Biden isn’t Black America’s anti-racist alternative
Unlike past elections in modern U.S. history, Tuesday’s vote could lead to two-and-a-half possible outcomes: A Trump win; a Biden win; and, closely related, a Trump refusal to concede and violence.
If this is a referendum on race as some are framing it, then it’s not a choice between racism and anti-racism. For white voters, it’s a choice between the usually hidden systemic racism now exposed by a global pandemic and the louder, vulgar white extremism.
For racialized voters, but especially the marginalized among them, this election is a choice between the terrible and the terrifying.
The Donald Trump rhetoric has dug out the cancerous roots of American racism that are both foundational and contemporary, based in white Americans’ deep-seated fears of the other — immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, Native Americans and heaven forbid, Black people — gaining any real power.
The Joe Biden campaign is not the anti-racist alternative. Heck, far from defunding the police, Biden promises to increase funding for police. But he at least offers plans for a younger, browner America, including investments in education, mental-health services, small businesses for communities of colour and policies to increase access to affordable housing.
If Trump wins, violence is unlikely. If Biden wins, all bets are off. Trump has so riled his base to believe that a loss means an election stolen, that a Biden win with Kamala Harris, a Black woman, as vicepresident will fuel a violent vengeance.
“Racial violence is very core to our history,” said Donna Murch, a Rutgers University professor of history. “To understand what’s happening now you have to go back 50 years to Black people winning full citizenship rights” with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After the Voting Rights Act was passed, the Democratic party that had been the party of white supremacy and segregation became the party of racial liberalism, Murch says. “As that happens, the majority of the white population leaves the Democratic party and joins the Republican party. That party realignment is a direct response to Black citizenship rights. If you look at it in this way, Trump is not an aberration.”
Over the decades, U.S. states have curbed advance voting hours and offered fewer polling stations, fewer polling officials and fewer machines that work in areas where minorities vote. Carol Anderson, author of “One Person, No Vote,” calls voter suppression tactics “a deliberate and cruel hoax played on millions of citizens.”
Even the dogwhistles employed are similar over time. In 1980, Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign speech outside the town of Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964. A few weeks ago, Trump’s first campaign rally after his break due to a COVID-19 diagnosis was at Sanford, Fla., which is where the Black teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by a white man in 2012.
“Those are signals to their base,” Murch says. “We are witnessing the culmination of the real attempt to overturn the Voting Rights Act.”
Already, while the election hangs under the cloud of voter suppression and violence at polling booths, hundreds of vehicles with Trump supporters bearing pro-police flags have snarled traffic at major arterial roads in several American cities. The FBI is investigating an incident on Friday after a convoy of nearly 100 pro-Trump vehicles surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas and reportedly yelled obscenities. According to a Biden official, the pro-Trump vehicles tried to slow the bus down and run it off the road.
Trump called the drivers patriots.
What would a Trump victory mean? In a word, catastrophe. Catastrophic for race relations, catastrophic for labour movements.
“As it stands now with the Supreme Court (that now firmly tilts Conservative) I’m not concerned that we will lose just the right to abortion, I’m worried that we could lose the right to organize and unions,” Murch says.
Any understanding of Trump has to come with an intersectional analysis. “You can’t talk about Trump and not talk about the gender politics.”
His “grab them by the p---y” rhetoric essentially valorizes sexual violence against women and weaponizes a vision of white masculinity and masculinity more broadly, she says. That macho allure may win him more men of racialized backgrounds, but while a majority of white women (53 per cent) elected Trump in 2016, they may not this year.
“Women are moving further and further to the left and so there is a gender split along these political lines,” Murch says. And a Biden victory? That, too, worries Murch. “What often happens in the United States is it’s often under the Democrats that you see the worst austerity being imposed. The only bright spot that I see is that our social movements grow stronger under Democratic presidents,” such as Lyndon Johnson, whose presidency saw an explosion of organizing and protest for both the civil rights movement, the urban rebellion and Black power in the 1960s.
Democrats often talk about reaching out across the aisle, but it’s usually a one-way effort, she says. So we see images of Michelle Obama hugging George W. Bush or CNN embracing John Bolton, the former White House national security adviser. Like Barack Obama, Biden talks about governing all Americans.
“One of the very worst things that Trump has done,” Murch says, “is that he has strengthened the right wing of the Democratic party. That’s how we ended up with Biden.”