgments,” do nothing to stop the ongoing genocide of natives in this country.

Turns out that the DNC Climate Council is the newest caucus. The moderator encourages the audience to find out more about it—“I want you to sign up now with the council”—before moving on to a review of the Biden/Harris achievements on the climate front.

“Climate is on the ballot in 2024.”

A few months ago, I read Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant book The Nutmeg’s Curse, which traces our current climate crisis back to the origins of colonialism. Ghosh says what I’ve heard few other say: the Western mindset that got the world into this mess can’t get us out of it. Sitting through the panel discussion, I can’t help but think that climate “policy” is little more than gaslighting given the way big money and lobbyists and billionaires pull all the strings. Too little too late. No other way to say it since, according to the United Nations, to keep global warming to 1.5°C or less, as called for in the Paris Agreement, emissions worldwide need to be reduced by 45% by 2030. Less than six years.

The DNC caucus meetings and other discussions take place at the Hyatt at McCormick Place. (As a kid I often attended the annual car show at McCormick Place.) Worth pointing out that Illinois governor G. B. Pritzker is a member of the Pritzker family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. Worth pointing out that back in January Chicago approved a Gaza ceasefire resolution that Mayor Johnson supported but that Governor Pritzker criticized. Worth pointing out that Pritzker was on the shortlist to be Kamala’s running mate, even if it’s unlikely that he ever received serious consideration since he’s obese, a no-no for a vice-presidential candidate. Before all else, presidential campaigns are about appearances, even if the self-proclaimed hillbilly, J. D. Vance, sports a beard, a no-no for most politicians in this country.  

The United Center will host the evening program for the DNC, which will consist of a series of high-profile speeches and musical performances. A cavalcade of blue and white Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses will shuttle us over. The bus I’m on is packed, everyone in good spirits, looking forward to the night ahead. Our bus, like all the others, has been assigned an officer of the CPD to protect us. He stands at the front of the bus a few feet from the driver. I’m seated a few feet away from him next to a Massachusetts delegate, a Black woman in her thirties, who wears fake pearls around her neck and white Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers, the agreed upon attire for all the women in her delegation.

With all the security precautions—streets blocked off, streets guarded by a seemingly infinite number of cops in patrol cars and on foot—it takes us more than an hour to reach the United Center, which was opened in 1995 as a new home to the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks. A stadium made possible by Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls—Be like Mike—to replace the Chicago Stadium, the mythic “Madhouse on Madison.”

Although I lived in New York for most of the Bulls’ six championship runs, although I considered myself a New Yorker, I was a huge Jordan fan, even wrote about him in my first novel, Rails Under My Back. Had the good fortune to see him play once in person (in New Jersey) but never saw the United Center. In the spring of 2008, during a low point in my life—my mother was living in a nursing home after having one leg amputated below the knee—I decided to make a pilgrimage to the stadium. Back then, the United Center had a bronze sculpture of Jordan—my mother always called him “Michael”—out front:

A statue that is now located somewhere inside the United Center.

Michael.

Whenever the Bulls got in a jam, they looked to Michael to see them through, to my mother’s dismay.

“Well,” she used to say, “they may just have to lose. They shouldn’t always expect Michael to save them.”

But it is only now, four years after my mother’s death, that I can hear what she was actually saying. America is always waiting for us, Black folk, to save the team, save the country, from evil. Always the Black savior: The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The Tuskegee Airman. Michael. The Dream Team. Obama. “The Black Vote.” Now Kamala Harris.

Snipers on the roof of the United Center.

A long queue for security screening. Once inside, the first thing I need to do is take a leak. I overhear two older Black women speaking:

“He came in the women’s bathroom.”

“Nawl. This is gender neutral.”

“What’s that?”

“Either sex can use it.”

In the rafters of the arena, red, white, and blue balloons awaiting the final day of the convention and Kamala’s coronation.

