Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
Page 8
The series of events rocked the nation. Worse yet, the events in Dallas came just weeks after a horrific attack by an American-born Muslim man on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that left fifty people dead and fifty-three people wounded, the worst mass shooting in US history and the deadliest attack on the LGBT community. As the shooting began, the attacker called 911 to proclaim his allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group.172 The Orlando massacre forced both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to address issues of bigotry, domestic terrorism, and gun violence as they campaigned.173 The events in Dallas forced them to come to terms with both police safety and police accountability, what was being represented in the public discourse as a choice between “Blue Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter.”174
Conservative critics had been quick to blame the deaths of the Dallas policemen on the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming it encouraged violence against police. Alicia Garza, the cofounder of the BLM organization, pushed back against that criticism in an interview. “Standing up for the rights of Black people as human beings and standing against police violence and police brutality makes you get characterized as being anti-police or it has you being characterized as cop killers, neither of which we are.… At the same time that we can grieve the senseless loss of life of five police officers, we are also grieving the senseless loss of life that occurred at the hands of police. Those things can coexist.”175 Mike Rawlings, the mayor of Dallas, agreed with that sentiment and spoke in defense of the Black Lives Matter movement and the organizers of what had been a peaceful march. “Our police officers died for the Black Lives Matter movement. We were protecting those individuals. That is not a racist organization.”176
The coexistence of so many strong emotions was captured in the remarks of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the day after the Dallas shootings: “This has been a week of profound grief and heartbreaking loss. After the events of this week, Americans across our country are feeling a sense of helplessness, of uncertainty and of fear.”177 With the heavy shadow of Dallas and Orlando hanging over the upcoming political conventions, the candidates prepared to respond.
Donald Trump’s acceptance speech emphasized law and order. “Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life.… Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and chaos in our communities.… I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.… In this race for the White House, I am the Law and Order candidate.”178 During the campaign, Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani had given speeches advocating for aggressive policing, including stop-and-frisk policies, and condemning Black Lives Matter activists as “inherently racist,” interpreting their slogan as a statement meaning only Black lives matter rather than as a statement of affirmation that Black lives matter, too.179 Trump avoided any specific reference to Black Lives Matter in his speech. Instead he made this promise: “When I am President, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally and protected equally. Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson who have as much right to live out their dreams as any other child in America?”180
At the Democratic convention, both the “Mothers of the Movement,” Black women whose children were killed by police, as well as family members of police who had been killed in the line of duty were featured on the convention stage. In Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech, she did not mention the phrase “law and order” but instead called for healing and emphasized unity.
Her vision, captured in her campaign slogan, “Stronger Together,” was one of inclusivity. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, she said,
Our country’s motto is “e pluribus unum”—out of many, we are one. Will we stay true to that motto?…
Now we are clear-eyed about what our country is up against. But we are not afraid. We will rise to the challenge, just as we always have. We will not build a wall. Instead, we will build an economy where everyone who wants a good job can get one.
And we’ll build a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are already contributing to our economy!
We, we will not ban a religion. We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight and defeat terrorism.…
We have to heal the divides in our country. Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more.
And that starts with listening, listening to each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other’s shoes.
So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day, heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job.
We will reform our criminal justice system from end to end and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
And we will defend, we will defend all our rights—civil rights, human rights and voting rights, women’s rights and workers’ rights, LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities!
And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from.181
The differences between the two candidates were wide, but the polls were close. The weeks of campaigning that followed the convention were characterized by bitter personal attacks between them. Donald Trump called his opponent “Crooked Hillary,” referring to the FBI investigation into her use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state, which potentially placed confidential information at risk, as well as other misdeeds (real or imagined) he accused her of. His supporters chanted “Lock her up” at his rallies. In her speeches, she castigated him for his lack of qualifications, the unsuitability of his temperament for the role of president, and his divisive rhetoric, which she called racist, sexist, and xenophobic, claiming he was drawing out the worst in us.
