Anti-Blackness Is Not a Wave You Ride to Congress
S. E. Anderson
Anti-Blackness Is Not a Wave You Ride to Congress
Darializa Avila Chevalier won in New York's 13th, and she will be the first woman ever to represent the district in Congress.
Darializa Avila Chevalier won.
Let me say it again, because some people spent weeks insisting it could not happen, that it should not happen, that a woman like her had no business reaching for a seat powerful men assumed was already paid for. Darializa Avila Chevalier is the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District. The incumbent had nearly a decade in the seat, the chairmanship of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the governor, the attorney general, and millions of dollars in outside money lined up behind him. He lost. She won.
A small confession before I go on. I wrote most of these words before the race was called. I wrote them last night, after I published my last piece, when the coordination became obvious, the comments flooding my section within minutes of my posting the piece on Instagram, when the threats began landing in my own inbox for simply naming what I was watching. I wrote them because I already knew. When a smear machine moves like that, in lockstep, with that much money behind it, that is not confidence. That is fear. And I wanted it on the record that I saw the fear before I saw the result.
So let me tell you what the fear looked like in this race.
The fear looked like grown adults in my comments demanding to see Darializa’s mother’s birth certificate, as if her dominicanidad were a passport that could be revoked by men who appointed themselves border agents of an identity that was never theirs to police.
The fear looked like the fabrication, repeated until some people started to believe it, that she is Haitian, that she is tied to Haitian nationalist and terrorist organizations. None of it is true. She is the daughter of Dominican immigrants. But the lie was never about accuracy. The lie was a dog whistle, and the dog it called is the oldest one we have on this island and in this diaspora: the one that says Haitian is an insult, that Black is a disqualification, that the way to end a Black woman’s campaign is to make her foreign, make her dangerous, make her other.
The fear looked like the words they hurled at her, and at me, once I wrote about the anti-Blackness running underneath all of it. Bitch. Dirty Black. Stupid liberal. Maldito haitiano, spat like a slur, as though there were anything shameful in being Haitian at all. And the most Dominican one of them all, mamaguevo, because when the politics run out, the insults are all that is left.
Let me be clear, because it matters. This is not who I know Dominicans to be. I am Afro-Caribbean, born and raised in the Bronx, Dominican on my father’s side and Boricua on my mother’s. My father is a Black man from Santo Domingo. I know how many of us have grown a no-tolerance for this racism and want nothing to do with this playbook. The dominicanidad I know is spent working alongside our Haitian brothers and sisters, taking them in when they arrive with nothing, not enough to feed themselves or their families, giving them work and sharing what little there is. The men who ran this campaign do not speak for my people. This vitriol does not represent all of us, and the playbook itself is not ours. It is a gutter politics. It is anti-Blackness as strategy, xenophobia as strategy, cowardice as strategy. And today, that strategy lost.
Here is the part they do not want said out loud. The real fear was never Darializa herself. The real fear was the seat. They thought it had already been bought.
Look at the money. AIPAC’s super PAC funneled $650,000 into a single outside group, BOLD America, which then spent more than $2.8 million on ads to tear her down and prop him up. His campaign took money directly from AIPAC and more than $140,000 in donations the lobby earmarked for him. In the closing days, a flood of out-of-district donors, most of them AIPAC’s own people, almost none of them living in Harlem or the Bronx, rushed cash toward a seat they had already written into their ledger. That is what they were defending. Not a record. Not the district. A purchase they assumed was final.
Zohran’s win should have been the warning. When this city swung behind a democratic socialist, a Muslim immigrant, for mayor, the message was already written on the wall for anyone willing to read it: the fear does not sell here anymore. They did not read it. So let Darializa’s win be the second notice. As Zohran put it after the Knicks brought this city to its feet, it is in that razor-thin margin, that .4 percent, where New Yorkers decide to make it happen. This was that margin. This was New Yorkers deciding. It was people who spoke out, who knocked on doors and talked to their neighbors one by one, who kept their chins up while Espaillat’s canvassers heckled and harassed them. That is what the margin was made of.
So to the Espaillat camp, and to everyone watching who still believes anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and political cowardice are a wave you can ride all the way to Congress: it did not work. It is not going to work. You demanded a Black woman’s papers and New York handed you a congresswoman. We are sick and tired of a politics that asks my people to prove they belong before it will let them lead. Darializa showed what is possible here. The record will show you tried to stop her. The record will show you lost. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
--------------------------------------------