Our Destinies Are Linked, Our Fates Are Tied
This is not a 2024 election postmortem. I have neither the range nor the willingness to try diagnosing the catastrophe that has been forced upon us once again. This is simply a statement of one thing I know to be true regardless of who occupies the White House in January of 2025: Our destinies are linked, our fates are tied.
The U.S. “left” and “right” are no longer what they once were. The “right” has shifted so far in its own direction that the entire spectrum has been upended. What was once considered right-wing now reads as moderate (whatever that is). As the right-wing leapt off the right side of the political game board, the “left” has in turn crept closer and closer to the right. On so many issues, the political “left” has become utterly unrecognizable.
Over the last four years, the Democratic Party—the party traditionally representing the “left” to the Republican Party’s “right”—has almost entirely abandoned what we were told are its core pro-immigrant principles. The Democratic Party told us they were the party of defending asylum, of welcoming the stranger, of humane immigration laws, and of protecting those who hold our economy up. Yet for whatever reasons and without remorse, the Democratic Party left immigrants in the lurch.
The Democratic Party went from decrying the cruelty of kids in cages and the illegality of Title 42 to enthusiastically gutting the availability of asylum (which flouts international and domestic law—at least for now) and wailing about insecure borders. In 2021, the future 2024 Democratic presidential candidate and daughter of two immigrants, told immigrants, “Do not come.”
Immigration law and policy have always been racialized. The diversified immigration ecosystem we have today was born directly out of the revolutionary wins of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the rolling back of civil rights in every area of our lives goes hand-in-hand with an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment. A vocal, bold resurgence of anti-Blackness goes unabashedly before rampant xenophobia. Our destinies are linked, our fates are tied.
I can speak only for my own dual communities of Black Americans and Black immigrants. Heed this warning: there is no future in America where we can survive without one another. Black Americans have nothing to gain while Black immigrants are on the chopping block. Black immigrants have nothing to gain while Black Americans try to withstand endless generational oppression. I don’t care what either party tells you. When the 2024 Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees openly slandered Haitian immigrants in Ohio with ugly stereotypes and outright lies, they signaled that it was open season on Black people of all ethnicities and nationalities. In America, your Blackness will always be recognized first and foremost whether for good or for ill. Nothing you do to differentiate yourself from “them” will permanently change the material conditions of anti-Blackness in America as they apply to you. Better you learn to change the material conditions of anti-Blackness in America for all of us so that we all get free. Our destinies are linked, our fates are tied.
No matter who it is easiest to blame for our second collective descent into chaos, please know that we—the marginalized, the racialized, the othered—are under direct attack. It is clear that those of us under attack must find new political homes, if they exist, or build them anew. So many people are already doing that work. It’s up to us to find and join them because our destinies are linked, our fates are tied.
