I’m deeply concerned to be one of the minority group that didn’t jump for joy, break into tears or feel any sense of cultural accomplishment with the announcement of the presidential elect Biden- Harris administration. Rather than feel any significant gain, it’s as if I was watching my worst nightmare while people were cheering in the background as I was being tortured beyond my wildest expectation. How could any Black women allow herself to be used by the biggest ‘super predator’ of them all in order to secure a spot in his administration, but then there’s Kamala. Being burned feels hotter when you don’t see it coming and this was a combination I would never have been ready for.
The Mass Incarceration Ticket Burns
During the presidential campaign, both Biden and Harris’ cam- paigns were huge red flags as they played major roles in over- crowding prisons in the 90s and early 2000s. The policies they initiated as state representatives continue to have a genocidal im- pact on communities of color forced to interact with the criminal legal system. For the two to come together in order to pull the wool over Americans eyes, was an outcome that I was not at all expect- ing. I coined it as the “mass incarceration ticket’ for reasons that I’ve already spent too much time talking about. I say “too much” because none of that kept the majority of voters from rushing to cast their ballots in support of them, who both have a record in locking up far too many people for far too long. I wouldn’t be sur- prised if those voters have family members who are locked up as a direct result of Biden or Harris’ work as Senator or AG. Surprisingly, a record number of people came out to participate in this years election
Where did all those votes go?
On the bright side, we can see how our nation is slowly shifting to recognize third party power. Libertarian Party candidate, Jo Jorgensen swept away the third party ticket with nearly 2 million votes (1,835,558), 1.2% of the popular vote. This is major as third parties traditionally struggle to earn at least 1% of the popular vote. Trump received 47.3% with 232 electoral votes and Biden received 51% with 290 electoral votes. What’s the significance of the popular vs the electorate vote? The popular vote is simply the people’s vote, a total count of each citizen who cast their ballot. In 2016, the popular vote went to Hillary Clinton, but the electorate vote swung the election in favor of Trump. The electorate is made up of a group of elected officials selected from each state. Know- ing that the popular vote isn’t the only deciding factor in the out- come of a presidential election, voters should feel liberated to vote outside of the narrow perspective of choosing the’ lesser of two evils’. While the people don’t have the final authority on whose selected, the popular vote indicates the people’s choice
while the electorate indicates the choice of our elected officials. This year both the popular and the electorate decisions aligned and while this shows that this year we have elected officials with a more accurate representation of the people’s objectives, it does nothing to appease the hearts of freedom fighters like myself who’ve dreaded a Biden Harris Administration. For those of us who aren’t blinded by cultural cues or wooed by kinfolk, we must strategize against another Pacifying Obama Era.
Avoiding the Plague of the Pacifying Obama Era
During the Obama era we blindly trusted that all of our generationally compounded needs would be met simply because we had kinfolk in office. Rather than that, we saw more police executions of innocent citizens, more prisons were built and the number of immigrant deportations hit an all-time high. We put our faith in a country that never worked on our behalf, just because someone we related to sat in its highest seat. While Obama was a wonderful example of Black excellence as a father, husband and charismatic leader without any policies passed targeted towards uplifting African descendants of slaves economically, he failed the Black community as the changemaker we voted him in to be.
With Obama’s VP as our current president elect and Kamala as kinfolk collateral by his side, I fear that all of the progress that has been made to organize against the fascism and white supremacy amplified within the Trump administration, will slow down exponentially or even come to a complete halt. It’s critical that we, rather than become complicit with our satisfaction of simply get- ting Trump out of the White House, cumulate a strong sense of public pressure for significant and sweeping change in the area of ending mass incarceration and transitioning into seeing mass re- leases on a federal and state level. Now that we have the author of the Crime Bill and launcher of mass incarceration coming back into the White House, we must make it clear that we won’t allow him the satisfaction of peaceful leadership without his complete undoing of the 1994 crime bills. Throughout the years of this ad- ministration we will use our community power to flood the White House with correspondence from its constituents about how the Crime Bills have continued to devastate our communities across the country until they are repealed and the communities impacted are restored.
