|
Most Black voters seem poised to vote for Biden, based on recent polls; Morning Consult’s tracking poll for the week on October 25, for instance, found 86 percent of Black likely voters favored Biden, and 9 percent favored Trump.
But Jones says he’s still nervous about the results of the election because “the enthusiasm is not there.” This too is reflected in polling; for example, an Economist/YouGov poll taken in mid-October found Black voters to be split when it comes to their enthusiasm about Biden — 48 percent said they were enthusiastic about the nominee; 49 percent said they were not.
Part of that gap might stem from a longing for another candidate like Obama.
“I don’t care how good you are at basketball, if you go play for the Chicago Bulls you’re gonna be measured up against Michael Jordan,” Jones said. “I think for the rest of my lifetime, we will measure up every Democratic presidential candidate against Barack Obama .... and Joe Biden, you know, can’t be Jordan.”
Perhaps a more widespread issue, however, is the slightly more distant past: Many told me voters often bring up a 1994 crime bill as a reason they can’t get behind Biden.
That bill, called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, was written in part by Biden, and he played a key role in getting it passed into law during his time in the Senate, two things he bragged about as recently as 2016.
Essentially, the law was meant to stem a decades-long rise in crime and signal to voters that Democrats were tougher on crime than Republicans. As Vox’s German Lopez has explained, it was not very successful at doing either, but it did do a lot of other things:
The law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same. It provided funds for states to build more prisons, aimed to fund 100,000 more cops, and backed grant programs that encouraged police officers to carry out more drug-related arrests — an escalation of the war on drugs.
At the same time, the law included several measures that would be far less controversial among Democrats today. The Violence Against Women Act provided more resources to crack down on domestic violence and rape. A provision helped fund background checks for guns. The law encouraged states to back drug courts, which attempt to divert drug offenders from prison into treatment, and also helped fund some addiction treatment.
Particularly during the past 10 years, advocacy groups, think tanks, and scholars have argued that the 1994 crime bill helped encourage racially biased mass incarceration and, along with the crime laws of the 1980s, exacerbated systemic inequality. The general consensus now, as Princeton African American studies professor Naomi Murakawa put it to the Marshall Project in 2015, is “that 1994 act is overwhelmingly, incredibly punitive.”
Throughout the Democratic primary campaign, Biden’s then-rivals brought up this record; Sen. Cory Booker called the crime bill “shameful,” while Biden’s current running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, accused him of contributing to mass incarceration. The attacks stuck — and were quickly adopted by Trump, who has continued to use them against Biden in the general election.
But Curmilus Dancy II, a political blogger in North Carolina, argued that the criticism makes little sense: “You want Black folk to be mad because you say they were hard on them, but I see it as them doing a job, and what some Black folk wanted, at that particular time.”
To Dancy’s point, the crime bill was popular at the time. As the Brookings Institution’s Rashawn Ray and William A. Galston have explained, in 1994, “58% of African Americans supported the crime bill, compared to 49% of white Americans.”
After several different responses to these attacks (some less convincing than others), Biden has simplified his message.
“It was a mistake,” he said when asked about the crime bill at the second presidential debate. “I’ve been trying to change it since then, particularly the portion on cocaine.”
It’s an answer that impressed Crosby, and Biden’s new stance on the bill has impressed others as well; that he’s willing to say when he is wrong and knows when “it’s time to step up” is something Spencer said she liked about him.
While Biden was ultimately able to satisfy Crosby’s concerns about his record on criminal justice, Harris has been able to do no such thing.
“She prosecuted so many Black men, and it’s just like, do you, also feel the struggle of Black people? Or are you at a place right now where it’s just you and your family, and you don’t care about oppression anymore?” Crosby asked. “That’s so sad to me, to see that you cannot be empathetic and sympathetic to Black people, your own race.”
He went on to explain that he cannot understand why Harris accrued the record she did as San Francisco’s district attorney, and later as California’s attorney general.
Harris had a somewhat contradictory record in those two roles, as Vox’s Lopez explained: She implemented some progressive reforms, but there are also prosecutorial choices she made that critics say were particularly harmful to people of color.
This record means that when she was announced as Biden’s vice presidential pick, “We weren’t as excited maybe as some other people were, just because her track record hasn’t hasn’t been that great in regards to criminal justice, reform, and second chances,” West-Schroder of EXPO said, noting the group is nonpartisan.
