Black Women Send Letter to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in Support of Maxine Waters

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Auntie Maxine to us, continues to speak truth to power. On Saturday the congresswoman kept it real and succinct as she spoke on President Donald Trump: “We’ve got to stop his ass,” Waters said to a cheering crowd.

As noted before, Mama Max takes no tea for the fever, and as a 78-year-old black woman in America, she done ran out of fucks to give about 30 years ago.

According to Mic, Waters hosted a fundraiser at socially conscious watering hole, Busboys and Poets, a day before Washington, D.C.’s Tax March.

The event was actually called “Auntie Maxine’s Tax Day March Open Mic Reception.”

The mic was indeed open, and Waters let her thoughts pour on our current commander in chief.

“He is a con man. He is someone who will do whatever is necessary to get over at the moment,” she said. She also urged attendees to become politically active.

Her rock-star status continues, and the very next day, at the Tax March, she said she doesn’t trust the president and will not rest until he is outta here.

“I will fight every day until he is impeached,” she said to the usual cheers.

If this behavior becomes acceptable, you'll understand why it is wrong when the pro-lifers start using it against leftists

Angela Rye had a message for anyone who thought that Rep. Maxine Waters does not have a strong support system behind her.

The CNN commentator took a moment during the Sister Love panel on the 2018 ESSENCE Festival Empowerment Stage, in which Waters also participated, to ask the audience of Black women to rally behind Waters.

“We stand with Maxine,” she instructed the crowd to chant.

The congresswoman has been on the receiving end of death threats after calling for the public to “push back” on the Trump administration's zero tolerance immigration policy that separates families.

President Donald Trump also directly threatened Waters on Twitter, while the top Democratic leadership seemingly refused to come to her defense.

"We want to make an illustrative point,” Rye told the audience while asking them to hold hands. “And this is what we’re going to say to Chuck to Nancy and to Donald (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and President Donald Trump)."

In a recent panel discussion, Rye called the recent criticism and death threats aimed at Waters as a result of her being a Black woman.

“It has everything to do with the fact that this Black woman is intimidating to some people who can't handle the truth,” she said during a CNN panel discussion Thursday with Steve Cortes of the Trump re-election Advisory Council. “It has everything to do with race.”

This is about the fifth time you've been threatening to start behavior that the Right has already been doing for decades.

The Right has already stalked people.

Surely you are not calling for the Right to escalate to violence, are you?

Sort of like when Merrick Garland was blocked from the Supreme Court. I had warned the left for years that their abuses were going to be turned against them. As always, they refused to listen to my warnings. Then when Merrick Garland was blocked, the left had only themselves to blame for it.

The Right has already stalked people.

Not really. You are referring to the acts of lone nutcases, not to the right organizing in large numbers with the support of conservative leaders.

What warnings?

For the first time in history, no action was taken on a Supreme Court nomination by the President. They announced they would take no action, no hearings in committee, nothing. Did the Senate have the right to reject Merrick Garland? Absolutely. But they had no right to go against a Constitutional mandate and simply ignore the President's nomination of him.

And no, the Democrats had never done such a thing. Nor the Republicans, until the True Believer Tea Party took over what used to be the Republican Party.

So conservatives have no basis for complaint against Maxine.

being more aggressive does seem to have started to make a difference for the Democrats. As much as I love the Obama aesthetic, being too cool for school might not be a longterm winning strategy. Digging in and fighting looks like it is paying off at the ballot box.

Anyone who doesn’t know that Rep. Maxine Waters is not to be trifled with has not been paying attention.

A few weeks ago, during a congressional hearing, the California Democrat silenced the U.S. treasury secretary and gave voice to legions of exasperated women by repeating the phrase, “Reclaiming my time!” She has been an unyielding critic of President Donald Trump, calling for his impeachment. The president’s supporters have pushed back hard, disparaging her record in Congress and, in one highly public instance, her appearance.

But Waters, 79, has not seemed shaken by the blowback. As she declared Tuesday night after receiving the social humanitarian award at BET’s Black Girls Rock ceremony, “I’m simply a strong black woman.”

