#BidenHarris2020: How Racism is Adapting to the Present Time
A historic win. This past week, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 presidential election, and many are calling it just that.
People are celebrating for different reasons: Biden and Harris winning; Trump losing; the work of organizers and activists finally paying off. And of course, folks are celebrating because Harris is the first Black-Indian woman to become Vice President of the United States.
People across the nation think that Harris rising to such a position will change the course of history — that the beginning of our liberated futures rests in her hands. I mean, we went from women not being able to vote to a woman becoming VP of the U.S., and all within the span of a hundred years. This is historic, “history in the making.”
While Harris’ win is graciously uplifted among marginalized communities, and one “for the history books,” our liberation will not be progressed forward with Harris. If anything, it will stay the same — and that’s only if it doesn’t get worse.
To celebrate or not to celebrate?
One of the biggest questions that people have had after this win is whether or not we should be celebrating. Should we celebrate at all? Is celebrating okay, if it’s only for the loss of Trump and not for the win of Biden? Is it okay to tell others that they shouldn’t be celebrating? If so, who has the right to tell others that they shouldn’t be celebrating: white people, Brown people, Indigenous people, Black people? Does it matter? Does any of this matter?
The answer to all of these is…Yes, and No.
As independent journalist and political commentator, Richard Medhurst, says it: “You can be happy about Trump being gone, without rehabilitating and whitewashing a racist, war criminal [Biden].”
What we need to understand is that even though we hold different identities, beliefs and ideologies are not restricted to one identity, nor do people of one identity all hold the same beliefs, or have the same viewpoints.
For example, we have white people who are celebrating the win of Biden and Harris, and we have white people who are merely celebrating the loss of Trump. We have Brown people who are celebrating the loss of Trump, and we have Brown people who are not celebrating at all, because they believe [know] that Biden will continue to bomb their people back home. We have Black people who are celebrating Harris’ win as she is the first Black woman in the VP seat, and we have Black people who are not celebrating at all, and insisting that Harris’ win does not matter — that Biden and Harris have already forgotten about them.
These, of course, are just the beginning of the various experiences and reactions to the election results. But you get the point.
So, can we celebrate? Sure.
Does it matter, if we do? Yes.
Can someone from one community tell someone from another community that we shouldn’t be celebrating? Or is that overstepping, and it solely has to be expressed from people within the communities that they each belong to?
Honestly? I don’t think it’s overstepping. Because it’s not about who is saying it; it’s about why they are saying it — and considering who is at stake (spoiler: we’re all at stake), we ought to listen.
What truly matters is how we approach the topic, and whether or not we are open to a conversation. Because we could just give demands and yell at people, “Stop celebrating!” — but what would that do? Surely, there are differences between publicly expressing your viewpoint, inviting someone into your thought bubble, and randomly sliding into someone’s DMs and telling them what you think they should be doing.
I think that people from all communities have a valid point, when they say that we shouldn’t be celebrating. If we look into their reasonings, they all come down to the idea of collective liberation, and how the system, (even with Harris in it), isn’t going to pave the path to our freedom.
After all, if a white person tries to defend Black people by telling their white and Brown colleagues, “Don’t tell them [Black people] how to celebrate (the Biden/Harris win),” where does that leave the Brown person who says that we shouldn’t celebrate, because celebrating means celebrating the bombing of their family back home? Does it make the white person wrong? No, they are well-intended, and their impact is standing in solidarity with Black people. But is there an alternative impact that gets overlooked? A cost to this supposed solidarity? Yes, there is.
Because standing with an oppressed people can look a lot like kicking another oppressed people to the side. And let’s not forget that many Brown, Black, and Indigenous people are not celebrating the Biden-Harris win. They already know what’s up — they already know what it means for their people.
So, a solution? White, Brown, Indigenous, and Black people need to come together and see the realities of this election, what it truly means to “celebrate,” and how celebrating should take place, if at all. It doesn’t really matter who is saying it, and to whom. It matters how it is done, and when.
Racism in a new era
From white men to a Black-Indian woman taking the seat as Vice President, we ought to believe that this is a step in the right direction — that we ought to eventually see a decrease in racism. I mean, with Harris all the way at the top, what could go wrong? Young Black and Brown girls see themselves represented. Harris serves as hope for people not in her position. It seems like we are moving forward as a country, and that Biden and Harris believe in a future, where those without a voice are no longer voiceless.
This is the reality that many people believe, and it is nothing short of scary. When Biden chose Harris as his Vice President, he knew exactly what he was doing, — and he knew how the public would react. Biden knew that choosing Harris as VP would be a strategic decision in securing the Black vote, votes from other marginalized communities, and even white feminists. [Particularly, white feminists].
What better move in this country than to have a rise in Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, and then bringing in a Black woman to help serve the country for the next four years?