The Chair of the Democratic Party, Jaime Harrison, and another speaker, a Black woman, kick off the evening. (Many people of color will be on the program tonight.) We are lead in a prayer. Then two Native speakers give a few brief remarks, a variation of the “land acknowledgment” ritual. After that, the Illinois State Honor Guard marches onto stage for the Soul Children of Chicago to sing the National Anthem. The choir performs a dull rendition of the song, except for at the end when they harmonize a couple of jazz chords. Impressive.

Mayor Brandon Johnson takes to the stage. I am coming to learn that he is a dull speaker—“She’s got us,” “The best freakin city in the world”—which is OK by me. A former Chicago Public School teacher, he’s not a career politician, hence his lack of oratorial skills. I think he wants to do good for the people of this city, especially Black people.

Once he’s done, Jaime Harrison delivers a speech. In contrast to Johnson, Harrison is a politician through and through. With his soft voice and round face and body he reminds me of that nerdy kid who was always raising his hand to answer the teacher’s question, and who later, in high school, ran for class president. He is still that kid, a starry-eyed boy in a man’s body, his speech full of slogans and platitudes and happy talk. “Hope and hard work can take you anywhere.” “When we fight, we win.” “Keep hope alive.” (Jesse Jackson’s famous slogan will be repeated often throughout the convention.)

Two Black women seated behind me go all in with Harrison:

“I knew he was gon say that.”

“Come on!”

“Oh yeah.”

“Say it.”

Harrison says, “For Black women this has been a long time coming.”

Then a montage of historical images focused on Black women and the Democratic Party—Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisolm, etc.—plays on the screen above the stage, accompanied by Public Enemy’s “Show ‘Em Whatcha Got.” Who would have thought? Even Public Enemy can be sanitized and appropriated. (Flavor Flav at the Paris Olympics last month.)

That night, much is made about Jesse Jackson’s two presidential runs. At one point, Al Sharpton wheels Jesse on stage in the company of several other Black dignitaries. Health failing, Jesse no longer looks like himself, his face drawn down, sunken, making him almost unrecognizable.

I think back to spring of 2008 when I had a chance encounter with Jesse at Midway Airport. Saw him standing in the terminal with his bodyguard. None of the other passengers looked at him, approached him. But I walked right up to him.

Said, “Thank you for all you have done for our people.”

“You’re welcome.”

The evening/night programming of the DNC is one long commercial. I leave the United Center before Hillary Clinton speaks, before President Biden speaks. Fact: Hillary endorsed Jamal Bowman’s AIPAC-supported opponent in the recent primary election and succeeded in seeing him defeated. Bowman made the mistake of speaking out against the genocide in Gaza. Fact: Biden is a self-proclaimed Zionist. (“If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”) My eight-year-old son Jacob calls Biden “Joe,” says “Joe is a good guy.”

When I leave the United Center, I cross paths with lawyer and CNN anchor Laura Coates. As I have come to discover, celebrities always look different from how they appear on the screen. On CNN, Coates appears tall and statuesque, what Black folk in Chicago used to call “built” when I was growing up. In person she is short, her face heavily caked with makeup, a screen keeping her in her own world.

Two miles away from the United Center, thousands of protestors stage a demonstration against the genocide in Gaza, some 3,500 people representing over two hundred groups. For some reason, news outlets think it important to describe the demonstration as “peaceful.” For months, these same outlets have been reporting that Biden, “Joe,” is working hard for a ceasefire. However, Sabrene Odeh, an Uncommitted delegate from Washington state, tells Al Jazeera that it is “illogical” for Biden to call for a ceasefire while arming Israel.

Some call him President Joe Biden. Others “Joe.” And he is known to some as “Genocide Joe.”

*

Tuesday, August 20 (Day Two of the Convention)

The demonstration the following night, on the second day of the convention, is not peaceful. It takes place west of downtown on Madison Avenue in a skyscraper that houses the Israeli consulate. Later it is determined that some protesters not affiliated with the coalition of two hundred groups had come into Chicago to “act a fool,” as my bus driver puts it. That they had advertised the demonstration under the slogan of “Make it great like ’68.” A boisterous bunch, any of them dressed in black, their faces covered, shouting, “Shut down the DNC!”

