The vice president has too much time on his hands

Tweet less and govern more, James David; you are wasting our time and tax money

I learned of JD Vance’s dis track on me while on a Substack Live with

Tommy Christopher

. Had he not told me, I would be wholly unaware that JD had attacked me. And if I’m being honest, I still don’t care all that much (though my initial reaction to Tommy was pretty colorful, which I’m sure he’ll post sometime soon.

And while I suppose it’s good news that Vance is dispensing advice to women beyond “quit your job, find a right wing husband, have more babies and adopt fewer cats,” as was his habit during the campaign, I have to admit, I am surprised that the vice president of the United States has so much time on his hands that he’s scrolling old interviews of mine and posting on X-Twitter.

We are, after all, just one day into a Republican government shutdown, Trump’s disastrous tariffs are wreaking hell on our economy, likely prompting yet another Trump bailout of the farmers who largely voted for him and those tariffs too. Unemployment is on the rise, prompted by Trump’s frenetic dogeing of any government agency, state or city he doesn’t like or that doesn’t sufficiently like him. Our health agencies are in the shaky hands of a former heroin addict / vaccine truther and a TV doctor from Oprah’s former show. And the former weekend TV host in charge of our military just forced our entire military leadership to watch him do a creepy, manosphere TED Talk, after which the clearly mentally diminished commander in chief threatened to use U.S. cities as testing grounds for U.S. troops’ battle prep; even as he turns the DOJ into a star chamber for anyone who made him mad during his first presidency while his creepy border squad unleash a 1930s-style masked gestapo to terrorize anyone unfortunate enough to be Brown and outside. To say nothing of the disasters Trump’s unique combination of greed and dereliction are unleashing in the Middle East and in Ukraine, while he whines and pines for a Nobel Peace Prize and blows hundreds of millions of dollars on a golden White House ballroom with money we supposedly don’t have for healthcare. With all of that going on, the vice president of the United States is spending his time trolling me on Twitter??? And not even for the first time???

For this, we’re paying this guy $235,000 a year??? And y’all got on Kamala Harris with the whole “well what has she done,” garbage. Sheesh! She at least negotiated that Central American public-private partnership to reduce traffic to the border and tried to get to the root causes of migration, and was the tie breaking vote on key legislation. This guy though? He TWEETS. I guess that’s what you call “reverse DEI.”

But forget all that. JD Vance is mad that I’m not sufficiently “grateful” to America. And to come to that conclusion, he reposted (with comment!) someone called End Wokeness, who pulled up a more than a year old clip of me in conversation with the great Ta-Nehisi Coates (it was a great conversation sponsored by Baldwin & Co. books, which you can find here) in which I talked about what my mother, Philomena, learned when she immigrated to this country in the early 1960s:

To which Vice President End Wokeness had this to say:

Well I’ll be. Non-trolling advice from this guy:

Should VP Kamala Harris be “grateful” that her immigrant mother, who has the same ethnic background as Mrs. JD Vance, gave birth to a daughter who rose from a single-parent household and regular public schools to become the highest ranking woman of any race to hold office in this country’s history, only to have that daughter referred to as “the trash” by the man seeking her job? Oh right … you were just reversing one aspect of The Great Replacement by stealing a white man’s spot back from the Black and Indian lady, amirite, JD?

Just to be clear: I don’t feel the need to take advice, trolling or otherwise, from a man whose moral North Star is Curtis Yarvin. The idea that Black people owe ‘gratitude’ (to white people, presumably,’) when we succeed, is just the same old racist balderdash that we’re used to from the right.

Unlike JD, I need not be grateful that a billionaire, anti-democracy, white South African sugar daddy literally financed my entire path in business and in politics after an affirmative action stint at Yale, where his family’s Appalachian poverty helped make him an attractive addition to that school’s freshman class the year he got in. Unlike JD, I built my life and career the old fashioned way: on my own. Literally.

Philomena died when she was 57 years old and I was 17. (My older sister June was 18 and in her sophomore year at Brown, and my brother Oren was 12.) I can hardly be grateful for an American medical system in which Black women are 40 percent more likely to die of breast cancer than white women, and have a five year shorter survival rate due to racial medical disparities that date back to enslavement but which the current regime won’t even allow government scientists to study anymore.

