Yes to all that. I hope the numbers hold and convert to votes. It’s crazy to think that white men are not equally as criticized for not voting for Harris, since Trump is a white supremacist. But, Trump is also a tough guy. And I think that some black men are tired of seeing weak and flabby white guys in the Democratic Party and want strength. You won’t find a white male politician in the Democratic Party since Reagan who loudly speaks out for reparations, ending convict leasing in prisons (see The Thirteenth by Ms. Ava DuVernay on Netflix), and protecting the voting rights of blacks and browns. Instead, not only will you recent quiet retreats, like President Joe Biden saying he doesn’t have time to fight for the John Lewis Voting RIghts Act now that the Black Caucus got his infrastructure bill passed (it’s just to difficult), but he triumphs signing the anti-lynching bill of blacks, which was introduced by a black congressman in 1900. 1900. That took 122 years and he calls that a moral or legal victory, to sign a bill that says “please white men stop lynching and killing black men?” Huh? I call that weak centrist white tea.
Not only that but Bill Clinton actually signed the 1994 “Let’s really keep incarcerating black act,” known as the Crime Bill, a euphemism, and during the debate Senator Biden said they have to keep the criminals, the “predators” (not super but just normal) off the streets. Predators even without the super meant black men. And Clinton signed the “defending straight marriage from homosexual act (or DOMA). Huh? This guy is more systemically racist than Bush who followed him.
In 1846, whites fought for black male voting rights in Wisconsin when it was making a constitution to become a state. Here’s what they slipped into the referendum on the state constitution: “All male citizens of the African blood, possessing the qualifications required by the first section of the article on ‘Suffrage and the elective franchise,’ shall have the right to vote for all officers and be eligible to all offices that now are or hereafter may be elective by the people after the adoption of this constitution.” Hell, you find that stuff back then but now? Crickets. Downhill since. Uncle Joe has to go use the bathroom when asked if he will push for pro-black anything. “I just ain’t got any fight in me to push for mass UNdisenfranchisement. That whole systemic mass disenfranchisement through mass incarceration took all the fight out of me after I helped segregations senator Thurmond and senator Helms end integration by calling it forced bussing.” Yeah, Harris called him out on the systemic racism he backed. Let’s hope she wins and picks up the cause.
The mass incarceration of black men, from about 1982-2010 (not sure it is over) was actually mass disenfranchisement, stripping away voting rights—for the time in US history from 1776 onward—NATIONALLY from blacks. There was not real precedent of disenfranchisement that took voting rights away from blacks in Northern or western states before that. Millions of black men (and latinos to be fair) LOST their right to vote, or what our founders call alienating their vote. This type of alienation for a felony happened in practice, nationally, for the first time ever AFTER the four Civil Rights Acts passed and were signed by two different presidents. The NYTimes also put up a video on YouTube a week or so ago showing how the 200,000 blacks in Tennessee alone had their voting rights alienated by the state government and how they can’t them back, or only 1 percent can. Hell, with white Democrats so weak at fighting for black rights and letting states like that strip away voting rights, why do we even Trump? I totally understand why they don’t want to vote, and don’t want Obama telling them to, a man that didn’t fight for them. I get it. I’m getting worked up myself thinking about it.
You point out a lot of great truth. I just want to keep writing the second chapter in that two volume series you propose. Peace and strength!
