Like the majority of Americans facing the new impeachment inquiry landscape, I am both jubilant and alarmed. What will happen now? Impeachment of a sitting president is a dead-serious business, with no predictable outcome. But I am also concerned that in our nostalgia for Watergate, in our laser-focus on government whistleblowers and international politics, we politically obsessed observers are forgetting the key actors who have been openly agitating and protesting against this White House all along.
Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian labelled this phenomenon the “whitewashing” of the impeachment push.
We’re already ignoring the antiracists, feminists, LBGTQ activists, anti-xenophobes, environmentalists, and those fighting for economic democracy, union rights and gun regulation — the progressive and often marginalized populations who do so much of the scut work of organizing and demonstrating against the just plain illegal and offensive acts of this Administration. They [we] set the stage for the Congressional actions we are now finally seeing.
I’ve had a front-row seat to one of those often-ignored populations and their activism in response to Trump’s Electoral College win.
For the last two decades, I have studied the politics and humor of “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” (TJMS) the wildly popular, quarter-century old syndicated weekday drive-time radio show for adult working-class African-Americans.
The TJMS anchors, guests and their committed, witty audience of 8+ million have for decades espoused a syncretic progressive politics of civil rights for all, women’s equality, LBGTQ rights, economic populism and union rights, supporting refugees, and fighting war and climate change. The show, working with the NAACP and the Teamsters, played a crucial and unrecognized role in President Obama’s two electoral triumphs. In 2017, they went all out for Doug Jones’ triumphant run against Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race. And yet TJMS and its giant audience have been all but invisible to the American mainstream.
Like our best late-night hosts, TJMS political commentaries are most often wrapped in biting humor. This show’s crew, however, are even angrier, funnier and nastier about Trump&Co than their mainstream television comperes.