Politicians must adjust to the political climate, especially if they want to continue and empower their agendas of white supremacy. When organizers, activists, and educators do groundbreaking work, those in power have to make up for it. For example, with BLM at an all-time high and the media aiming to be more “inclusive,” choosing Harris was the “smartest” thing that Biden could have done. Unfortunately, Harris has a visible track record of imprisoning her own people and standing in solidarity with Israel to oppress people in Southwest Asia. Put simply, Biden and Harris are one and the same, and awfully similar to Trump — just covert in some ways than others.
This country was founded on racism, which means it will continue to produce and reproduce racism. The key to seeing it? Acknowledging that times are changing; and with time, so are the ways that systemic oppression (e.g. racism) are showing up and are going to show up in the world. Some ways will stay the same, and some won’t — new ways will take form, be delicately and strategically designed, via the creativity of the corrupt. The question is how. And when. And where. And how long before how and where.
Harris winning VP as a Black-Indian woman isn’t surprising. It’s with the times. Same with Obama. As people on the ground are fighting for our liberation, politicians have to adjust. This means putting people that look like us in power. And oftentimes, it means picking people who look like us to progress systemic oppression forward.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a queer president or VP in office within the next 10–20 years. I also wouldn’t be surprised if they had a nasty track record of serving in the military.
While representation is seemingly beautiful and exciting, it’s usually part of a larger plan — to use our fears, insecurities, and identities against us. People in power manipulate us by disempowering us via identity, leave us gasping for air, and then, play hero and “save” us through representation. Falling for this is one of the most dangerous things that we can do.
Politicians, particularly at the national level, are like the Sirens in Greek mythology. They call for us — allure us into believing that we are being represented, “seen,” cared for — that our futures are in the process of becoming more liberated.
But we are not, and our futures are not.
National electoral politics will never achieve this for us. There are countless reasons why this is the case. The system is corrupt; and despite how great of a person anyone is, if you are in the system long enough, you will conform to all of the ways that it wants you to.
Rather than having another white man oppress us in one of the highest positions of power, we have to think about what having Harris means for us. Is it the same, or worse that one of our own people will be oppressing us instead?
I honestly think it’s worse. From contributing to Southwest Asian wars to putting people in prison to giving the American people a false sense of hope that racism is decreasing in America, it is more deadly to be oppressed by one of our own. She’s a prop in the system — Biden’s puppet, and we’re all falling for her and for the system.
Uplifting identity to attack identity
Something that we need to think about is how people in power use our identities against us, oppress us, and then, use our identities to bait us into believing in them and the system.
As a matter of fact, I think that the U.S. is going to treat Harris’ win as a case study. What is going to be interesting is analyzing how politicians, the media, and the general public are going to react to Harris’ successes and failures while in office — how exactly they are going to hold her “accountable.”
How will they critique her work? How will her identity be brought up in the criticism? Will her identity be uplifted, blamed, or not mentioned at all? Keep in mind, she’s the first of her time. So, even to the media, this will be new game.
Perhaps when Harris does well, people will say, “See, women can do just as well as men. They are just as capable; if not, better.” Perhaps we will see a rise in advocacy for more women and marginalized people in powerful positions.
And perhaps when she fails, people will say, “See, she’s a woman and incapable. We saw this coming,” among other nonsense statements that attack her identity, and fail to hold her work, itself, accountable. We might also see a rise in attacks towards marginalized people; and white supremacists advocating for less of us (and for more white men), once again.
Because of this, we need to stay vigilant. And even if we don’t agree with or support Harris, we might need to step up to the plate in her defense, especially when/if she starts getting attacked on the basis of her race and/or gender. Most importantly, because doing so would be defending ourselves and the people who hold the same or similar identities.
So, where do we go from here?
We need to reflect on what it means to be “represented” — whether that be in electoral politics or anywhere else. And if it, at all, means anything on the large scale of things, especially if our “representation” is trying to deceive us into believing something that is not true, and into seeing something that is not there.
Because identity politics will not save us. Identity politics is not the answer. People looking like us, or identifying like us and being in proximity to power is not the answer. In fact, it means nothing, especially when they have and are going to sell us out. And the same way that Biden chose identity — the same way that some of us chose identity — is going to be the same way that identity backfires on all of us.
The question is whether or not we are ready, and prepared to fight it.
We also need to re-evaluate where we are spending our time and energy. While spending time in electoral politics can be helpful in certain ways, we need to ask ourselves how much time we are spending in our communities.
How much time are we spending on organizing, engaging in mutual aid work, focusing on individual and collective healing?
There’s so much that we can be doing to invest in our communities, and it all starts with how much we are investing in ourselves: whether that be in the classroom, in the streets, or in therapy.
It’s time that we take control of the narrative, and create the futures that we want to see for ourselves and the world.
