Kamala Harris’s resounding defeat affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country, even as some looked to the future with a wary determination.
Black women could see the mountaintop.
Across the country, they led an outpouring of Democratic elation when the vice president took over the top of the presidential ticket. But underneath their hope and determination was a persistent worry: Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman?
The painful answer arrived this week.
It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.
She lost because she was a status quo right winger and didn’t represent a large portion of her base or address their ever growing concerns.
Yeah Trump won 46% of Latinos and 20% of the black vote, and the “everyone’s racist” trope is starting to lose its luster. We absolutely cannot win if we keep using race and gender as a prerequisite for exaltation and insist that they take deferential precedence over all else. To be sure, there’s a shitload of racists/sexists in Trump’s party, but the fact that their coalition is sucking in minorities should tell us identity politics is only part of the equation. He’s cultivating working class solidarity in a really powerful way, and it’s starting to appeal more and more to folks who’ve watched the Democrats pay only lip service to racial grievances, and then proceed to never make meaningful sacrifices to ameliorate the underlying problems of economic inequality and then work constructively to promote financial security. All racists are Trump supporters, but not all Trump supporters are racists.
Sure, but racism and sexism aren’t just white people problems. For example, I’m assuming the repeated efforts to reach out to black men in the last month were reactions to what internal polling was telling them. There are lots of people who’d vote for any man over any woman.
Everyone also seems to be looking for the one and only reason Harris lost. There isn’t one reason. I’m sure racism and misogyny are reasons, even if they’re not the only ones.
By doing what exactly? I’ve seen plenty of arguments like this about Dems not doing enough to seperate themselves from the status quo, and thus are losing ground to Republicans on things like the economy and fighting for the working class. I don’t disagree with that, but what arguments like that fail to convince me of is what exactly is Trump offering these Latino and Black voters that’s better?
“Change” and he’s further back in their memories. People are genuinely struggling - both in where they are and where they’re headed; he promises he can change that direction. He won’t, but people are desperate and Kamala ran as a status quo candidate
It’s more than just one thing, of course. Probably some racism and sexism too
Exactly. Most people don’t have any idea what will fix our issues they just know that something needs to change and Trump was the only one offering that. When people told Kamala they were struggling she just responded by saying that the economy is actually doing great. Trump promised actual changes (yes they’re all for the worse but the average idiot doesn’t know that) where as Kamala repeatedly just blew people off.
I think it’s less about offering specific policies that will help and more about looking them in the eye and saying “I hear you, it’s fucked up. We’ll change everything.” It’s a bit like when my wife has a bad day at work, and when I get home she starts venting. Sometimes I try to cut in and come up with a solution to her problems, but it usually makes things worse. One day she stopped me dead in my tracks, took a deep breath, and said, “Please don’t try to fix it. Sometimes I just need to vent and I want you to tell me you hear me and that you love me. That’s all.” She didn’t want me to offer a solution at all, she just wanted me to actively listen and comfort her.
I think that’s what Trump is doing. He’s engaging them on a human level and validating them as individuals with problems. He’s going to do absolutely fuck all to fix them, but it’s a really powerful level of connection that’s obviously working.
No one wants to hear this, but it’s pretty much only educated white and black folks that believe in the social program that has been floated by the democrats the last few elections. The country is a lot more diverse than that and South Asian, East Asian and Latino folks are largely what this site would call bigots.
100%
There’s a reason we got hammered for “virtue signaling” for so long. It’s a shell game that doesn’t require any real sacrifice on the part of educated whites, and minorities are starting to realize that.
Yeah, articles like this are nothing more than an attempt to scapegoat and spin the issue into Democratic “business as usual” so that the DNC doesn’t have to self-reflect on how they’ve spent decades selling out their base for rich corporate donors.
Although yes I agree with you, I also think the points the article raises are definitely a factor.