So What Do We Do Now?

 If you are like me, you have been trying to not tune into the dumpster fire of DC politics under this neonazifacistregime.

Yet, it all around us and we have to look at what is happening.

In a lot of ways, I've tried to be like that image of the African American women of all ages sitting on top off the highest high rise, sipping their lattes, teas, or mimosas, watching as the United States burns.

We.tried.to.tell.you.

92-percent out.

Black women getting our nails done (not me), sipping our lattes (me), reading (me), or hanging in the garden (not me) or sewing something new from something old (not me, but maybe my daughters), or reading (definitely me) and otherwise just sitting back saying, "we can't save you this time."

I, for one, am not a political commentator.

Nor am I an historian.

Yet, in a lot of ways, I am.

Since the days of Katrina when I organized my first community giving and response event, I've dipped my toes into the water through my action-ism. I've always been in the "let's do something about this" camp.

In my home, for instance, we didn't just start buying Black or local. We had our physician, and when I had my daughters - my OB, realtor, insurance agents, clothiers for some things, all things natural hair, and of course, booksellers. We lived it. We even bought (and reviewed) the book by Maggie Anderson that chronicled her family's one-year long experiment in Chicago of trying to only buy from African American owned establishments to meet their needs. It was published back on Valentine's Day in 2012 when the only thing the country was afraid of was if the then President was going to wear a tan suit or if his wife.

This was before the country reminded us that they really didn't care about us.

Trayvon Martin was murdered just a couple weeks later, in Black History Month, in Florida because a wannabewhiterentacop was scared of his skittles and tea in the rain. 

Two years after that, it would be Mike Brown, on a steaming hot summer day in August 2014 in a closed community in Ferguson. 

A few months later it would be Tamir Rice in Ohio, just a kid playing at the playground during Thanksgiving Break in 2014.

None of these boys were men, all were African American, and their lynchings set off protests.

Maybe that is what scared the white folks.

2014-2020 was almost non-stop assault against Black bodies, minds, spirits, or even hair, in ways that resembled the Jim Crow South. It was pervasive. 

The response from white America was to elect the most unqualified, unfit, unAmerican white man they could find. They did, despite warnings and warnings, but they did because a woman wasn't supposed to lead, and we had 2016.

We found a bit of soul in 2020, or perhaps it was just too many folks died, but we had a sense of normalcy and recovery, but that 2016 dude organized a coup and we ended up with the next few years with court-after-court case and news pundits wondering if the dude-with-the-stammer was too old to lead.

And Black women watched, and tried to tell you that it was about more than just what they were seeing.

Those with platforms tried to tell you.

Those of us with just conversations or spaces like this tried to tell you.

Immigrations - we told you that you were not like them, but you kept wanting to be American, code word for a white as you could be, so you tried to assimilate. And they are sending you to Gitmo. 

We tried, we desperately tried but ya'll - Muslims in Dearborn, Latinos in the Bronx, voted for that re-elected felon.

We tried.

I even got into a somewhat heated conversation, before the dude dropped out and the AfroAsian woman had to step in and try to save-the-day in under 100 days, with a blustering bullying black man. He tried to argue me up and down about the stimulus checks and how Black men would never choose that old white man running for re-election. But they would choose a crook, I argued? I stopped speaking when my husband nudged me under the table and gave me our code signal to stop talking, it was useless. We were of the same educational and social class, it wasn't like I was talking to someone from around-the-way.

I wonder what that dude is doing now or if he was one of the kewnery krew who went to the kakostraphy in the White House during Black History Month this year.  

The washing-out-the-black has been like a firehose. They got rid of our sister-journalist and all the other folk who had a bit of God's sun on their skin.

The onslaught has been a lot.

That begged the question and a lot of folks on social media were asking the 92-percent why we weren't up-in-arms, why we, the most educated in America, weren't lamenting the cuts to social programs and the job losses.

Because we.told.you.so.

Because we've been organizing and strategizing and planting and making and trying to save ourselves this time.

Because we are tired.

So what do you do now? Go back and do what we told you a decade or more ago.

Call your local and state and national representatives.

Show up.

Risk something, we did.

And we are resting from all that we risked.

It's your turn now - Asians, Latinos, Muslims, Progressive/Liberal Whites. Even Palestinians protestors.

We left you a blueprint.

But you have to risk something.

Will you do that?

Asking Black women what do we do now is not the move. We already tried to warn you. We wrote books about it, blogs about it, held teach-ins. We did our work.

It's your turn now because it is not theory.

Because the monsters are at the door. In the house. 

Do something.

©2025 by Tayé Foster Bradshaw Group LLC.

This writer is sipping her brown sugar and berry latte pondering the day before she puts on her cape and goes to save herself.