Black and Brown voters powered Biden-Harris ticket

FROM THE PULPIT TO PUBLIC SQUARE

By Marvin A. McMickle, Ph.D.

There are two things that must be pointed out as we look back on the 2020 presidential election. First, black and brown voters from all across the country were the driving force in the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is clear that Jim Clyburn of South Carolina rescued Joe Biden’s campaign from potential obscurity after Biden lost primaries in Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire. Biden was considered to be “down and out.” Then came the South Carolina primary and Clyburn’s endorsement, and black voters (especially black women voters), set the Biden campaign on a path to the White House. That journey was greatly assisted by President Barack Obama who campaigned for Biden in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia. Donald Trump won in 2016 largely because black and brown voters in those and other states did not come out in high enough numbers. That mistake was not repeated in 2020. There should be no doubt that black and brown voters made the difference in the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

There is no doubt that two United States Senate seats are within reach in Georgia because of a black woman named Stacey Abrams. The election of Joe Biden will be frustrated by Mitch McConnell who is the Senate Majority Leader and the other Republican Senators who have stood in the way of progressive policies for the last ten years. Abrams has worked to register so many new voters in Georgia that those two Democratic Senate candidates are positioned to win. One of those candidates is my long-time friend Raphael Warnock who is the Senior Pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where Martin Luther King, Jr. had been co-pastor. 

One of the historic consequences of black and brown voter turnout is the election of Kamala Harris who will bring her African American and South Asian sensibilities to the table. It is clear that black and brown voters drove the Biden/Harris campaign to victory. A graduate of Howard University (an HBCU) and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha) is now the Vice-President-elect of the United States. Fifty-five years after the adoption of the Voting Rights Act, the power of the black vote was flexed in a substantial way. As Jesse Jackson said in 1984, “hands that once picked cotton now pick Presidents.” 

It is regrettable that voter turnout was not equally large here in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. There were precincts in Cleveland where voter turnout was around 30% of the eligible voters. Black political leaders in Cleveland and the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party must do better if Ohio is to remain relevant in national and statewide politics. 

I use the word relevant, because there is a second lesson that must be learned from last week’s election. Over 70 million people voted for Donald Trump. That is the second highest number of votes given to a presidential candidate in the history of the United States. Joe Biden beat Trump by more than four million votes. Are we really the UNITED States of America? It seems as if the voting patterns of many white Americans were the exact opposite of black and brown voters. In Ohio, Trump won 81 of the 88 counties, including nearby Lake and Mahoning. The same was true in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and even in New York State. Needless to say, that pattern was repeated in states across the country from Missouri to Mississippi and from Texas to Tennessee. Nearly one-half of the population of this country is not rejoicing over the results of this election cycle. Many of them still believe that Donald Trump actually won the election and is being denied that victory due to voter fraud. 

It will take a long time and a lot of work and prayer if this nation is ever to be UNITED again. 

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The Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, retired last year as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he had served since 2011.

The Struggle Continues

From an online article in The Smithsonian magazine

By R. T. Andrews

‘Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.’

That sentiment, expressed by Martin Luther King at an Emancipation centennial event in 1962, can be felt across much of the land this morning.

You could sense the nation’s collective sigh of relief last night as the country began the ceremonial transition, from its Tasmanian devil of a president and his wooden sidekick of a veep, to the reassuring presence of an Uncle Joe, accompanied by his potential rock star of a governing partner, Kamala Harris.

‘Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.’

The United States in 1862 was a nation literally at war with itself. Rebels were fighting to preserve a way of life that other parts of the country wanted to leave behind: chattel slavery, religious bigotry, nativism, xenophobia.

For the past four years it seems as if those alternative visions of the world were still being contested. Make America Great Again was a very thin code for a nostalgic call to a past where black people were underfoot, women were in the kitchen, gays were in the closet, and white men were ascendant, under precious few obligations of restraint. Police busted heads on the regular without fear of reprisal, women were silent over all manner of violation, shaming and disbelief being normal consequences for truth telling. Anything outside of an able bodied heterosexual white man was deviant and ‘less than’ by definition.

The irresistible forces of diversity — which is to say, the natural conditions of humankind — have been taking it on the chin and in the solar plexus these last four years. The assault has been played out relentlessly on the airwaves: governance by ego, rooted in confederate nostalgia and counterfeit reality, manipulated offstage as always by forces of unmitigated greed that produce historic wealth inequality.

While the trumpian coronavirus has been momentarily exorcised from the White House, its residence there did incalculable damage to the organs of America: our infrastructure of government, our politics, our society, and our culture.

To expect a Biden administration to restore the status quo that existed before trumpism entered the open sores of our society is fantasy. For the moment we can breathe more easily because the inflammation has receded, that incessant tweeting pain has subsided.

But COVID-19 is still here, wreaking havoc with our health and our economy. To defeat it will require and the immediate attention and intelligent aggression of the new administration, as well as patience by American citizens, who are already fatigued by mask-wearing, social distancing, Zoom meetings, and lost conveniences.

Patience has seldom been a virtue of our national character. While Trump fatigue may be in our rear view mirror, one early measure of the Biden administration will be its ability to forge sufficient consensus around mask-wearing and quarantines while an effective vaccine is developed and distributed.

That won’t be easy. The new president will have a thin margin in the House and implacable opposition in the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may extend some good ol’ boy collegiality towards Biden, a former colleague, but he will continue to stand resolutely in the gap against anything remotely resembling progress.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris superimposed upon the shadow of Norman Rockwell's
1964 illustration of six-year old Ruby Bridges as she was accompanied by US Marshals in the
desegregation of public schools in New Orleans.

Finally, a word on the new Vice President. It is of course far too early to tell, but her elevation to national leadership status may prove to be the most consequential harbinger of a new generation. Barack Obama cracked open a door in a notorious manner, ushering in a twenty-four second “post-racial” America that was immediately followed by in true American fashion by nativistic American backlash. But Kamala Harris, on the strength of black women, has eased into the sidecar seat, from which she is positioned both symbolically and realistically, to change the landscape irrevocably.

To put it another way, there was no guarantee that the Jackie Robinson experiment to integrate major league baseball would succeed. If Obama was Jackie, Kamala is Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. There is no turning back.

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