This is an opinion column.
She was fire. Controlled fire. Fire, nonetheless.
It was the final day/night of the 2021 Alabama legislative session, the marathon day/night, the day/night when lawmakers bring their pajamas, comfortable shoes, and snacks to work until the clock strikes midnight.
A week ago Monday, around midday, Rep. Merika Coleman (D-Birmingham) had just wrapped a cordial yet spirited repartee with Rep. Paul Lee (R-Houston County) over the vaccination passport bill. As the lawmakers stood at podiums safely socially distanced apart on the House floor, Coleman asked Lee to read portions of the bill, including amendments, to clarify how they prevented private businesses and educational institutions from requiring customers or students to be vaccinated against COVID-19. She also repeatedly asked that their exchange be recorded.
Coleman: “All right, we’re talking about the free enterprise party, the party that supports business in this state. If I decide that I don’t want anybody to enter my place of establishment that has not been vaccinated, does that amendment forbid me from doing that?”
Lee: “Yes.”
Coleman: “Thank you for the recording … Thank you, Mr. Speaker. No further questions and I hope somebody recorded every bit of that.”
“My whole point,” Coleman told me later, “was to show the hypocrisy of the Republican Party.”
Afterward, Coleman sat at her place near the center of the first floor of the chamber—a status afforded by nearly two decades of service in the House as lawmakers accommodated social distancing guidelines; junior members were in the balcony, along with members who felt more comfortable there.
She put on her headphones and hunkered down for the marathon day/night. When Coleman removed them, Rep. Mary Moore was at the podium “talking about how something was disrespectful,” Coleman recalls.
Coleman then—at 12:35 pm—saw a text message from another female House saying, “…how rude ‘she’ had been”.
“I didn’t even know what ‘she’ they were referring to,” Coleman recalls.
“She” was Rep. Charlotte Meadows (R-District 74), a charter school leader who won her seat in an August 2019 special election to replace Rep. Dmitri Polizon, a restauranteur who suffered a fatal heart attack in March that year.
While Coleman was ensconced between her headphones, Meadows headed to the floor and remarked on the bill.
“I was told she said, ‘If people just read the bill,” Coleman says. “She insinuated I hadn’t read it, that I didn’t know what I was talking about. She didn’t call my name, but it was right after me, right after I spoke. She just kept saying ‘people’—'people would understand, if they would just read, then they could understand what’s in the bill.’
Then she said, ‘I hope someone is recording me’. Of course, that was a dig on me, I was responding to the dig.
Via email, Rep. Meadows responded:
“She talked earlier and said numerous times that she wanted someone to ‘record her conversation’. When I spoke in favor of the bill, I primarily was talking about the bill and how the vaccine is not fully FDA approved, etc. I ended by saying ‘and I hope someone is recording me’. It was meant to be funny. Inadvertently, she was offended.”
More than mildly. After reading the text message, Coleman walked to the left side of the chamber. “A whole bunch of people there, Democrats and Republicans, stopped me to say, ‘I can’t believe what she did.’”
The fire rose—the rage of years of Coleman enduring “microaggressions” in Montgomery and beyond because she is a Black woman, of a 2021 legislative session fraught with political tension, even moments of covert and overt racial attacks. All stocked by a taunt from a colleague.
Coleman returned to the podium and, with her voice trembling, spoke—with passion and purpose, for just over four minutes. Here are excerpts:
“When I came [to the State House] I was a 28-year-old young woman, a young person dealing in this body. I had to deal with levels of microaggression where people [thought] that they know more than I [knew] because I was young, and a woman. … I’ve also had to deal with those same levels of microaggression from people who think they know more than I know because they’re white and I’m black. But I never would have thought that I would have to deal with the level of disrespect that happened here from somebody who still has milk on their breath, as my mother used to say, when it comes to this body, somebody who just walked through the door, didn’t know the rules yet. I had to ask somebody the person’s first name because I didn’t even know [it].
“I will not be disrespected in this body. That won’t happen while I’m standing here and to have somebody come behind me and mock me when all I ever try to do in this legislative body is to bring informative issues … speak with intelligence. … For somebody to mock me in this body when we’re supposed to be colleagues, that is unbecoming of a legislator, and we need to make sure that our rules reflect that. … She just walked through the doggone door …”
At this juncture, Coleman stares towards Meadows in the balcony.
“You will never disrespect me in this body, I will not stand for it and I’m gonna tell you this. You don’t want this smoke. You do not want the smoke. I will not take it, we as a body shouldn’t take it. And just because you’re a white woman doesn’t mean you know more than I do as a Black woman … I will not take it.”
Meadows begins laughing. “Once I realized she was talking to me,” she wrote, “I got tickled at some of the comments she made.”
Coleman, of course, was not laughing.
“I see you laughing. I see you laughing. … That’s levels of microaggression where that person is trying to devalue my opinion. …In fact, that’s not even microaggression that’s outright aggression. … For you to sit there and laugh just shows the type of woman that you are.
“For all of these organizations that are trying to encourage women to run for office, and support women who run for office: We are not created equally. Make sure you do your due diligence before you send that type of person back down here to this body.
“I’ve never been disrespected in that manner in this body. And I know one thing: It better not ever happen again.”
Watch full video here.
“I was not just mad, I was really kind of hurt that another member of the body would mock me,” Coleman later told me. “As I’m talking about how I felt, I’m looking at her. She is not only smiling. She is having a good old belly laugh at me. When I said, ‘I see you laughing’, she mouths the words: I am laughing. That’s what really set me off. "
Coleman says Meadows has not apologized to her—although in an email the Republican wrote: “I am sincerely sorry if she was offended.”
“I believe that the incident is over, and I certainly don’t see that this is worth reporting,” Meadows also wrote. “Most of the House members were not even aware that I was the member she was talking about.”
That they did or not misses the magnitude of the moment, and blithely dismisses the depth of an encounter that embodies Black invisibility, which author Ralph Ellison so deftly revealed almost seven decades ago.
Coleman’s anger was stoked by more than Meadows’s words. She shared a frustration likely felt by most Democrat lawmakers in a body where Republicans possess a “supermajority,” allowing them to act like knucklehead teens left alone at home and enact any legislation without opposition. No matter how irrelevant or insipid it may be. (Like banning transgender athletes in the state when there are none to speak of; and, hey, so glad we finally have a state vegetable.)
“I think it probably was the final nail in the coffin after several times this session when I felt not only that my voice didn’t matter, but my constituents weren’t even being considered,” she said. “Times when I felt, as a woman and a Black woman, my voice was not heard or considered. Her sitting there laughing was live and in living color how this session has gone.”
Here’s a twist: The incident may have offered a rare galvanizing moment for the deeply divided House. Coleman is grateful to colleagues on both sides of the aisle who later supported and encouraged her.
“Some said, ‘I can’t believe she did that’, Coleman says. “Some apologized as if they had done something and they hadn’t. Others wanted to make sure I did not lump all white women in the same category. They were like ‘We just want to make sure you know we don’t feel that way and would have never treated you that way.’ There are people in her own party, who look like her, who recognize that what she did was rude wrong condescending.
“I am glad my colleagues rallied around me, and that such behavior was not rewarded in the Alabama halls that particular day,” Coleman added.
It’s days alert, the fire is doused. Mostly. Enough for Coleman to add with a chuckle: “At least not on that day.”
A voice for what’s right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama (and beyond), Roy’s column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him at twitter.com/roysj
"colleague" - Google News
May 25, 2021 at 07:18PM
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In tense exchange in Alabama House, Rep. Coleman tells colleague: ‘You don’t want this smoke’ - AL.com
"colleague" - Google News
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