Hi, white friends! Can I invite myself to your dinner table for a minute?

You know, the one where you’re having the same conversation that my family’s been having since the debate last Thursday, at our little dinner table in the tiny cottage here on the Beach of My Heart.

It’s the endless circling conversation where we bemoan the inevitably looming electoral disaster, because we’re damned if we lose and still damned if we win. Where we say, I’m thinking about leaving the country if he wins. Where we talk about the end of our democracy, about how impossible it’ll be to come back from this defeat because they’ll hold all the levers. The one where we say, it’ll be game over.

This is not a game. And it is not over.

This is what we need to remember. This struggle is never over. For better or worse, it goes on and on.

Sometimes it’s easier. If you’re like me – a white middle-class liberal who started seeing the racial and systemic pieces of all this within the last decade or so – you maybe thought it would always be easier. That it might end soon, maybe even right now, or at least within our lifetimes.

Sometimes it’s harder. They’ve held all the levers before. The Supreme Court, the President, Congress, everything all the way down to your local sheriff and your local all-white jury. That’s how we got Dred Scott. Plessy v Ferguson. Reconstruction. Executive Order 9066. The Chinese Exclusion Act. Greenwood. The MS St. Louis. Just off the top of my head.

You know why we know those examples and a thousand more? Because the fight didn’t end there.

And it is always, always our fight. For our country, for ourselves, because we don’t want to live under a white Christian nationalist regime, because we know that harms us too, and because – by and large – we are the ones with the numbers and the money and the power to fight back. There is no defeat for white supremacy without white people like us in the fight.

Of course, I know that “white” doesn’t automatically mean “safe.” Some of us are closer to the margins than others.

My intensely beloved family member who’s trans? They might need to leave, along with their parents and sibling.

I can’t get pregnant anymore; I love a lot of people who can, and they may need to leave for medical care, which could mean a short trip or their entire reproductive years, and what if they end up having daughters of their own, does that mean they need to stay away?

I’m Jewish, by birth and culture although not by religious belief; my friends and family who are way more Jewish than I am may need to leave sooner than I would, and my time might come too.

And what about our loved ones with disabilities and/or without documents?

On and on. There are a million reasons why we’re all entitled to make different choices at different times. I’m not advocating martyrdom.

Far from it. I’m not much of a warrior, and I’m certainly not holding myself up as a model. I know that I don’t give as much money as I could. I don’t give as much time as I could. I’m not even writing stuff like this as much as I used to. I’m talking to myself as much as to any of you here.

All I’m trying to say, at your dinner table and mine, is that the more power we have to leave this fight behind, the more we need to think carefully about our responsibility not to.

If it’s easy for us to give up – if we have the money to travel, if we feel like we can just nope out because we wouldn’t be leaving loved ones behind to be victimized, if we could go back to being safe by just keeping our heads down – maybe that’s a hint that we have the strength to keep fighting.

The struggle for justice will go on with or without us. It always does. And white people like us have always chosen to be part of it. Even when we could have opted out.

That’s who I want to be, because right now, I can be.

If you need to go, I love you and I want you to be safe. I’ll be here as long as I can, doing the little bit that I can.

Okay, my dears. Thanks for letting me sit at your table for a few minutes. Hope I’ve been a good guest, not too bossy or didactic. It’s hard to find words for all this. You know I mean well, right?

Much love to all. Onwards. ❤️