White Liberals, We Are Not Allowed to Get Discouraged
Suck it up, buttercup
White liberals are taking this election personally. There were a lot of heavy sighs this week, a lot of wet tissues, a lot of “I thought we were better than this” commentary. Biden/Harris ended up pulling out a win, of course, but White liberals are still sad and worried and ashamed at just how many White people voted for Trump this time around.
I get it. Four years ago I felt the same way. I cried. I stayed up on election night staring at the TV in disbelief. I felt lost and sad and alone the days and weeks after. It was alarming for me, a life-long leftist, to see that progress was a mirage. The grief I felt was real, and it was justified. But it was naive then, and it’s even more naive now.
We’ve had four years to come to grips with White racism, White fear, and White indifference. We have had to face up to the fact that it’s all three of those things, and that it’s been that way all along. We just didn’t see it. We can smile at a racist and they’ll smile back — we’ll never know. We can make “racist uncle” jokes while ignoring the fact that all our White friends have the same stories. Somehow we’re shocked that over half of White voters don’t mind a White supremacist, even though they’ve been getting louder and bolder for four years.
No one talks about “the White vote” the way we talk about other racial groups. We know that White people don’t vote as a block; we are not a monolith. We talk instead about the rural vote, the working class vote, the college educated vote, the progressive vote. Cue the months (years?) of digging into the White demographics to see what happened, trying to figure out how to pull more Whites to the left.
But let’s face it — that is useless. The Democratic Party has been doing that for years, and it hasn’t made a dent. We had more White women vote for Trump this time than four years ago! It’s time for a different strategy. Luckily for all liberals, BIPOC organizers have been leading the way for quite a while now. Time to get on board.
Stacey Abrams had the governorship stolen from her two years ago. She did not spend her time moping. She fought like hell, and when she was defeated by a corrupt process, she absorbed the election loss and kept right on fighting. She wasn’t fighting for one candidate — not even when it was herself — or even one party. She was fighting for every single Black voter in Georgia, and she wasn’t the only one. Massive organizing around voter registration and against voter suppression has been happening there (and other places) for years.
And all the while White liberals have been saying, “Things will get better eventually. Golly gee, they just have to!” While we were patting ourselves on the back about electing Obama for a second term, Black organizers were doing long-range planning to re-enfranchise voters who had been written off. Those are the voters who just ousted the most racist president in a hundred years.
We are not going to be able to count on White people as a group doing the right thing, voting on the right side of history, or educating each other out of our racist ways. It’s not going to happen. Again, more white people voted for a fascist in 2020 than in 2016. It’s time to stop focusing on convincing them to do anything else.
Instead, we need to focus on expanding the voting rights of the oppressed. Native and Mexican-American voters flipped Arizona. Black voters flipped Georgia and Pennsylvania and Michigan. White people in those states did not get less racist. Massive BIPOC voter turnout made the results in those states less racist.
White liberals should learn from this. Expand political power for non-White populations across our country, and we’ll start seeing less terrible policies. That’s it.
Anti-racist policies, the kind that lift up the most oppressed and marginalized, are good for everyone. They are good for democracy. But we’re not going to convince people who vote based on their fears of higher taxes and integrated suburbs of that. They will only be convinced when it happens and disaster doesn’t ensue. They will never be the ones to get us there.
Who is going to vote for politicians with antiracist agendas? Sure, some minority of White voters, myself included. But we won’t be the ones to get it done either. The people who’ve been oppressed, ignored, and disenfranchised are going to get it done. The only helpful role we can play now is to get them the political power they need to do it.
So stop moping. Stop wringing your hands and saying you can’t believe that we haven’t made more progress. Yes you can. Now get over it. And get organized to expand the electorate.
Here are some places to start:
Fair Fight is the organization founded by Stacey Abrams to expand voting rights in Georgia and across the country.
Native Vote is a nonpartisan organization focused on expanding Native voter rights and registration.
The Mississippi Center for Justice is an organization that works toward social justice, including voting rights, in one of the states with the highest number of disenfranchised voters.
Lastly, find out how many formerly incarcerated people in your state have lost voting rights here. Then do something about it.
What other organizations should be on this list? Drop a comment to let me know.
