Tag Along

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 20th 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…