In October, just a month before the presidential election, Trump’s moral character became an especially hot topic in the campaign when a previously unreleased video, taped in 2005, was made public. In it Trump was recorded talking with Billy Bush, then with the entertainment news program Access Hollywood, about his sexual exploits with women. In very vulgar terms, Trump bragged about being able to do whatever he wanted to women because he was a celebrity, including kissing them uninvited and trying to “grab them by the pussy.” Taken literally, it was clear that he was describing behavior that could be described as sexual assault. In response to the released video, Trump explained his words away as just “locker room talk.”182 However, in the wake of the release, at least three dozen prominent Republicans came forward to say that he should drop out of the race, and many others running for reelection moved to distance themselves from him.183 Trump’s standing in the polls dropped and Hillary Clinton was seen as the clear favorite to win the election.
But then Hillary Clinton suffered a setback. FBI Director James Comey announced on Friday, October 28, just eleven days before the election, that he was reopening the Clinton e-mail inquiry because some new, relevant e-mails had been unearthed during the investigation of an unrelated case. It was an unprecedented announcement, as there was a long-standing policy of the Justice Department not to comment on an ongoing investigation and not to release any information that might influence the outcome of an election.184 On November 6, just two days before the election, Comey indicated that there was nothing in the new information to support any criminal charges against Clinton, but the damage had been done.185 The momentum that had been building in her favor was gone. Still, many people expected her to win the election.
To the shock of many, she did not. Though she captured the popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes, she
failed to get the majority of votes in key states like Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, giving Donald Trump the electoral votes he needed to win the election. He had 306 electoral votes to her 232; 270 were needed to win.186 Clinton supporters were horrified and heartbroken, but Trump supporters were jubilant. The majority of the people had voted against their candidate, but still he was the winner—President-Elect Donald J. Trump.
The postelection analysis of voting patterns revealed a nation divided along racial lines. Put simply, the majority of White voters chose Trump; the majority of voters of color did not. According to analyses done by the Pew Research Center, White non-Hispanic voters preferred Trump over Clinton, 58 percent to 37 percent. During the course of the campaign there was a lot of discussion among political pundits about the fact that Trump was appealing to a non-college-educated, working-class base that was feeling left behind by globalism and the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US. Indeed, college graduates backed Clinton over Trump (52 percent to 43 percent), while the majority of voters without a college degree voted for Trump (52 percent to 44 percent). But among White voters, race seemed to carry more sway than education. More White voters, irrespective of whether they had a college education, voted for Trump.187
Given Hillary Clinton’s history-making candidacy as the first female presidential nominee of a major political party and Donald Trump’s highly offensive remarks about women, many people thought she would do well with women voters. And she did do very well with women voters of color. Black women voters were the most supportive, only 4 percent voting for Trump. But 62 percent of White women without college degrees voted for Trump, as did 45 percent of White women with college degrees.
Donald Trump became the first person to win a presidential election without having served in the military or having held any previously elected position. Remarkably, almost 25 percent of Trump supporters said he was not qualified but voted for him anyway. Laura Morgan and Robin Ely, both of Harvard Business School, explained the voting behavior of White women as reflecting both economic anxiety and gender dynamics: “The Trump campaign tapped into fears and frustrations among white working-class women about diminished possibilities for their husbands and sons to provide for their families.… Women and men have been socialized… to associate leadership with a particular version of masculinity, an image Trump exemplified in his persona as the supremely successful businessman.”188
Van Jones, an African American political commentator on CNN, articulated another theory on the night of the election: “This was a rebellion against the elites. True. It was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. It’s true. But it was also something else.… This was a white-lash. White-lash against a changing country. It was a white-lash against a Black president.”189 While perhaps not everyone who voted for Donald Trump shared the bigoted views of his White supremacist supporters or agreed with the offensive statements he himself made about Mexicans, Muslims, inner-city Black and Latinx communities, or women, on Election Day those things did not prevent millions of people from saying yes to Trump. That is a painful reality for those who have been his target.
