So that happened

scatter brain thoughts

💖Motivation Meows💖

Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.

To read what you missed this week in Good Black News, click here. Otherwise, well, you know what we are talking about today.

Feel free to send around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Instagram at dominicmadori.

This month I’m reading: White Teeth by Zadie Smith

This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: Stand on the Word by The Joubert Singers

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💢From the Chatterbox💢

There is a lot to process. But these are my first initial reactions to what has just changed the rest of my life.

Trump won in what was essentially a landslide. Harris didn’t even come close.

The main culprit for the results seems to be the economy and no doubt things are tight right now. Housing is expensive. Groceries are expensive. The media says the economy is doing good but the consumers on the ground feel squeezed. They think Trump will save them because when he was president things seemed different. The economy goes up and it goes down and whichever president is in office at the time bears the brunt of that movement. But Trump will not save the middle or working class, analysts have warned, which makes this moment even sadder I think. People voting for today not realizing they and their children still must deal with tomorrow.

You know, one of the most annoying things that happened this election cycle was the commentary around Black men and crypto. It was distracting, offensive, and frankly silly. Though the campaigns had to make some crypto speeches no doubt to please the new class of crypto lobbies that have formed to sway American politics, I felt it was a red herring to the actual issue that plagues U.S. elections every year: that white women and good chuck of non-Black people of color vote red. Black Americans have always voted in a blue bloc; I was trying to get people to understand that no matter what happened, no matter whose side we were always on, we always voted collectively together, not individually, the Black male vote was always going to Kamala Harris because that’s just the Black community votes. Crypto or not. Stimulus checks or not.

The media spent so much time and Kamala spent so much time talking to this imaginary Black man who was slipping away from her fingertips when she should have been talking to white women, who swayed the election to Trump the first time; she should have done more to court Latino voters, who still came out in very large amounts to back Donald Trump regardless of the racist commentary he’s made about the entire diaspora. Harris worried about crypto but she should have been focused on the people — including Black people — who were very serious in that they were not going to vote for her over the handling of the war in Gaza.

But it’s discouraging to know that in the end, nothing would have been enough. At the core of this country still remains this rot from hundreds of years ago that we cannot dig out. It’s all so complicated, isn’t it? How race, self-interest, hatred, fear, sexism, xenophobia, etc., combine in this nation of 340 million people to dictate the future of the world. It’s impossible to encapsulate it all — the motives, the intentions, the desires, dread, and suspicion. I’m not going to try. But I do have a few other things to point out and say.

There was a quote my grandfather told me down in the South which was that a poor white person will always still think of themselves as superior to any rich Black person

I think about that when it comes to the grasp that hatred and fear have had on people for the past four hundred years in this colonized land. I have been talking to all of my friends, many of whom are first-generation, to try and understand why minorities and immigrants are voting for a party that thinks so lowly of them. As a Black person who has been here for hundreds of years, I don’t understand why people of color, especially those who are upper-middle class and lower (in other words not rich!), vote against collective self-interest, thinking that the rights of the individual will supersede policy measures that overarch the nation.

Do you think you fell out of a coconut tree?

And when you buy the cow you get the milk — whether you are vegan or not.

I don’t need to say again that this nation was built to please religious white men and we have not grown out of those roots. Even single-issue voters, taxes, in a nation where no one is poor only pre-rich; the topic of religion, in what is supposed to be a secular nation. Abortion. People for some reason thought abortion would make more women turn blue, especially given the fact that women are dying in states where there are near-total bans. I have struggled to articulate exactly how alliances are drawn in the U.S., but just know that it could be thousands of women dying, the number would never be enough for many, in a nation whose roots are fundamentalist Christianity. There is an interesting phenomena that we have started to witness first hand which are the marginalized communities, especially white women, who consistently vote against their own interests and then question the diminishing of their rights. I’ve started to ponder more about the radicalization of white men. How terrifying to not be terrified anymore.

I wonder how emboldened people will now feel to stand comfortably in hate. I keep asking what is it? Is it racism, sexism, xenophobia? Is it the money? Even the idea of individualism no longer makes sense, because it’s as if people are not feeling the impacts of the last time Trump was put into office. Or have I just become so absorbed in the media bubble that I too have lost touch with what matters to the world around me? In tech, I’ve been thinking a lot about billionaires — Elon and them — who I suspected all stood in solidarity, to now find themselves within a stone’s throw of the White House. I imagine more will now bend the knee. Power: It’s why representation politics is dangerous and desperate.

You know, I read an article in the Financial Times about how growing up in apartheid South Africa impacts the way tech billionaires and Elon — an immigrant with anti-immigration views — think and operate today. Here is an expert from that piece that has helped put into context a lot of what I was already curious about:

The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society and becoming more violent in the 80s. Musk’s teenage recollections of seeing murders on trains may not be entirely factual, but do evoke the atmosphere of the era. He warned in 2023 about potential “genocide of white people in South Africa”. Trump’s recent claim about “American girls being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage criminal aliens” preyed on similar white fears.”

