Why, as a Black Woman, I'm Not Shocked by a Trump Win

On November 8 around 9 pm EST I clicked on the TV to watch election coverage. I started folding laundry, glancing up at the screen from time to time, expecting Hillary Clinton to pull out a tight victory.

And then the swing states started to fall — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, freaking Wisconsin. I watched in shock and slight horror as state after state went red — even somewhat reliably blue states like Pennsylvania.

I stayed up from 9 pm till 5 am the next morning watching CNN, and reading the rapidfire election coverage on news sites and Twitter. I shook my husband awake at 2 am. “Donald Trump is our next president.” I told him.

That night in my black moms Facebook group I started a vent thread, but as I typed dozens of comments in a stream of consciousness, I started to realize that my anger wasn’t directed at Trump, but at the many other forces that lead to his victory. By afternoon the next day I realized that there were many signs pointing in the direction of a Trump win.

1. The Democrats treated Bernie Sanders like shit
I haven’t shed a tear since Trump was elected president. But the day Bernie Sanders conceded I cried bitterly because I knew, on some level, that the Democratic party had just destroyed its best shot at a 16-year White House reign.

The leak of Democratic National Convention private emails added insult to injury showing that an organization with a duty to be impartial during the primaries clearly had thrown its weight behind Hillary, giving her unfair advantages and speaking dismissively, even disrespectfully of Sanders.

And they basically shot themselves in the foot. The point is not whether or not Sanders would have won had he been treated fairly. Clinton might have very well still pulled out a decisive primary victory. But in being so quick to dispense of him and force an end to his campaign, the DNC failed to realize that he was essentially a political prophet with his finger on the CENTRAL issue of this election — middle class and white working class frustration.

After casting him aside, Clinton adopted some of the elements of his platform that appealed to middle class Americans — promises of free college and reining in Wall Street. But her campaign seemed more preoccupied with the messages of ‘I’m not Trump’ and ‘I’m breaking a glass ceiling.’

2. Identity politics have taken over the Democratic party and policy has taken a back seat
So don’t get me wrong. I understand that representation is important. There is a painting of Barack Obama hanging up in my 4-year-old son’s bedroom. I regularly wear the glitter-rock Obama bust t-shirt my husband bought from a Chicago street vendor the night he was first elected. But representation in politics and policy in politics are two COMPLETELY different things.

Dems got so caught up in pushing the importance of Hillary’s identity politics (she would be the first woman president) and denouncing Trumps identity politics (immigrants are dangerous, Muslims are terrorists) that they forgot to talk about policy — things like public school divestment, stagnating wages, the skyrocketing cost of childcare and college, the increase in suburban poverty, the racial inequity of mass incarceration, the sovereign rights of Native Americans. Like, seriously, I can count on ONE HAND the number of times I turned on the news and heard soundbites of Hillary addressing these things (and I’m sure she did at many of her rallies, but that’s not what the media covered.) But I can count DOZENS of times I heard her denouncing Trump’s racist, sexist rhetoric.

I was listening to NPR this morning and they were speaking with Alfonso Aguilar of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. The white NPR host asked, with incredulity, why a whopping 29% of Latinos had voted for Trump, despite him calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between Mexico and America. Trump won MORE Latino voters — percentage wise — than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And keep in mind that Trump BARELY did any kind of outreach or stumping in Latino communities. Aguilar started out by asserting that Latinos are not a monolith and, had Trump campaigned more heavily to them, he would have probably won more of them over. And then he said this; many Latinos are pocket book voters, and they are not happy about their rates of unemployment and believe Trump will bring jobs.

This might be hard for black folks to understand because we are NOT pocketbook voters. We are solid identity voters, always voting Democrat regardless of what is being presented or promised. We learned November 8 the hard way that not everyone votes like we do.

3. Democrats have ignored class implications in all of this
This election was about race. Trump’s talk of a “silent majority” attracted many white people — both young and old — who yearn for the ‘good old days’ when it was written into law that they would get the best schools, jobs, homes and communities. But this election was not all about race. A lot of it was about class. And here’s why: Hillary lost, in 2016, many counties and states that Obama easily won in 2008 and 2012.

The Midwest is a stunning example of this. Illinois (in large part because of Chicago) is a reliably blue state. And for a long time the Midwest has been either swing or blue. In 2012 Obama won the ENTIRE Midwest except for Indiana. So he carried Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan. In 2016 Hillary lost almost ALL of it. She only carried the one reliably blue state — Illinois — and Minnesota.

Why such a dramatic shift in 4 years? One word: economics. While the media took glee in highlighting how terrible and racist and sexist a person Trump was, how violent his rallies often became, they failed to notice that he was also always, CONSTANTLY talking about jobs — that too many of them are being shipped overseas, that trade deals aren’t benefiting the middle class in the same way they benefit the wealthier class, that too many American goods are made overseas. He spoke about this at such length that desperate voters were willing to ignore the fact that Trump himself is guilty of many of the things he’s denounced (a large percentage of Trump goods are produced overseas.)

And you know who else was talking about jobs and trade all the damn time? Bernie Sanders.

By focusing on identity politics Democrats missed that a lot of their base was thinking more about jobs. And because Democratic leadership seemed to talk more about identity than jobs, a lot of their white, blue-collar base abandoned them and went right.

So what now?

In many ways Barack Obama’s presidency is a blow to the idea that, for blacks, integration is the path forward. A black/biracial man being president of a white (supremacist) country is the height of integration for our era. There was much to be proud of with this, and I’m not denying this. But once in power Obama — a man who got his start doing community organizing in working class, black Chicago neighborhoods, whose South Side Chicago pastor boldly proclaimed ‘God damn America’ for its history of injustice — chose to remain moderate and not rock the status quo too much. Perhaps he felt his race, and the symbolism of his presidency were a lot — even enough — for people to take in, and he didn’t want or need to pile on more. But it means NOTHING if we integrate spaces without TRANSFORMING them to be more accessible for the very people they are designed to keep out.

Obama won an incredible victory with Obamacare, but a lot of his other policies read very centrist. He was heavily invested in standardized testing and charter schools, which many feel has contributed to the deterioration of teacher’s unions and traditional public schools, which millions of black and brown children (including mine) still depend on for a quality, free education. He didn’t prosecute any of the Wall Street execs who sank the economy. He told a crowd of veterans that their white tears over Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem was the same as the devastating pain of a black family losing a loved one to police brutality. He denounced the Flint water situation, but the water is still poisoned and black babies there are still slowly dying.

Towards the end of his presidency I grew disillusioned, disappointed and weary. As I drove through Chicago’s devastated West Side, where my husband and I had purchased our first home in a black community almost devoid of any semblance of a middle class, I wondered if Obama realized that symbolism can only do so much. Too many of us are asked to blindly support the Democratic party (in the last few days by Beyonce, Jay-Z, Lebron James and Lady Gaga no less) while ignoring the fact that we are starting from less than zero. And while many black Americans use their grit and ingenuity to escape poverty and middle class stagnation, for many, no amount of pulling up pants or studying at the library will get them to the finish line in a system that is decreasingly concerned with their challenges and content to leave them as a permanent underclass.

America’s Reconstruction era shows us that it is entirely possible to broadly and swiftly increase the quality of life for America’s black population. The tools are there, but in both the Democratic and Republican parties, the political will is not — no matter what color or gender our president is.

I gave Hillary my vote — not because I liked her, not because I thought she would be a great president. I gave her my vote solely to stop Trump. I trusted the Democratic Party Machine and right now, most of all, I feel cheated.