I sent a friend a text message last night during Super Tuesday on March 5, 2024 that sums up what I think many black people and people of color voters might feel about the 2024 Presidential Election cycle:

“Watching white people decide the future of the country is not fun.”

Although this was arguably the norm in the pre-Obama era, it was less blatant and less existentially debilitating then.  Ignorance was a twisted bliss.  Particularly for those of us children of the Civil Rights Movement, there was at least the vague and performative indication that one’s vote as a black American (a long fought for right that was severely compromised in 2013) counted for something.  In 2024 however, it is simply a fact that whiteness, or really the various convulsions of whiteness are driving the politics and policies of the country.

White liberals are still congratulating themselves on Obama, whose policies by and large look like every other mid 20^th century Democrat politician.  While physically so, politically Obama was not a black president.  Arguably, he shouldn’t have had to be.  Biden is a coda to Obama as well as a throwback to the Johnson/Nixon era touting an underlying message of universality and “gee can’t we all just get along”-ism that struggles against its tendency toward colorblindness and flattened playing fields.  In contrast, Trump actively courts Nazis, racist and homophobic radical Christians, and the KKK while making a place for blacks who really want to see themselves as white (I’m looking at you Sen. Tim Scott) and Latinos who already do when it is convenient (Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio).  They provide Emmy worthy theater, by playing along while not getting in the way…yet staying in camera shot.

But Emmys are given for fiction and our politics actually change people’s lives.  The phalanx of white men currently closing ranks around our national decision making is an odd mix of impotent liberals and rabid conservatives who have never had to consider gestation inside their bodies, or what it means to be the target for gun violence because from a distance you might look like someone, or being shut out of housing or jobs because you talk with sibilance. But they want to convince us that they really do have everyone’s best interest at heart, and we should all just tag along.

But tagging along with, that is “trusting”, someone who has no idea what a life lived outside of the safety of being a white penis holder has never served those of us without that embodied experience well.  Voting is more difficult now if you have brown skin, having a uterus is more difficult whether you identify as female, male or trans and I can already hear the key in the lock on that old closet door, ready to swing open to welcome the gays back in.  While the dominant white men in politics and academics see this as a natural ebb and flow of “society”, for the rest of us it is life and death.

Electing Barack Obama was the best and the worst thing possible for the United States.  It was the best thing because 220 years of white male rule seems like a lot in a country that is only 236 years old.  My goodness, not even Great Britain did that.  It was the worst thing because it exposed the reality of American ignorance about what representative government actually is.  Or maybe it just laid the true bias and bigotry bare?

Back in the day, one of the arguments against women achieving the vote as well as the argument against blacks having the vote after emancipation was that women and non-whites were not capable of holding the responsibility for civic duty.  This seems odd considering the rather central role women have in literally creating life and the fact that illiterate white men who led lynch mobs to wantonly kill blacks could vote.  The legacy of questioning the capabilities of non-white, non-male individuals is built into the system, codified in law and regularly reasserted in policy.

But in 2024, non-white is nearly dominant and non-male has been dominant for decades in this country.  If we look at the representative reality, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden should be president of the United States.  Not intending to be ageist, it is impossible to look at global demographics and international leadership without seeing them both as fossils. Neither of them will be capable of solving the crisis at the border because they have only literally flown in and flown out of that situation.  Neither of them can solve the problems of US involvement in international war because their experience of conflict is at existential arms length (more so for Trump).  Neither of them can understand the conflict in Gaza because their understanding of the region and the people involved will always be academic at best and trope based at worst.  These are not leaders for a modern world.

The United States is at a crossroads.  It is dragging its elderly politicians to places they are ill equipped to go.  It is silencing the voices of its diverse electorate through gerrymandered voting maps and restrictive voting policies, to keep the myth of a status quo happy.  Through what can only be called radical judicial decisions, it is enabling criminals and dismantling the one guardrail that we have.

There is a deep irony in that Trump is noted for regularly making the case to “take our country back.”  I would say he’s right.  But the people who need to act on this mandate aren’t at his rallies.  They aren’t white and they don’t stand to pee.  Women, brown people, immigrants, “minorities” of all kinds…that’s whose labor (both kinds) built this country, that’s who has kept it going, that’s who has always innovated and who has always made a way out of no way.  This is who needs to take it back.

It’s time for the white guys to tag along,…if they can keep up.

–ALD