Post-Election “Blues”: Who Was Really Responsible for the Biden-Harris Win?
I recently joined an incredible SpeakOut webinar with anti-racist activists Melina Abdullah, Tim Wise, and Helen Zia. SpeakOut offers webinars with progressive speakers on a sliding scale basis.
In the webinar, I was schooled on who mattered more than I thought for the Biden-Harris win. Even though most white people that you and I personally associate with might have phone banked, gone door to door, and made donations in support of the Democratic ticket, it was brown and Black people who physically voted Biden in with their higher than usual turnout. Many Black women were responsible for this. A major force among them was Stacey Abrams, whose organization, Fair Fight, registered hundreds of thousands of new voters. A majority (55%) of white women and a majority (61%) of white men voted for Trump. We white people have a lot of work to do to get other white people on board!
What can we do now? With racism continuing, a backlash/whitelash to the Biden-Harris election win has already begun. Having a just racial framework embedded in education, health care, the military, government, corporations, etc. is a necessity. After a moment of relief and celebration, we must continue the everyday anti-racist efforts that go on quietly between major events like the killing of George Floyd and its powerful aftermath.
The horror of that killing became the catalyst for an epic expression of anti-racist outrage across our country and around the world — and we must use the momentum of that outrage and of our celebration of a new administration to propel our work going forward. We haven’t really won — not yet.