Op-Ed: We Have 2 Weeks Left To Do Our Job. We Can Do It. Here’s How We Win This Election – Essence

If we all do our job over the next two weeks, Kamala Harris will be our next president. But our job isn’t easy. We can’t just vote on our own. We need to help others send in their ballots and get to the polls, too. We can’t just talk with people who agree with us about our hopes for a Harris presidency and the danger of Trump. We need to talk to people who are thinking about not voting or even voting for someone else.

That’s our job right now. I’m not saying it’s always easy. And it may not always be fun. So I’m writing this piece to offer some pointers—and things you can say—that will make that job a little bit easier. 

We all know that nothing will feel better than waking up after November 5th and seeing how well we did our job—seeing how much it paid off in swinging this election and seeing that Black people came out ahead. Because that’s what this is about making sure Black people come out ahead in this election. 

We need to make that clear to everyone in our lives before they vote. That means talking to all of our family, even the people it’s hard to talk to; and the people we work with, even when it’s not always comfortable to talk about it; and our friends and neighbors we see at the salon or barber shop, or at school pick-up, or church, or at the last picnics of the season, or anywhere else. Everyone we can talk to, we need to talk to.

But how do we get there?

#1 – Volunteer. Resources like vote.org, Black Voters Matter and Color of Change’s VotingWhileBlack give you tools to help talk to Black voters across the country—making sure they are ready and able to vote. 

These sites let you check your voting registration and make sure you haven’t been cut off the voting list by right-wing Republicans. You can use them to help family and friends do the same. And you can sign up to volunteer—on your own or in groups of friends—so you can do what matters most in the last weeks of the election: texting other Black voters, making calls to voters, donating to get-out-the-vote programs, going door-to-door in neighborhoods, organizing events that motivate more people to vote, and more. 

#2 – Talk to people you know. That can be hard—talking to people you know who may not already agree with you. Someone may say to you, “I don’t do politics.” But you need to tell them: “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you. And if you realize that after the November 5th election, it’ll be too late.”

Sometimes, it’s about saying that one thing they can’t ignore: the one thing they can’t deny, which makes the choice in the election and urgency feel so real. For instance, 

Donald Trump executed more incarcerated Black men than the federal government had put to death in decades. He wanted to look tough, and Black people paid the price. Harris and Biden stopped that. But Trump will definitely start that up again on day one. That’s because Trump only cares about his popularity with the loudest white racists, not people like us.

Sometimes, it’s about talking about the reality we’ll all have to live in if we let Trump back in. In 2016, hate crimes increased over 200% in places where Trump held a campaign rally. And they continued to rise even higher after he took over the White House. Now, he’s drumming up all that hateful energy against Haitian people, leading to more than 30 bomb threats at schools, government buildings and officials’ homes in the place he told his mob to target: Springfield, Ohio. That level of anti-Blackness won’t stop with Haitians. All of us are part of a group of Black people he will tell his mob to attack. And if he’s in the White House, he’ll attack us: he’ll tell his Justice Department and police to attack us by invading our neighborhoods, and he’ll tell his IRS and Social Security to attack us by canceling our benefits and who knows what after that.

Sometimes, it’s about being clear and sober about Kamala Harris. She will give us a huge opportunity to move ourselves and this country forward, even if she can’t do everything for us, especially if a Republican Congress stands in her way—just like they did with Obama. But she will push the government forward when it comes to getting what we need and deserve for health care and childcare and for fighting discrimination. She’ll push for economic opportunities for us. And just like with Obama, sometimes we’ll need to push her. The difference is that when Black people push a Democrat like Obama or Harris, we can move them. I was part of doing that during the Obama years, and we won a lot—especially health care. But we can’t have any delusions about the situation under Trump: we will never be able to push Trump. There is no opportunity for us with him.

And that’s another point: talking about Trump’s plans for us.

You may have heard about Project 2025. But what is it? It’s a blueprint for Trump’s agenda that would expand executive power—much like a dictatorship—and turn over all decision-making in government to right-wing extremists. We all know who they are and the kind of things they do.

Project 2025 includes a plan to eliminate job protections for thousands of government employees and replace them with people loyal to Trump. Black workers make up more than 18% of the federal workforce, so this is a direct threat: we would be kicked out of government, and we would probably be the first to go. Project 2025 also plans to destroy the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides money for people with low income to buy food. They’ll attack diversity programs all across the country. Just one result of doing that is creating a massive shortage of Black doctors. The range of negative impacts for Black people is endless. You can see me talk about it here. You can read more here.

Sometimes, we can see that people forget what happened the last time Trump was president, and we need to remind them. When Trump left office, the Black unemployment rate was more than 9%and the Covid pandemic, which he and his administration downplayed and let spread, disproportionately killed Black Americans at double the rate of white people. The Trump administration halted consent decrees that were starting to finally regulate corrupt and racist police departments, and they halted Department of Justice investigations into violent police departments. Trump appointed the most Appeals Court judges in decades—not one of them was Black—and he appointed three Supreme Court justices that ended Affirmative Action, abortion rights and more. 

Vice President Kamala Harris has a proven track record of working with President Biden to create a record number of jobs, keeping unemployment low, improving maternal care, casting the decisive vote for passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and much more.

Our job is not easy in the weeks ahead. But we have to talk to people. And we can’t leave anyone behind. Just as you have seen in the Paint the Polls Black series, which is being helmed by the Global Black Economic Forum and supported by Essence, we have to make sure we share information, dispel the myths and mobilize to vote.  If you haven’t seen the series, you can watch all of the content on YouTube.  

No matter what someone cares about—climate change, jobs and employment discrimination, quality education and health care, reproductive health care, affordable housing, criminal justice reform, LGBTQ+ rights, reining in corporations that cheat us with fines and fees at every stop—we must show them that the thing they care about most is on the ballot in November: they’ll either get it (or have a chance of getting it with Harris), or they definitely won’t get it with Trump—and in fact, it’ll all get a lot worse. It’s our job to make sure people know.

We can do this.

Rashad Robinson is a Civil Rights Leader and President of Color Of Change and spokesperson for Color Of Change PAC.