What the Election Can Tell Us About Overcoming Racism
Take a deep breath. Joe Biden has been named the president-elect and Kamala Harris the vice president-elect of the United States of America. This is truly a historic moment, one worth pausing and celebrating. I hope you’ve found time to do that in the last few days.
After four years of incomparable harm done to our country by the Trump administration, voters like you raised their voices in support of change. This election has made clear that this victory could not have happened without the grassroots organizing efforts of people of color, who despite numerous voter suppression and disenfranchisement efforts risked everything to vote and to save our union. Every single one of those votes honors our ancestors: John Lewis, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ella Baker, Grace Lee Boggs, and so many others. It is in their footsteps that we follow today.
However, this is not the time for us to get complacent or assume the work is finished. Race and racism are what divide us as a nation today. The numbers are clear: a majority of white Americans, regardless of gender, class, education, and age, voted for Donald Trump. To me, this speaks to a chasm in our society that has been around since our founding. People of color and white people are operating in two different universes. To me, this division is what scholars call “dominant group status threat.”
Like many of you, on the night of the election, I was in absolute shock as the numbers were coming in. So many people voted for Donald Trump, under whose leadership our economy is in shambles, almost 250,000 Americans are dead, and who has bullied virtually everyone: women, immigrants, veterans, Black people, Asian Americans, doctors, trans people, disabled people, and the elderly. For the last week, I’ve been asking myself: how could this be? I sincerely believe in the humanity of every single person, and I was trying to empathize with their motivations.
As I was celebrating the joy of Kamala Harris becoming the first woman, the first Black and Indian woman, to become the VP-elect, with my two brown nieces, I had a sudden realization. Just as the symbol of Kamala Harris energized and empowered me and many like me with a sense of visibility, inclusion, and belonging to the country we love so much, Donald Trump brings that same level of energy and empowerment to most white Americans. There is a fear of losing their dominant group status to people of color and immigrants. This may operate at an unconscious level, and this is why the pollsters were wrong again. If we continue to deny race and the Bradley effect taking place, we will fail to address this problem.
This moment has to be a wake up call for every single one of us. We are living in a time that calls to mind the Weimar Republic before the Nazis took power in 1933, a historical period marked by active misinformation, divisive politics, and the dehumanization of marginalized groups. For me, this work has to be about changing the hearts and minds of enough people to build a prosperous, compassionate society that serves us all. We must feel connected to each other not merely as Black, white, Asian, Hispanic/Latinx, or Indigenous, but as human beings.
This work is up to all of us in all of our communities, but particularly white communities. Furthermore, it has to be led by justice-minded, compassionate white people. These are the 38 million white Americans who voted for Biden and can see through the dangers of Donald Trump’s tropes. As the dominant caste, they have greater psychological power of relatability than any person of color could have.
Hispanic/Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous communities have to do this same work, but to a lesser extent. While not a majority, a substantial minority of these communities voted for Trump despite his racism, sexism, and xenophobia. This speaks to what Isabel Wilkerson characterizes with the following:
“The centrality of the dominant [white] caste is not lost on [anyone]…The highest and lowest rungs are seen as so far apart as to seem planted in place, immovable. Thus those straddling the middle may succumb to the greatest angst as they aspire to a higher rung. Everyone in the racial caste system is trained to covet proximity to the dominant caste: an Iranian immigrant feeling the need to mention that a relative had blond hair as a child; a second-generation Caribbean immigrant quick to clarify that they are Dominican and not African-American; a Mexican immigrant boasting that one of his grandfathers back in Mexico ‘looked just like an American’ — blond hair and blue eyes.”
A world without racial caste, and each one of us working towards that future, has to be the beginning of our collective movement for freedom and liberation for all of us. The time has come to dedicate ourselves to eradicating racial bias in our lifetimes. Activists and organizers have been doing this work for decades; it is time to recognize and bolster their efforts with our own.
So where can we — including you! — go from here? We must engage those around us in this work, whether they voted for Biden or Trump. Here’s how:
- Continue your own racial equity education and join the meaningful conversations happening around the globe. You can even refer to our PRISM tools to build a mindfulness practice around breaking bias. Learn our history, talk about it, share it with everyone you know!
- Talk to your loved ones, particularly those who voted for Trump. It is vital. Learn about their fears and misconceptions. Ask them how they may feel in a world where we belong everywhere.
- Engage in organizing. We have to stay engaged and united against hatred, fascism, and ignorance. We have to organize across the color line because the threat that we face right now is the system of racial caste. We have to overpower it with all of our efforts together.
The work may look different depending on who and where we are, and that’s okay. What matters is that we commit to it.
The celebrations we’ve seen unfold across the country are well-deserved; after all, this is a huge moment for so many of us. But now it’s time to get to work. I hope you’ll join me.