And my mother had no more help than I did. She came to this country by herself at 30 years old; got herself into NYU, married and divorced my father, raised three kids on her own, on an associate professor’s salary after Reagan’s 1983 budget doged her federal dietician job, and managed to buy a house, a car, and see two daughters get accepted to Ivy League universities, not because white America gave her anything as some sort of racial gift, but because she worked her ass off — sometimes three jobs at a time — through the cruelties of Reaganomics and despite the abject racism she and my Jamaican godmother encountered from NYU on. And as my. godmother reminds me, nearly every time we talk, the racism she and my mom faced in New York was nothing compared to the racism the Black Americans in their classes faced. Indeed, sticking up for their African-American friends became a core part of Philomena and Bernice’s journey at NYU, because with their foreign accents, they had slightly more social latitude and would receive less backlash. And the racism those Black Americans in New York faced paled in comparison to what Black Americans in the South were going through at that very time in the early 1960s.

And so yes, JD, I recounted to Ta-Nehisi how my mother found out pretty quickly that this country was designed to be a land of opportunity; just not intentionally for people like her (or me.) Black Americans and Black immigrants have had to get around a congenitally anti-Black system to make this country work for us. Could we always get an education? No. It was literally illegal to teach enslaved people to read, and then Jim Crow locked us out of public school and colleges. Black Americans fought that all the way to the Supreme Court, and then affirmative action opened the doors to higher education by forcing elite schools to just notice high achieving Black high schoolers.

Could we always own a home in America? When you count redlining, banks refusing to lend to Black buyers, racially restrictive covenants, racial bias in home valuations and banks handing Black buyers higher interest rates, the answer is, “sure, but with a lot of hoops to jump through.”

Can we start businesses and be entrepreneurs? Of course. And many of us do. But we face institutional barriers to getting the same kinds of investment and business loans that white entrepreneurs receive for back of the napkin ideas.

Everything that Black Americans, including the Black immigrants who have benefited from the searing civil rights struggle Black Americans (and Black immigrants like Stokely Carmichael) fought and in too many cases, laid down their lives for, is done with the headwinds of anti-Blackness blowing hard in our faces.

The reality is, if you see a Black pilot when you board an airplane, tell the Lord thank you, because that pilot had to be ten times as good as his white counterparts to get into that seat. That plane is gonna land safely.

Like it or not, the United States of America, from its inception, has operated on the dual principle of both needing the labor of Black people, and violently hating Black people; as well as the Brown and Asian people who replaced Black people’s free labor, and the indigenous people the colonizers stole America from.

The loathing of immigrants has also been a feature, rather than bug, of American society. For much of this country’s history, Blacks and immigrants were treated like second and third class citizens, who ought to be grateful that white Americans allowed them to live at all. They were told where they could live, where they could and couldn’t go to school, where they could and couldn’t work, and how much success and affluence would be tolerated before it was taken away — by insulted bosses and supervisors firing them for being too “uppity,” by police officers killing them for being in the “wrong place,” with the wrong skin color; or by marauding, armed white mobs lynching their bodies or burning their towns to the ground. The difference is, white immigrants eventually got the option to transition into white Americanness (to which many Latino immigrants also aspire.) Not so, Black Americans, and barely so, Black immigrants.

The horrors of that past are mostly past (mostly) … yet even now, if a Black person manages to build anything in this country, men like JD who believe themselves to be our betters will either assume that you stole your success from a more deserving white person or they’ll demand that you show them some “gratitude.” They want to watch you grovel before their lily white vision of America and thank people like them for “letting” you succeed.

Well guess who I’m grateful to for my success, JD. I’m grateful to the abolitionists and civil rights heroes who showed us the meaning of resistance; from Nat Turner and John Brown, to William Lloyd Garrison and Toussaint L’ouverture; and from Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells; SCLC and SNCC to the Black Panthers, and to Martin, and Medgar, and Malcolm. I’m grateful to the indigenous warriors who fought for their homes and the Interned Japanese Americans who demanded reparations, and to everyone who has fought to give this country its desperately needed second reconstruction. I’m grateful to the immigrant field workers who feed us and the construction workers who build our homes and make our businesses thrive.

And most of all, JD, I’m grateful to my mom, Philomena Augustina Carryl Lomena, who came to this country all by herself and built a life. Who sacrificed her own health to keep a roof over her children’s heads, and who fought with the headwinds of anti-Blackness in her face to be somebody of account in this country. I’m grateful that she pushed us to get good grades, and made sure we had encyclopedias and Essence and National Geographic magazines at home and that she unleashed her children into the library on weekends and scrimped to afford piano lessons for us. I’m grateful that she cheerleaded our successes and bought me a little $300 car so I could have some independence and get a little job so I could afford contact lenses in high school. I’m grateful that she brought our cousins to Denver every summer so we would know our family. And I’m grateful that she died knowing her baby was gonna earn a Harvard degree. And I’m especially grateful that she made her way in this country so foreign to her, despite people like you.

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