Opinion We vote together, but can we trust each other?
"A few years ago, a colleague who had volunteered on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign told me of a canvasser’s encounter with a couple in the Rust Belt. He said it happened in a White working-class neighborhood of a key swing state. The woman who answered the door yelled to her husband, out of view, “Who are we voting for president?” His response: “The n-----.” She relayed their support to elect the nation’s first Black president and closed the door.
Democracy is a numbers game. When parties and movements pull coalitions together, voters often find that they’re in allegiance with people who resent them. It’s a feature of the system, incentivizing cooperation across differences and moderating our worst impulses. Those ill feelings are usually tucked away in service of a shared interest. But during presidential elections, when the stakes seem highest, more people are willing to show their hand.
Black voters keep a watchful eye for these signs. Their trust in democracy — both the system and the people who operate it — is hard-earned. For them, choosing the right coalition partners has not been just a question of policy wins but a matter of life and death. The same system that legislated slavery and Jim Crow became the tool that secured rights and opportunity. This checkered past gives their politics a pronounced pragmatism, rooted in an understanding that Black people in America fare best when the federal government makes civil rights a priority. Their numbers and political solidarity give them electoral power — valuable even to those who might despise them.
At the presidential debate in September, Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump announced his belief in a debunked conspiracy theory that Black people in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets. This came only about a month after he suggested at an annual conference for Black journalists that they’d been fooled by Vice President Kamala Harris about her race. Trump blurted that Harris, the Democratic nominee and an Alpha Kappa Alpha from Howard, had only “turned Black” out of expedience.
Follow Theodore R. Johnson
Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Republican lieutenant governor and gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has reportedly labeled himself a “Black Nazi” and wrote that “some people need to be slaves.” And yet, the same party that puts up such candidates also touts its gains with Black voters and has more Black members of Congress than at any time since Reconstruction.
Every vote is a bet on democracy. Citizens trust, to some degree, that the system can fairly govern their affairs. Ballots are votes of confidence that the voter’s interests and well-being will be a priority for the candidates and coalitions they support. Sometimes they win; sometimes they lose. For many Black voters, though, win or lose, there’s a lurking concern of being cut out of the deal after the election — partners in winning coalitions aren’t always friends once in power.
The gamble for Black America, though, isn’t just that policy preferences might be ignored, but that racism will be the reason. Despite homages to “we the people,” democracy has long coexisted with exclusion. In a nation nearly 250 years old, women were denied the vote until a century ago; Black people were mostly kept away until six decades ago. But the problem is not democracy — it is intolerance, which forces people to stay on guard, even when they are part of the winning side. When a group is believed to matter less, its rights are soon jeopardized.
Over the years, Black voters have paired with interest groups of all kinds in pursuit of civil rights protections and equal opportunity. Their choices in the upcoming presidential election, particularly in the swing states, might decide who wins the White House. But election outcomes are only half the battle. A fraying democracy is concerning, but Black voters have also understood that the biggest threat to their lives and liberty is a partner’s double-dealing.
In 2020, former vice president Joe Biden named then-Sen. Harris of California as his running mate. It proved a wise decision, helping to mobilize Black voters in must-win metro areas. But in the moment, some Biden supporters were uneasy. A few weeks before Election Day, a small group of party loyalists gathered to talk about politics. A friend of mineoverheard an attendee’s whispered objection to Harris on the ticket: “I don’t like that Black b---- being one heart attack away from the presidency.”
Presidential elections can make democracy seem like a game of intrigue, pairing groups together based on their attributes and strategic importance. Black voters. White voters. Hispanic and Asian voters. Suburban mothers and rural men. Christian evangelicals in North Carolina and Arab progressives in Michigan. Pollsters and pundits and strategists mix and match groups in hopes of identifying the winning hand. That’s evidence our democracy is stronger and more accessible than it once was, even if it still requires fine-tuning. But for Black voters — given the nation’s history — democracy is also a game of cards, hoping partners don’t renege."
No comments:
Post a Comment