“I don’t give a damn about that,” he told me without flinching.
I leaned in, staring back into his steely brown eyes. “Really? You’re not worried about what the national Democratic Party wants?”
He shook his head, adamant. We stood shoulder to shoulder as the Senate chamber in the Annapolis, Maryland statehouse emptied. The wrinkles around his eyes didn’t mute their intensity. He sighed as if the explanation was too long for the time we had. And for a second, I wondered what years of experiences had done to get him to this moment. I had clearly missed something.
“I have a big problem with them carving up Mfume’s district and giving it to Sarah Elfreth and Johnny O.”
Kweisi Mfume is a Black congressman who represents the Baltimore area in Maryland. Elfreth and Johnny Olszewski are white. One of the congressional redistricting map proposals threatened to carve up Baltimore. And the Black Democratic state senator I was speaking with was counting. He was counting the number of Black representatives at the federal and state level.
“With our newest member in the Senate, the Black caucus will be 17 people, and leadership needs to reflect that.”
He went on to list what he wanted, committee chairmanships and the like. He didn’t give a damn about what national Democrats wanted in terms of numbers. He said he didn’t trust them to look out for his interests. And he had a big problem with the idea that Maryland’s Black community would sacrifice their representation for a national team he voted with but didn’t trust.
I had stumbled into this conversation while doing my usual reporter-style backgrounding. For me, these conversations were always the most revealing moments. Sometimes people dropped tips but most times they just spilled tea and aired all the petty politics that thrived in local government spaces. My interaction with this particular senator, who didn’t want me to publish his name, stuck with me. I thought, this is worth mentioning.
Because I went in with assumptions about where people stood framed around the dominant national narrative. Republicans wanted one thing and Democrats wanted another.
But belonging to a group is always more complicated than that, especially when it comes time for the group to make a sacrifice for the collective.
Then, the question really becomes, “Who is we?”
It’s like when the company is a “family” but it is time for layoffs, “Who is we?”
When you are a citizen of a country but it is time to go to war, “Who is we?”
When everyone eats dinner and it is time to wash the dishes, “Who is we?”
We are members of several overlapping groups, each of us at the centers of ridiculously complicated Venn diagrams. Race. Party. Country. Class. Profession. Neighborhood. Family. Most of the time, those circles overlap peacefully enough that we don’t have to decide which one matters most. But sometimes, forces beyond our control pull them apart.
I initially heard “I don’t give a damn about that” and thought I understood what he meant. I’m not so sure anymore. Somewhere along the line, his circles had stopped overlapping neatly. Black representation. Maryland. National Democratic power. He saw a situation where someone was going to be asked to sacrifice for someone else.
And before deciding what he owed the group, he was asking a very basic question.
Who is we?
Rebrand!
(In case you missed it last week.) Yes, the newsletter looks different. I’m rebranding because I want it to be clearer what you get by being part of this community.
The news has me running 24 hours a day. Substack is where I slow down and take in moments. The scene that got cut in editing. The sentence a mother said that I couldn’t stop hearing. The thought too convoluted for a four-minute radio piece but too important to leave in my notebook.
What I want this to be now is the place we process together. Every other Sunday, one story. Have a coffee (or a cocktail) and process a moment with me. Dive into my thinking.
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And remember,…
This conversation is one of many, as I bet you know well. I appreciate your recognizing it and elevating it. Every choice has tradeoffs. This is why I advocate for Prioritized Problems debate over traditional debate. We say it so often there that they've become quotes. "If a solution causes more problems than it solves, is it really a solution?" We need to pay attention to all of the problems and know "Which problems should we not make worse when solving less important problems?"
People are usually not objecting to someone's desire to solve a problem. They're objecting to the ~way~ that person is solving the problem, because that way of solving the problem is creating problems for them and others. We're told, "we'll get to your problem next / later," but it never happens, because there's always a new problem that pops up, caused by the previous solution.
"When you solve problems one at a time you create new problems or make other problems worse."
"Solve as many problems at the same time, while not making more important problems worse when solving less important problems."
How do we collectively determine which problems more important or less important? Prioritized Problems and Democracy Thinking.