During the past 18 months, the Covid 19 virus wasn’t the only outbreak that occurred. An outpouring of cries for social justice has rung out globally. Much of America has been forced to deal with an issue that Black people have been dealing with since the “White Lion” arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, with 20 enslaved Africans on August 20, 1619. Our enslavers viewed us as sub-human, a vile and damaging mythology was created about our “inferiority” that has infected practically every institution in our society. The visible chains may be gone, but the institutional chains remain. So why did the death of George Floyd, this singular event, create the global reaction it did in its aftermath? It was not the first time we have seen a Black man murdered by police on video, i.e., Eric Garner. Much of the credit must go to the Black Lives Matter (BLM), other activists, and indeed all the people that took to the streets during a global pandemic. But we must ask ourselves, is this awakening going to be an inflection point where most Americans would agree that racism has been and still is part of America’s DNA, and are we willing and capable of bringing about a mutation. Sadly, both history and current polls raise doubts.
The source of my pessimism is reflected in the recent PBS Newshour/NPR/Marist poll. In the survey, 62 percent of white people believed that there was a need for police reform. That’s relatively encouraging. But in the same poll, they asked, “do you believe that Police treat Black people more harshly than they do white people?” Only 25 percent of the white respondents said they believe Black people are treated more harshly. What kind of cognitive dissonance is this? These types of conflicting positions raise questions about how reliable most white voters will be in this battle to end institutional racism. My question is, will they be “woke” enough?
The last time a Democratic Presidential candidate won the White vote was 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson crushed the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. In that election, Johnson received 59 percent of the white vote. It is no coincidence that the steady decline of that support concurred with the last significant efforts to eliminate institutional racism, which was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many described the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the day the Democratic party lost the South. I prefer to describe it as the day the Democratic party performed a bloodletting that removed many of the card-carrying racists and segregationists from their ranks. We traded to the Republican Party, and Republicans accepted the former Democrats with open arms.
In 2020 Donald J. Trump received 57 percent of the white vote in an election where more than 159 million Americans voted. After four years of an administration that governed with malicious ineptitude, Trump exhibited very little concern over 600.000 casualties of COVID 19. These are numbers that give me very little hope that there will be some groundswell of support from white Americans in our efforts to eliminate institutional racism in our society. Moreover, it is disconcerting that most white women, nearly 55 percent, voted for Trump. These numbers appear to be illustrative that most white Americans are deeply vested in maintaining a system that contradicts many of the high ideals our nation aspires to. Do we earnestly desire to achieve these lofty goals, justice, and equality, or are declarations just rhetoric to cloak their satisfaction with the status quo?
In 2016 the Democratic nominee was one of the best prepared and qualified presidential candidates in history that was a white woman. I’m not suggesting in any way that white women should have declared allegiance to Hillary Clinton for that reason but come on, look at who they voted for, Donald Trump. They voted for a narcissistic, misogynistic, Reality TV personality that was an antithesis to the core principles that would support the notion of “American Exceptionalism.” There has been a debate about what percentage of white women voted for Trump (47%-52%), but the fact is that most white women also voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
It is numbers like these that make me hesitant to believe that there has been some significant attitudinal change in our nation’s dedication to implementing long-overdue police reforms. Police reform should be low-hanging fruit. How many videos must one watch of Black people being brutalized and murdered by the police? How long do we have to bear a legal system where your skin color is considered a criminal offense? How long do we have to love our country before it loves us back?
Racism is like an auto-immune disorder, eating away at our healthy body tissue, our democracy. We have fellow citizens who believe America was only “great” when Blacks and POC “knew and stayed in their place.” Republican politicians, who are so devious, pit Americans against each other by sowing hateful theories of superiority and inferiority and an economic system that punishes those who work and enriches the few at the expense of 300 million Americans. There is one difference between racism in the United States and an auto-immune disorder. An auto-immune disorder destroys healthy body tissue by mistake; we are aware of the damage to our democracy.
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