The crowd of mostly black women roared in agreement. Waters is perhaps the most popular fighter in “the resistance” against the Trump administration, especially to millennials, who have affectionately named her “Auntie Maxine.” Her signature visage — a disapproving glare over the top of her glasses — has been printed on t-shirts, and her retort to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin became a social media hashtag and the inspiration for gospel song. When I interviewed her in April for a profile, she seemed confident, resolute — strong.

Yet as the celebration continued on social media, with memes quoting Waters’s self-affirming statement, I winced, as I thought about what it means to be a strong black woman.

When it’s time to rumble, everybody looks to you to take the first swing. And if you don’t show up, some folks are upset or suspicious, wondering if you’ve lost your super powers or maybe cut a deal. And you have to calibrate that show of strength just so, or you become marginalized as an angry black woman.

Being a strong black woman can be physically and emotionally exhausting.

Kaila Story, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Louisville, said that people use the phrase in the most positive and affirmative sense. But it carries historical and present-day connotations that “pigeonhole black women’s images.”

“I don’t think Maxine meant any harm and I saw it as an affirmation of herself,” Story said. “But in these times and especially in this climate, with all of the violence affecting black girls and women constantly every day, we need to leave room for a more holistic picture and understanding of who we are as human beings, not stereotypes.”

The term “strong black woman” has been used to laud the bravery of historical heroines such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells. But it also has been abused in popular culture, from the tart-tongued, emasculating Sapphire character of the 1950s Amos and Andy Show, to the more contemporary works of comedians and filmmakers such as Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry, who don drag to portray cartoonishly powerful black matriarchs.

Either way, the dominant image of the boss black woman is incomplete portrait. What of those black women who, because of oppressive or unsafe circumstances, are unable to push back. What if the strong black woman needs to take a sick day or a vacation?

“It doesn’t leave any room for vulnerability, to say, ‘Hey, I quit today. I’m tired. I’m resting today,” Story said.

The overexposed image of the strong black woman also puts African American girls and women at risk for violence and harsher treatment by society. Story cited a recent study that found adults see black girls as less innocent and less in need of protection than white girls. Black girls are disciplined more harshly, in schools and in the juvenile justice system.

“Violence becomes rationalized for black women and care and tenderness goes out the window for black women and girls,” Story said.

In recent years, when black women have been the dominant faces in politics and popular culture, we have been reminded that even at to top of their games, black women are not bullet proof. Beyoncé, one of the most successful female artists in history, addressed the pain of her husband’s infidelity via her album Lemonade. Serena Williams is constantly a target of racist and sexist comments about her body type and dominating tennis game, and recently has had to endure bigoted taunts directed at her unborn biracial child. Michelle Obama publicly acknowledged last month the “small tiny cuts” that she lives with, inflicted by people who could not accept the notion of an African American first lady.

“I’ve been called a strong black woman before. I think people who use it mean you have a developed racial consciousness, you are deliberate and intentional about the things you say and the things you advocate for,” Story said. “I think people honestly feel it’s an affirmation, a compliment and are unaware of all historical and somewhat present ramifications of what that statement really means.”

Waters, in her speech Tuesday, indicated that she does understand the challenge of being a strong black woman. She told the crowd that her antidote for the “right-wing haters” who come after her is “the love and respect shown to me by black women.”

“I am you and you are me,” she said. “We have power. We have influence. We can do things that others have told us we can’t do.”

That is incorrect. The Democrats did it to the Republicans first. The Republicans were just returning fire when they blocked Merrick Garland.

President Bush's nomination of Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican is being held up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raising the possibility that the post may be vacant when Pope Benedict XVI visits the United States in April.

Glendon was appointed by President Bush to the President's Council on Bioethics. Her nomination as United States Ambassador to the Holy See was announced on November 5, 2007. The U.S. Senate voted to confirm her on December 19, 2007. She presented her Letters of Credence to Pope Benedict XVI on February 29, 2008,

If this stalking that the Democrats are proposing is allowed to become acceptable behavior, the pro-lifers who adopt the tactic might do things slightly differently as well. But the result will still be the same.

This is your idea of blocking a nomination? She gets confirmed a month after she's nominated,

As the Republican politicians for decades have been supporting the organizations who advocate forcefully stopping legal abortions, this is nothing new.

You certainly don't like the aggressive posture the Democrats have begun to adopt as far as citizens using their Constitutional right to verbally confront high level government officials whom they think are doing great harm to the country.