Some of them, reportedly, carried aerosol products for the possible purpose of self-immolation. (Aaron Bushnell.) They do burn an American flag.

A line of CPD dressed in riot gear block the group from marching. One officer yells into a megaphone, “You are ordered to immediately disperse.”

A woman in the front of the march shouts back through her own megaphone, “We’re not scared of you.”

The demonstrators charge the line and eventually push past the officers, only to be penned in several times by CPD, who some said seem determined not to allow protesters to disperse. The confrontation comes to an end when CPD pin the demonstrators inside a plaza. It is then that most protestors are arrested.

*

“In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party.”

                        —W.E.B. DuBois, “Why I Won’t Vote,” The Nation, October 20, 1956

Wednesday, August 21 (Day Three of the Convention)

The Black Caucus meeting is scheduled to start at 9:30 that morning but doesn’t gavel-in until after 10:00.

The Vice Chair of the panel reads the famous Langston Hughes poem beginning “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” Chair Virgie M. Rollins calls someone up to the podium to lead us in prayer. The pastor says, “Lord, we thank you for your anointing.” She says, “Satan is reflected in the face and voice of Trump and all his followers.”

Jaime Harrison is in the house. To thunderous applause he shuffles forward, following his belly to the podium. He speaks in a hoarse voice. “We knocked the roof off the United Center.”

Then he begins an extended riff filled with basketball metaphors. He calls Kamala an “MVP” as a prelude to reviewing all the great things the Biden/Harris administration have done for Black people. Tim Walz is the “coach.” Harrison says that the Harris/Walz campaign is a raucous and joyous gathering like a family reunion.

“I will always ride with Biden because he has always ridden with us.”

Getting back to basketball, Harrison says that Kamala “has been Michael Jordan every step of the way.”

Then, “America’s greatness is in her future.”

He concludes with a call, “When we fight,” that gets the wanted response: “We win!”

The chair announces that a special guest is in the house: John Legend. Everyone Jack-in-the-boxes up from their seat, clapping and hooting. John Legend!

(I admire all that he has done for criminal justice reform, and I salute his wife Christy Teagan for calling Trump a “pussy ass bitch.”)

As he takes the podium adorned in a cheerful pale blue suit, people begin videotaping him on their cellphones. They remain standing through the entirety of his speech.

Displaying his Ivy League education, he reads a crisp and clean ten-minute oration. Says that Kamala “champions the rights and dignity of Black people.” Says, “When we all do better, we all do better.”

After the speech, he poses with the seven members of the committee for a photo.

Far fewer people at the Hispanic Caucus meeting. In a panel focusing on immigration, one speaker notes that California is the fifth largest economy in the world because of immigrants.

That afternoon, members of the Uncommitted movement hold a rally a block away from the United Center, a rally organized by the US Palestinian Community Network, a Palestinian and Arab community-based organization. In a statement to the press, Rabbi Brant Rosen, a founder of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council, condemns Democrats for not speaking out about the war in Gaza at the convention. Says, “The word Palestine is not allowed inside the Democratic National Convention. The word ceasefire has barely been uttered.” He continues, “This is a Hollywood-style coronation of a candidate. They assume they are entitled to our votes, but they are not entitled to our votes.”

That night, Democratic celebrants leave the United Center while protestors shout the names of Palestinian children killed by the IDF in Gaza. The celebrants cover their ears. Some even make snide remarks.

Later that night, the Uncommitted movement receive word from the DNC that the DNC will not allow a Palestinian to speak on the last night of the convention. The Uncommitted movement has thirty delegates from eight states at the convention. The DNC had asked them to provide the names of possible speakers.

In response to the DNC’s decision, journalist Mehdi Hasan airs a special episode of his podcast “Mehdi Unfiltered” at the Palestinian-American owned OUD Coffee and Café around the corner from the United Center. His guests are key figures in the Uncommitted movement: Layla Elabed, co-chair of the Uncommitted movement; former US Representative from Michigan Andy Levin, a progressive, Jewish critic of Israel; and Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman, the first Muslim American woman and first Palestinian American to be elected to the state’s House of Representatives. Romman made a shortlist of potential Palestinian speakers at the convention.