I’ve been telling people these past few years that tech billionaires are becoming more intertwined with policy and politics. I’ve covered the rise of this and watched how silently many of these tech barons have now come to power. Their wants and motives are different than what the average American might think. The incoming vice president, J.D. Vance, was literally a venture capitalist backed by Peter Thiel, another billionaire mentioned in the Financial Times piece. Now all of these backers and loyalists have an ear to the White House. Most Americans objectively do not care about crypto yet there are crypto Super PACs helping to swing Congress, eliminating anyone who stands in their way. The Right has benefited from this, and last night’s efforts helped swing Congress right. Now, the entirety of the U.S. government is under conservative control. Some have talked about not believing in science. Reproductive rights. Climate change. Of silencing the press. Of banning vaccines. Eliminating the Department of Education. Of imprisioning detractors. Of Project 2025. At risk is Our food. Our water. Our health. Our families. Why?

I understand America is a place to hustle and get rich. That’s it. I think that idea is old. There are too many people living here now to ignore a disrupted social harmony. And the largest town hall we have to talk about it — Twitter — is owned by the man who helped get the president elected and who is poised to get a cabinet position now. Al Jazeera’s headline says enough “Elon Musk eyes radical overhaul of US gov’t as ‘secretary of cost-cutting.’” I also worry about the media self-censoring as its billionaire proprietaries seek to stay in good favor with Trump and editors caution to displease the power that keeps the lights on. I worry. I worry. I worry about what we lose from this — the little hope left of social and economic mobility, reproductive freedom (and RFK being put in charge of that), the right to dissent, and policies that spoke to the working man.

I worry we have become desensitized to hate. I knew after Charlottesville back in 2016 that the racial rot we have been unable to dispel is making us dangerously sick as a society. But still, we kept going. We have had white supremacist and nazi rallies since then, inspiring some people to take torches and march. Donald Trump held some election rallies in sundown towns, did you know that? It’s a concept I had to explain to a friend in the U.K. A sundown town place where just a few decades ago, once the sun went down, Black people couldn’t be outside or in a certain part of town because white people would either kill them or beat the shit out of them.

They still exist today. My hometown was registered as one.

Alas, I haven’t been home for a while, so I’m not as in touch as I once was with the sentiments of small red-town Florida, which is why I was so surprised at the results of this election. I feel bad for Black voters, who must reckon with voting blue each election only to live with the results of a country that will vote for a man whose supporters tried to overthrow the Capitol. I think, how silly we were really to think that America would elect a woman, a Black person, and an Indian person as president — be very serious right now. Doing so would defy everything many think about the country — that we are sexist, racist, and anti-immigrant and that there has never been a time in our history where at least one of these facts has been false. These sentiments were not suddenly going to be refined during the most polarizing time in this nation’s history, where right-winged ideology is sending society into psychosis.

In my home state of Florida, the majority of the state voted to legalize weed and to protect our right to abortion but because the amendments didn’t receive at least 60% of the vote —upped from 50% — the amendments were still rejected. This doesn’t make sense, but results like this make me worry about the future of disenfranchised voting, where past policies no longer make sense for the reality we are living in. My friends text me about never wanting to have sex again. About how we have to flee the country. They talk of events and occurrences that, if happened anywhere else in the world, the U.S. would denounce as grave infractions of democracy. Books are being banned yet we seem content with our discontent. The French surely would never have allowed it to get this far.

So Trump can do whatever he wants now. We can only ponder if he means what he says or if he will do all that he promises. He has a bigger, more powerful backing this time. He won the popular and the Electoral College votes. The rumors of a stolen election have quieted. I’m sure I will have more to say like everyone else around town. I’m sure pundits will be talking for the rest of my lifetime about what went wrong with Kamala’s campaign, without acknowledging the core issue of the hate at the heart of this country, driving us down the highway to hell. Not even four years of Harris’ would-be presidency would have reckoned with the sobering fact that darkness is inside of our society. It’s a hard thing to admit. That maybe somewhere along the line, something failed. Facing this would go against the idea of American Optimism. That hope we always have for a better world. That, exceptionally, we are still the best nation on this earth no matter what happens or who comes into power. Look, the fact that a convicted felon can even rise to power after so many allegations and lawsuits is proof that anyone here can truly rise to become anything (*exceptions may apply).

Television and media make it seem like slipping into an authoritative fascist state is some painful, forceful action that sees people crying and calling for God in the streets. Yet it’s a peaceful morning in New York and we all have to go to work today.

As a Black American, it’s funny in a not-so-funny way, to feel trapped in a country you had no say in coming to, as you watch the fire spread around you. I imagine it’s what a rat would feel like sitting in its cage watching the gone-mad scientist burn down the lab.

I wonder, how much longer a country this big will survive so divided. In peace. And without war.