North Carolina’s Long Moral March and Its Lessons for the Trump Resistance - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/north-carolinas-long-moral-march-and-its-lessons-for-the-trump-resistance
As Barber put it on Saturday, the movement exists “so preachers can fight for fifteen and workers can say ‘black lives matter,’ and a white woman can stand with her black sister for voting rights, and a black man can stand for a woman’s right to health care, and L.G.B.T.Q. folk can stand for religious liberty, and straight people can stand up for . . . queer people, and a Muslim imam can stand with an undocumented worker.” This litany of identities might horrify those who argue that Democrats have fallen away from common appeals, but the premise of the movement is that a universalist program—for health care, voting rights, reproductive choice, and higher wages—begins in building coalitions among people whom politics have driven apart. The point of the new coalition is to achieve for the first time what he calls the “justice and community and the general welfare and the domestic tranquility and equal protection under the law” that American Constitutions, state and federal, have always promised but never quite made real.
On Saturday, an unseasonable seventy-degree day, with early magnolias already beginning to bloom, the march resembled a constitutional convention scripted by Walt Whitman. Traditional ministers from the black church shared the stage with Planned Parenthood officials and self-described queer Muslims. There were doctors, union leaders, environmental activists, rabbis, and white mainline Protestants. The N.A.A.C.P. is so central to progressive political life in the state that it fields nearly all-white delegations from the mountainous western counties. Some participants were dressed for church, some for class or the golf course, and a few for a shift at the anarchist bicycle co-op. Some of the loudest cheers were for the first of three Muslim speakers.
Forward Together also offers a warning for the increasingly popular tactics of repeatedly calling congressional representatives and, better yet, showing up to challenge them at town hall events.