Fighting racism and inequality was all the rage in May 2020 when approximately 15 to 20 million Americans took to the streets in at least 200 cities in the United States. Books and videos about anti-racism flew off the shelves, and there was what some observers saw as a seminal moment, a national recognition of the existence of institutional racism and the abusive treatment of Blacks in the American justice system. Amazingly, all of it was during an unprecedented pandemic that claimed the lives of at least 750,000 Americans.
For some, this was a transformational moment that represented a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-generational outrage about George Floyd’s death. We’ve never seen anything like this before. Unfortunately, moments don’t make movements. Those who felt we had seen this movie before knew it would be just a matter of time before this impressive display of activism would expire like a Snapchat message. Those vested in fighting for racial justice were left standing around wondering where everyone disappeared. According to a Pew Research Center survey, on June 20, 2020, 67 percent of Americans supported the fight against racial injustice and Black Lives Matter protests. As of September 2021, that number has fallen to 55 percent. The lion’s share of that slippage is among white Americans.
One of my favorite quotations from Martin Luther King Jr. is, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” My favorite thing about this quote is that it recognizes dedication and perseverance are necessary to progress towards justice. Reverend King and many of us knew that racism and racial injustice are not transactional. Racism and injustice don’t exist because of a series of individual events. Instead, it is an integral component of a system constructed to dehumanize and subjugate an entire race. Then that suffering was institutionalized in our constitution and profited from for centuries. These are indisputable facts.
Racism is like visceral fat. It accumulates around your vital organs, imposes grave risks to your health, and is extremely difficult to eliminate. Our democracy is seriously ill. Racial injustice is deeply entrenched, and any effort to combat it or diminish its impact significantly requires relentlessness. Racism never takes a day off. Neither can the fight to pursue racial justice in our nation. The racial justice protests have shown that even though fleetingly, Americans, predominantly White Americans, could be jarred into acknowledging how cruel and unjust our justice system is to Black people. That is not enough. At a minimum, what is required is a dedication to the principle that all men and women are equal, followed by action to protect and promote that principle.
Now is not the time for situational or therapeutic advocacy. The threat to democracy is a clear and present danger, and one legitimate way to address that threat is the voting process. But why have most White people voted for politicians, specifically Republicans, that have shown that they don’t give two shits about White people either? They don’t care about your kids. Republican governors manage seven of the ten worst school systems in the United States while only representing 3 of the best ten school systems. They don’t want you to have affordable healthcare, and as we recently saw, if you deign to protest on behalf of Black Americans, you are fair game to be shot with no consequences for the murderer.
The last time Democrats won the White vote was in 1964, which not coincidentally was after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Imagine someone saying, yeah, I’m changing parties because my former party isn’t racist enough anymore. That was and continues to be the case for millions of White Americans. Approximately 58% of White voters voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. So, if we play this out to its logical conclusion, there had to be some overlap between the people who supported the Black Lives Matter protests and the White people who voted for Donald Trump. He is the candidate who consistently pushed for violence against these same protesters. There is no logical explanation for that, no level of compartmentalization explains that unless these voters were too embarrassed to answer those poll questions honestly.
I’ve always thought it was a fool’s quest to try and reconcile a vote for Trump or Republicans with being a rational human being. People that voted for Trump in 2020 can’t even claim temporary insanity. I estimate that we can give up on 40 percent of the American voting public. Why waste our energy trying to convince them of what’s best for them when they are hardwired to be supremacists and contrarians. We should continue to fight for policies that benefit them despite their opposition. If we could convince one additional White person out of 10 to vote to protect and advance our democracy, we could defeat those who would destroy it. We will, of course, need everyone that is dedicated and concerned about America striving to be the nation we claim we are to exert their political franchise.
Muhammad Ali once said, “service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” Well, I’d like to take the liberty of revising that quote to say that voting is the rent you pay for democracy. Don’t let anyone discourage you or tell you that your vote means nothing or does no good. Not only is it the most powerful tool you have in a democracy sometimes it’s the only one that matters
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