“Who voted for Trump?” is an important question. For the health of our democracy, “Who was prevented from voting?” is even more important. The 2016 presidential election was the first without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act.190 As discussed earlier, Republicans have been focused on reducing voter turnout in areas likely to vote Democratic since the strong showing of Barack Obama in the 2008 election. There are four key ways to suppress voting: create barriers to registration, such as by creating bureaucratic roadblocks to grassroots voter-registration drives; curtail the availability of early voting; require government-issued photo IDs; and disenfranchise ex-felons.191 In 2016 fourteen states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time—including crucial swing states like Wisconsin and Ohio. For example, Donald Trump won Wisconsin by twenty-seven thousand votes, but three hundred thousand registered Wisconsin voters, according to a federal court, lacked the required forms of voter ID. “Turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest level in 20 years and fell by 52,000 in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives.”192
In three states with a long and documented history of voter discrimination, Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina, there were 868 fewer polling places available, creating long lines and discouraging voters. In North Carolina, Black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because in forty counties with large Black populations, there were 158 fewer early polling places than in previous years.193 Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin observed, “The North Carolina Republican Party actually sent out a press release boasting about how its efforts drove down African-American turnout in this election.”194
It seems clear that voter suppression had an impact on the 2016 election. Was it significant enough to actually change the election outcome? We will never know. What we do know is that more than fifty years after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the struggle for the right to vote continues.
Living in the Age of Trump
Donald Trump’s election emboldened White nationalists who celebrated his victory in public gatherings. Less than two weeks after the election, a White nationalist conference took place in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from the White House, embracing Donald Trump’s election as validation of their ideas. Not only had their preferred candidate been victorious, but he had quickly selected as his senior adviser and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, the man who had previously run Breitbart News, the most prominent media platform of the so-called alt-right. With Bannon as part of Trump’s inner circle, the opportunity for White nationalists to influence presidential politics seemed a dream come true.195
For others, the days after the November 8 election were something out of a nightmare. Immediately after the election, hostile graffiti appeared. For example, in Durham, North Carolina, walls at a busy intersection read, “Black lives don’t matter and neither does your votes.” In Wellsville, New York, a baseball dugout was spray-painted with a swastika and the words “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.” National and local newspapers were filled with stories about the dramatic rise in bias-based attacks after the election.196
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate-motivated incidents, released a report called Ten Days After documenting almost nine hundred reports of harassment and intimidation, not including online harassment, that were reported within the first ten days of the election. In these documented accounts from across the nation—every state is represented—many of the harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults, making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success. According to the SPLC report, people have been targets of harassment at school, at work, at home, on the street, on public transportation, in their cars, in grocery stores and other places of business, and in their houses of worship. The most common occurrences involved hateful graffiti and verbal harassment, although a small number of the events included violent physical interactions. Only 23 of the 867 incidents reported were directed at the Trump campaign or his supporters.197
The detailed accounts are upsetting to read. They include: multiple reports of Black children being told to ride in the back of school buses; the words “Trump Nation” and “Whites Only” being painted on a church with a large immigrant population; a seventy-five-year-old gay man being pulled from his car and beaten by an assailant who said the “president says we can kill all you faggots now.” Though SPLC has been documenting similar hateful incidents for many years, the people targeted since the election said this experience was new for them.
“I have experienced discrimination in my life, but never in such a public and unashamed manner,” an Asian-American woman reported after a man told her to “go home” as she left an Oakland train station. Likewise, a black resident whose apartment was vandalized with the phrase “911 nigger” reported that he had “never witnes
sed anything like this.” A Los Angeles woman, who encountered a man who told her he was “Gonna beat [her] pussy,” stated that she was in this neighborhood “all the time and never experienced this type of language before.” Not far away in Sunnyvale, California, a transgender person reported being targeted with homophobic slurs at a bar where “I’ve been a regular customer for 3 years—never had any issues.”198
The SPLC reports that schools—K–12 settings and colleges—have been the most common venues for hate incidents. For example, a Washington State teacher reported: “‘Build a wall’” was chanted in our cafeteria Wed [after the election] at lunch. ‘If you aren’t born here, pack your bags’ was shouted in my own classroom. ‘Get out spic’ was said in our halls.” Another example was provided by a mother from Colorado: “My 12-year-old daughter is African American. A boy approached her and said, ‘Now that Trump is president, I’m going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find.’”199