Harris has since stressed that she has left behind the “smart on crime” stances she took while in California in order to advocate for progressive criminal justice reform in the Senate — including by introducing bail reform, anti-lynching, and marijuana decriminalization bills. And like Biden, she clarified where she stands now during a recent debate, saying, “We need reform of policing in America, and our criminal justice system.”
This new stance won over some of the voters I spoke with; but others were excited more by what she represents — potentially, the first Black and first Asian American woman to be vice president.
“A lot of people were already like, ‘Eh, yeah, I’ll vote for him, I’ll do what I got to do.’ And then when she was put on the ticket, it was, ‘I’m voting!’” said Walton, the Milwaukee party chair.
“The fact that she would be the first woman vice president is lit,” Blackwell said, noting that he also thought she would be helpful in balancing a potential President Biden: “It’s hard to trust any old white man with a lot of power, to be honest.”
“There’s a contradiction that folks are holding,” Jackson said, noting “there’s a particular political terrain that we need to be on” to achieve aims like defunding the police. But many are willing to embrace that contradiction and come out for Biden and Harris regardless of their pasts, because, as Jackson said, “this is such a high-stakes election.”
The stakes feel — and are — existential for Black Americans.
For many, the Covid-19 death toll isn’t just numbers of a graph; they have been personally swept up by the first, second, and third waves.
Branden Snyder, the executive director of Detroit Action, told me, “In Detroit, you know, it’s six degrees of separation, everyone is seeing someone that they know who passed from from Covid. I know somebody — we’ve had … two of our members pass, we’ve had staff members who’ve been infected.”
More than 27,000 Black Americans have died. And that means Black Americans “have the kind of collective experience of grieving and mourning people that should be here,” Jackson said.
It is not just the coronavirus that is taking Black lives. This year, Black Americans have been killed by vigilantes and police officers, by guns and knees, on snow-covered pavement and in their own homes. Black men have a 1-in-1,000 chance of being killed by police, a recent study found. One in 920 Black Americans has been killed by Covid-19. It can feel as though if one does not get you, the other will.
“I just don’t understand it,” Crosby said. “I don’t see why we’re not getting helped.”
Spencer expressed similar frustration: “How are we still fighting for the same things that my mom was fighting for? My mom is 90. How? How? I mean, how?!”
Many I spoke to expressed particular concern for racist violence from non-state actors. “The KKK, the white supremacists, the racist individuals, they have taken off their hoods,” Spencer said. “They are no longer hiding who they are. They are embracing it, actually. They are embracing white supremacy.”
The president has had a strong hand in this. In the words of my colleague Fabiola Cineas, “Trump is the accelerant” — he habitually quickens racist fires, from insisting that Obama was a Muslim with ill intent to telling the far-right hate group the Proud Boys to “stand back” and “stand by” on national television. In his staffing choices, rhetoric, and policies, he has advanced the cause of white nationalists, who desire a physical or spiritual white state.
Spencer said many Black voters she’s talked to believe the price of a second Trump term will be high. She said they are “extremely worried that if there’s four more years of this administration, we will be under 2.5 seconds away from chains and cotton fields.”
Even if such a dire reprisal of history isn’t in Black Americans’ future, they will still be faced with the economic remnants of that past. In good times, Black Americans faced a desolate economic landscape, one bereft of benefits accessible to white Americans, like homeownership and being on the high end of a persistent wage gap. Now is not a good time, nor will the foreseeable future be.
There is no simple solution to these monumental problems that are so ingrained in American life. Trump may be the accelerant, but he is not the root cause.
“We’ve got to delete Trump out of the picture,” according to Blackwell. “It’s not about him. It’s about us.”
Crosby was always sure he was going to vote, but he also wanted to be sure he was casting his ballot for the candidate who would most benefit his community. And he said, after watching the final debate, he’s no longer undecided.
With a pandemic, systemic racism, economic inequality, and the shadow of white nationalism haunting the US, he said, “I don’t know who’s truly going to help me. But it sounds like Biden is more on the side of trying to help people.”
That is enough for him, and enough for nearly everyone I spoke to. They all just want to use their voting power to install leaders who will actually work for — and with — them to make life better.
“We just have to get to the next level,” Blackwell said. “So we can change, really, the system.”