The Fight for the South
Why We Must Win the U.S. Senate in GA
My fellow white Southerners,
I’m writing today to ask you to join me in the fight of our lives.
We come from places where we know how to take care of one another and how to protect our communities. We grow our own food and share it with our neighbors. We share rides to work and watch each other’s kids. When someone dies, we make sure the grieving family has casseroles, fried chicken, and ham for weeks. If someone tries to bully us, we have each other’s backs. We are fighters and we don’t back down.
But I have to ask: who are we fighting?
Southerners hold a fierce sense of pride, rebelliousness, and freedom. We value protecting our family, our land, and our people. When we’ve lost our jobs and unemployment doesn’t come for months, we are ready to lash out. When we lose our homes because we can’t make rent, we feel that something has been stolen from us because it has. We are looking for who to blame and we should. When our families have to use Go Fund Me to pay for medical care, we are under attack. Our anger is righteous and it’s justified.
But my fellow white Southerners, I have to ask: who is really to blame for our suffering? Is it our struggling neighbors? Or billionaires who sacrifice poor people as “essential workers” while they are hiding on their yachts? Is it other poor people who take our freedoms? Or is it a country that connects our healthcare to having a job that makes money for rich people while we barely scrape by?
We must ask ourselves: is it Black people or immigrants who are hurting us? Or is it actually the greedy landlords throwing families out into the street?
For decades, big business, crooked politicians, and the rich have used their power to gut the government and defund the very institutions that keep us safe like schools, hospitals, and housing. They’ve lied to us and spent billions on psychological warfare and spreading disinformation on social media. They’ve convinced us government is the problem even though government is the only thing standing in the way of their greed. We are dying and they get rich convincing us to blame each other instead of them.
And mostly it’s all been working in their favor because they are the ones who designed the strategy. But they know if we stop fighting each other and start fighting them, they are screwed.
On Nov. 3rd we struck a blow to this entire system that has been so carefully crafted to keep us divided. Following the leadership of Black women, working people across the country came together to defeat Donald Trump, including the state of Georgia — a state that people from both political parties had already written off. Black and brown leaders across Georgia led this work for years and poor white people in rural communities showed up alongside them at the polls to choose freedom, safety, and a fighting chance for all of us.
(Actually, Southern Crossroads in partnership with SURJ helped secure this victory by making a million calls into Georgia having more than 30,000 conversations with white people about the election. As the results rolled in, we saw significant gains for Joe Biden in majority white rural communities where we called.)
Now we keep fighting. On January 5th, Southerners are going to lead the way and defeat the Republicans so we have a shot at winning better schools, unemployment and health care. We will win the runoff elections, flip the Senate, unseat Mitch McConnell from leadership and hand deliver all of it from the South. It’s going to take all of us to do it. Sign up with us to get involved.
Poor folks, rural folks, people who have been struggling for decades, people the rest of the nation shames — we’re not going to be held down anymore. Our best bet lies in choosing sides and picking solidarity with Black and brown working people — not rich white people. On election day and every day after that, we are organizing to ensure that us poor white folks join our Black, brown, and immigrant neighbors and fight.
This is the fight for our children, our families, our homes. We are the people who this system was meant to kill. And we will be the ones to fight together and tear it all apart.
My people, we need each other. Join us. This is the fight for the South.
In love and solidarity,
Beth Howard
Sign up here for Southern Crossroads’ GAining Ground ground campaign for the runoff elections in Georgia to phone bank and knock doors with us. Find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @fight4thesouth. Get on our mailing list to stay up to date on our work.
Beth Howard is the Organizing Director of Southern Crossroads, a community project working for collective power and multi-racial alliances among poor and working class people in small towns across the South.
