How did you spend the 2020 Presidential Election? I imagine that’s a question historians focusing on American politics might be adding to their litany of inquiries, if they haven’t already done so. I spent November 3rd working as an election officer because I figured helping others vote would be more productive than constantly refreshing my browser for updates. For 16 hours I disinfected voting booths, explained to first-time voters how to fill in their ballots, showed other voters how to feed their ballots into the counting machine, and whatever else the other officers needed me to do. It was a long day and I was exhausted by the end of it, but ultimately it was a good use of time. More than 600 people from our precinct came out to vote, which counts for something. It was also probably the one day that week I didn’t think about the election and its outcome because I had other things to preoccupy me.
As with lots of other people, this election has left me feeling emotionally drained. It’s always a stressful season when a Presidential Election is on the ballot, but this year especially, between the pandemic, ongoing anti-Black violence, and other systemic issues, the stakes felt especially high. The delayed ballot counting was also giving me flashbacks to 2000, an election that ultimately left me feeling disappointed because I had wanted Al Gore to win, not George W. Bush.
But here we are, with President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris expected to take office in January. Across social media, I’ve been reading collective sighs of relief, exaltation, and for the first time in a long while, a sense of optimism for the future, at least for the people who wanted this outcome. And I’ll admit, it’s been nice.
But now the real work begins.
As tempting as it is to blame Trump for all our collective woes, he’s not the cause but the symptom. He gave a voice to a side of the United States we don’t like to think about: the racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, white supremacist one. While historians have long been pointing out how our country as we know it was built on the exploitation of Black people, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and other atrocities, and perpetuates systemic inequality in its institutions and infrastructures, we don’t like talking about it. Trump’s response to the 1619 Project alone, the so-called 1776 Commission, gives you a sense of how little we like confronting the violence of our colonialist origins and how they continue to shape our societies and cultures. Yet so long as these perspectives didn’t have a voice, or rather one with substantial political power, it was easy to ignore them. We (and here I mean mainly white people) could make ourselves believe that things used to be bad, but they’re better now, and we’ve moved past them.
That’s the thing about our understanding of history. We like to think of the past as being decidedly over and finished. Partly this reflects an ongoing interest in progress, of constantly and undeniably moving forward to a better future, as Jani Scandura posits in her introduction to Down in the Dumps. But defining the past as over and finished also implies that we’ve moved on and don’t have to confront it. Such is the argument Erin Devlin makes in her book Remember Little Rock, which looks at how historical interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement have influenced the current lack of integration efforts. By framing the Civil Rights Movement as finished rather than an ongoing process, white administrators, in particular, have presented integration as an issue that has already been resolved and doesn’t need to be worked on anymore. Consequently, even though communities continue to remain segregated, we white people believe we have already done the work of racial reconciliation and can go back to business as usual. To make a grammatical analogy, instead of viewing historical events gerunds, as something ongoing, we regard them as past perfect, as complete.
If anything, the past four years have made it painfully clear that we have a lot of reckoning to do. And rather than hope that these perspectives will disappear again, back to a safe place where we can cheerfully ignore them, we need to address them now. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time because the next Trump appears to stoke the anger and fear sustaining these beliefs. Indeed, the fact that so many people voted for Trump even after experiencing his administration for four years, not to mention the election of a QAnon supporter to Congress, is sobering.
So how do we fix this? The truth is, there is no simple way to eradicate centuries of exploitation, suffering, and pain. Instead, we (and I mean you, white people), have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, to recognize how we benefit from an unfair system, and, most importantly, agree to create something better for everyone, not just us. I’m reminded of an online panel I recently watched on decolonizing museum practices, hosted by the Illinois State Museum. As Brandie MacDonald, Director of Decolonizing Initiatives at the Museum of Us argued, there is no quick fix for the wrongs done in the past. You don’t get to just say some words, get a merit badge, and be done with it. Deconstructing our supremacist frameworks, like decolonization, is an ongoing process, one that we each have to commit to every day. The election of Biden and Harris may be a relief, but it isn’t going to be an immediate solution to anything.
This is also where an intersectional lens can be useful, especially when we (and again, I mean white people) start feeling defensive about our privilege. As Kimberle Crenshaw, Lauren Klein, Catherine d’Ignazio, Ibram X. Kendi, and many others point out, very few people are exclusively oppressors or oppressed. Rather, we all exist within matrices of advantages and disadvantages, each of which shapes our outcomes in life. To make a quick example of myself, as a woman I have fewer privileges than a white man due to historical gender roles and an ongoing legislative obsession with my bodily autonomy, but as a white, cisgender woman, I attain success and security more easily than a BIPOC person or a trans person. Yet white supremacy hurts all of us, including white people, because it relies on fragmentation to sustain power. Instead of seeing how we all collectively suffer under an oppressive system, we are encouraged to look out for ourselves and remain suspicious of others based on their difference. I’m not saying intersectionality will fix everything, but it can help us better understand how we both benefit and suffer from a system that isn’t designed to value all people.
For a moment though, let’s celebrate (and for goodness sake, wear your mask, we’re still in a pandemic). Let’s recognize Vice President-elect Kamala Harris for her achievements, anticipate her ongoing success, and be prepared to stand up for her when critics root their concerns in racism and misogyny rather than her political record. Let’s congratulate President-elect Joe Biden for keeping his cool in what has arguably been a challenging election, and for offering a platform that relies on a unifying rather than divisive rhetoric. Let’s celebrate all the Black women who have challenged voter suppression: Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown, Aimee Allison, and so many others. Let’s also remember all the Indigenous and Latino activists and organizations that contributed to the election’s outcome.
And then let’s get to work, because I for one don’t want to relive the past four years ever again.