She tells Hasan, “I really thought I could take something back after this week, and now I don’t know what I’m going to say to [my community].”

Three weeks ago, at a rally in Detroit, protestors from the Uncommitted movement shouted out, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide.”

She responded: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” a retort that quickly became a campaign slogan.

Kamala, I’m speaking now. Listen: we are all voting or not voting because we are trying to save a life, including the lives of Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, people from the LGBTQ+ community, and Palestinians.

Yes, you’re speaking, speaking to people whose family members are being slaughtered in Gaza with US made and supplied weaponry. The genocide in Gaza has proven to be and continues to be an inconvenient truth for the Biden/Harris Administration, an administration which is complicit in Benjamin Netanyahu’s failed “war” that has killed over forty thousand Palestinians directly, led to another 160,000 Palestinian deaths, and created a man-made famine and humanitarian crisis. Separately, Tutu warned that it was not possible to be a neutral bystander.

Much has been made of Harris’s “refusal to be silent” on Gaza, but there is nothing in her past that suggests, if elected, she will act on her expressed sympathy to the plight of Palestinians. Quite the opposite. In 2017, she co-sponsored a measure condemning a UN resolution urging an end to Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. As one Palestinian said recently in an interview, Harris is “in line with her Democratic predecessors—lip service to the Palestinian people with no intention or desire to advance their just demand for liberation and self-determination on their homeland.”

Many on the left see the upcoming election as an either-or matter. Either vote for Harris or allow Trump to win and hasten the end of democracy in our country. Many on the left say that politics is a dirty game in this country, that no politician is pure, uncorrupt. Therefore, “single-issue voters” are naïve and impractical. But what if these single-issue voters ultimately determine the outcome of the election? Put differently, what if the upcoming election hinges on the genocide in Gaza? What then?

*

Thursday, August 22 (Day Four of the Convention)

The coronation of Kamala Harris. The greatest show on earth.

Let us imagine it. See her walk onstage to Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” which has become the theme song of her campaign.

As journalist Charles Blow writes in The New York Times, “These are two Black women at the top of their fields performing at the top of their game at a time when their gifts are aligned with the public’s appetite.”

He continues: “On a more strategic level, Harris is deploying some of the same tactics around image and access that Beyoncé has insisted upon, and they are paying the same dividends.”

To that I say we are doing it again, projecting all our progressive hopes onto a centrist Democrat because that candidate is Black. Perhaps—the shape of things to come—Harris will indeed get to be the custodian of an American empire that is spiraling in decline. In all likelihood she will disappoint Black people in the same way that Obama disappointed Black people.

I know that I am impractical. Know that I’m an idealist, a “radical” stuck in 1968, 1969 (the murder of Fred Hampton), 1979 (the Sandinista Revolution), 1989 (Berlin Wall). That I find it hard to play political baseball because I feel that doing so will betray those who never sold us out—Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Fanon, Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Stokely, Fred Hampton, Lumumba, Biko, Sankara, Machel, Fannie Lou Hamer, my mother.

The world is in many ways worse than it was in 1968. If we couldn’t achieve freedom then, we can’t achieve it now. The older I have gotten, the more I have come to understand that the odds are always against us, that life is not fair, that the “arc of the moral universe” does not bend toward justice because the “pigs” have the money, the guns, the bombs, the drones, the police, the jails, the media. I know that creating a true third party is impossible in this country since we are neoliberal and corporate in our politics and our thinking. I know that what John Steinbeck said about this country remains true: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

In his 1968 piece “The Members of the Assembly,” Jean Genet wrote, “America is a heavy island, too heavy; it would be good, for America, and for the world, for it to be demolished, for it to be reduced to powder.”

Perhaps it will all be reduced to powder someday. Part of me wants it all to be destroyed—Burn, baby, burn—but then I remind myself that if it burns, many people will get hurt, people will suffer, I remind myself that those I love, namely my four children, will get hurt, suffer. The best I can do is hope for the best and fear for my children.