VICTORY.
Turning Back Fascism By Trump At A Crucial Moment In The Nation’s History
The champagne is still flowing around here. The celebrations are still going. More than four days (and counting) after Wolf Blitzer’s pronouncement at just after 11:24 am Eastern U.S. time on Saturday, November 7, 2020, here I sit, basking in the glory and relief of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s historic, landslide win.
How sweet it is.
While this win, which will see a Democratic presidential administration that includes the first female vice president in American history, the first Black woman vice president (and the first woman of color in that position), the realization that speaks loudest is that had it not been for Black people — especially Black women — we’d have at least four additional years of Dictator Trump in the United States of America.
Black women must take a bow today. Take your praise. Every day. Even if that is not one of the things that is top of mind for you.
Stacey Abrams must be among the Black women given maximum credit for her tireless, endless hard work and dedication to registering Black voters and other groups to vote, not just across Georgia but all over the United States. Ms. Abrams’s Fair Fight organization raised the stakes and got record-breaking turnout in Georgia and elsewhere.
This hard work — which must be saluted and rewarded on numerous levels, and is being rewarded with an inevitable Biden win in Georgia — must be replicated by all of us over the next seven-plus weeks in two U.S. senate races that will determine who controls the U.S. senate. The Democratic U.S. senate candidates in Georgia are Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock.
Now it is essential that people phonebank, donate and volunteer to get both elected to the Senate. If this dual success occurs the senate will be in Democratic control. The U.S. senate would then finally pass all the important House Democratic-passed legislation Mitch McConnell has been blocking for almost two years. (Some of the things McConnell has blocked passage of include: The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act, election protection bills (three of those protection bills, actually.)
The Ossoff and Warnock Georgia runoff elections are to be held on January 5.
Latinx, Native American, Progressive and youth organizers must also get praise for all their efforts in turning out voters for Joe Biden.
FACT: 77 million people (and counting) voted for Joe Biden. President-elect Biden received the most votes in the history of U.S. presidential elections, and when the vote counting is concluded will get at least 80 million votes and win by about seven million votes.
Based on those expected numbers President-elect Biden has a clear mandate. And since Black people were vastly responsible for this mandate (no other group voted in higher percentages for Joe Biden than Black people did), they (and every white voting-Biden person and all other voters) must press forth an agenda that calls for Black lives to matter in policy implementation, as well as many other issues also critical to so many: healthcare, Dreamers status, a woman’s right to choose, a drastic change and transformation in policing that is community-based and humanity-rooted not punitive-based and executioner-driven.
While the Biden victory celebrations continue in cities and towns all over the United States and countries beyond, it is critical that each person who cares invests a little time in presenting an agenda item list or plan of their own. What are the three most important issues to you? What are three most important issues affecting your life? Write those three issues down on paper or your laptop or phone and ask your friends what issues matter to them. Convene on Zoom or elsewhere. Discuss and talk about the issues. Gain consensus. Invite others in. Become an organization together. Interface with other organizations who are already doing work on the issues that mean the most to you.
Before long you will have a movement, a collective of people across a spectrum, via coalitions and shared interests. Utilize social media platforms and technologies to enhance your standing. Grow your organization. This can be done. It takes time — but you have tools at your disposal that Rosa Parks and Amelia Boynton and Fannie Lou Hamer and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis back in the day didn’t ever have.
In other words, creating organizations and movements with agendas and policy advocation can be done. Young people are taking the mantle and doing so with such movements as the varying climate crisis movements (see Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg and also the Sunrise Movement among others) and the March For Our Lives gun-sense and anti-gun violence movement. These are just a few of the organizations run by people who are under 30.
As importantly: we must keep the Biden-Harris administration honest and hold them to account. We cannot afford to turn around and go back to business as usual as we did after Barack Obama became president in 2008. In retrospect, far too many of us were so in awe of history and the first Black president that when he did things wrong not nearly enough of us registered our objections and protestations to a sufficiently audible level.
That reticence and complacency cannot happen now post-election. So much more is at stake. The year 2020 has only emphasized this truth even more.
As a percentage more Black people voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris than anyone else. (Black women at 92 percent, Black men at 82 percent, via CNN and NBC News.) We will see whether President-elect Biden makes good on his promise to “have (Black people’s) back too.” But we cannot afford to wait very long at all. An agenda must be put forth at the very start of the Biden-Harris administration to that administration in order to serve notice: Black people (and Brown people, Native people and young people) brought you to the dance. Time to ante up.
(By the way: most white people, knowing what they knew, including with 241,000 people dead from coronavirus in the U.S., voted for Donald Trump for the second presidential election running. According to CNN and NBC News, 58 percent of white men voted for Donald Trump, while 55 percent of white women voted for Trump. Very telling indeed.)
Omar Moore is on Twitter @thepopcornreel and hosts The Politicrat daily podcast. He is also the editor and owner of The Popcorn Reel film website.
