Full disclosure: We cats are white. And we couldn't care less about the prediction that by 2045, the United States will become a minority-majority country. Are we falling down on the job as the dominant caste? Should we be defending our whiteness more?
Nah. In fact, total nah.
Who cares about that crap? In a democracy like America claims to be, racial imbalances are not supposed to matter, right? But — oh! Maybe we're not really a democracy, or white folks wouldn't be so worried about being outnumbered. Is that it? Yep, that's probably it.
There's always been a gap between what the US stands for and what it really is. We all know this. Thomas Jefferson may have written that famous line about everybody being created equal, but he was an enslaver, and his definition also didn't include non-property-owners, or Indigenous people, or women. But his words are immortal — so we've spent the last 250 years trying to live up to them. Sometimes we've done well. Most often, we haven't. It's a continuing struggle.
Even knowing this, though, it's been mighty dispiriting to see the developments over the last week: the Supreme Court obliterating the Voting Rights Act, the Southern states' rush to gerrymander Black people out of existence, and Virginia's top court tossing the Commonwealth's new map out on a technicality.
The Republicans' goal is clear. They're freaked out about 2045, so they're trying to make America a 21st-century version of apartheid South Africa, through draconian immigration enforcement and voter suppression. To see what they're doing in Tennessee, as just one example, is wildly depressing. But we can't believe they'll be successful in the long term.
First, the political and economic forces against the GOP in 2026 are just too strong to overcome. In a wave election, all the gerrymandering and suppressing in the world still won't be able to cancel out the will of the voters. (Important message here: Let's make it a wave, everybody. It doesn't happen without us.)
Second, the United States of America is a far more diverse country than apartheid South Africa ever was. We are too big and too cumbersome for minority rule to be effectively enforced (apartheid South Africa was, at most, 40 million people, with Black Africans accounting for 75 percent, while the current population of the US is 340 million, with 50 million identifying as Black). Still, the racist Trumpsters will try for it. But we have to believe most people in the US are not okay with segregation. Paws crossed.
We have our marching orders. The states will continue to wrangle over redistricting, but we have to keep registering people and getting out the vote in numbers like we've never seen before. We must have that wave election — not just to recapture the House, but also the Senate.
And once we do manage to get back into control, we have to follow South Africa's example in one respect: Hold a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Unless we grapple with our racist, enslaving past, and are willing to extend the American dream of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness to all people, we'll still fall short of the ideal that the Founders envisioned. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.
(IMAGE: Nicole Hester, The Tennessean)
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