An Open Letter

To my Black & Brown Communities Post Local Election Season

To my Black and Brown communities,

Every election season, we brace ourselves for the noise—misinformation, tension, arguments at the dinner table, long Facebook posts, and the emotional exhaustion that comes with choosing leaders in a system that wasn’t built for us. We expect the harm to come from the outside: from wealthy white donors, political machines, and candidates who have never stepped foot in our neighborhoods but feel entitled to our votes-which is evident in our recent election.

However, the hardest truth we rarely say out loud is this: sometimes the harm comes from us.

And we need to talk about it.

We need to talk about the fact that Black and Brown folks can be just as harmful, just as petty, just as manipulative, and just as damaging during election season as the very systems we claim to be fighting. We need to talk about how we replicate the same behaviors that traumatized us—gatekeeping, silencing, rumor-spreading, tearing each other down, and weaponizing our proximity to struggle.

Internalized oppression doesn’t disappear when we canvass. It doesn’t dissolve when we endorse a candidate who “looks like us.” It doesn’t vanish when we volunteer for a campaign or run for office ourselves. It shows up loudly. It shows up in the ways we delegitimize our own candidates with language we learned from white supremacy. It shows up in the ways we call each other “unqualified,” “too emotional,” “too loud,” “too inexperienced,” “too radical,” or “too much,” or my favorite “too aggressive and divisive,” repeating the very critiques once used to box us out of power.

And sometimes, it shows up in even uglier ways that mirror the tactics of the political machines we claim to resist.

Retaliation.

Intimidation.

Character assassinations whispered behind closed doors.

Public callouts rooted in personal vendettas, not truth.

And a willingness to watch a fellow Black or Brown leader crumble because their rise feels like our loss.

We don’t like to admit that proximity to oppression doesn’t make us incapable of harming each other. It doesn’t make us automatically ethical. It doesn’t guarantee that our leadership is rooted in community, honesty, or justice.

Being marginalized doesn’t turn us into saints.

Sometimes it turns us into survivors who haven’t yet unlearned how to stop fighting each other.

And election season magnifies all of it.

We see misinformation spread faster when it comes from someone who looks like us. We trust the tía who circulates a video of a candidate talking about balancing the local budget, but the clip conveniently ends before the candidate starts promoting the idea of housing unhoused people on farms and forcing them into labor—essentially repackaged plantations. We believe the local nonprofit leader who publicly declares a candidate “untrustworthy” because they missed a single phone call, conveniently ignoring that the same candidate is hands-down the most qualified person on the ballot. We let elders pressure us into certain votes out of guilt and the privilege they’ve accumulated over the years—like casually calling a sitting councilor on their personal cell while that same candidate ignores everyone else in the Black and Brown community and openly discriminates against a staff aide.

If we are going to demand better from the political system, we must also demand better from ourselves.

Start by saying aloud: “Accountability is not anti-Black.”

It isn’t a personal attack, and it isn’t division—it’s a standard. And that standard applies to every sitting councilor and every future councilor who harms Black and Brown communities, no matter how familiar, friendly, or politically convenient they may be.

It’s the belief that truth matters more than loyalty to any political figure.

It’s the belief that power should never be protected at the expense of the people who gave that power in the first place.

The next election season, we must interrupt the cycle. We must call each other in—not out—to demand better. We must challenge misinformation, even when it comes from our own families. We must refuse to tear down our neighbors for the sake of a candidate or a party. We must choose truth over tribalism, integrity over identity, and community over chaos.

We have fought too hard, for too long, to gain political power only to use it in ways that mimic the systems that oppressed us. Our ancestors didn’t march, protest, organize, and bleed so we could become the very thing they struggled against.

We deserve campaigns that respect us, not manipulate us.

We deserve politics that bring us closer to liberation, not deeper into internal conflict.

So here’s the invitation—and the challenge:

Let’s show that we know how to hold power without weaponizing it.

Because the future of our communities depends not just on who wins an election, but on who we become in the process.

With truth, urgency, and love—

A fellow daughter of these communities who expects us to rise higher

I’d love to hear from you…