The perfect ending to a dumpster fire of a year: Righteousness has prevailed as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada stormed in like the Black Panther to help take down orange Thanos and elect Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States.
CNN and the Associated Press project that Biden will win Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, giving him more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Kamala Harris will become the first woman and the first African American to be vice president.
Biden was able to defy President Trump, his lies, his claims of voter fraud, his sycophants storming ballot counting sites, and the Georgia governor’s undying love for him.
Because Trump left America in shambles, Biden knows his work will require not only swift policy action to get Americans out of poverty during a pandemic, but he will need to make an extended and sympathetic push towards healing the country, all while ensuring America that his victory is legitimate.
Did you really expect Trump to go quietly into the dark night? What lies ahead for Biden is an assured push by Trump to try and tie things up in the courts while continuing to use his public pulpit to discredit Biden’s win at every turn. It won’t work. America worked hard, in a fucking pandemic, to prevent this election from being stolen, and the true heroes are the poll workers and the ballot counters who refused to let sleep get in the way of ensuring that every vote be counted.
What Biden was able to do, with the fate of America’s democracy hanging in the balance, is nothing short of a miracle. Biden didn’t just pull in numbers; he pulled in historic numbers and garnered the most vote in American history and he needed every one of them. What happened was not just a testament to Biden’s campaign; it was a testament to Stacey Abrams and other black female political organizers in Georgia fighting for a fair election. It was a testament to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, the Divine Nine and HBCUs. It was a testament to those who looked at the last four years and said they wouldn’t stand for four more. What righteous America said was “enough,” and while those accolades don’t go to Biden alone, today is his day, so let’s give him his flowers.
America also proved a few things that have to be addressed before the next elections. America is and always has been racist AF. The millions of votes for Trump—one of the worst, most vile, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic presidents to ever sit his untanned ass in an Oval Office chair—are real. Those votes weren’t from Russian bots (at least as far we know); those were real white women (with their lying asses) and real white men (with their expected asses) and real Black men. Wait, let me read that again. Yes, 18 percent of Black men reportedly voted for Trump, and since I don’t think Jason Whitlock voted that many times, it means America is deeply fucked, and that’s OK, too. This isn’t the first time that America has had to look itself in the mirror and it won’t be the last.
What America can’t ignore is that Trump’s in-your-face racism, xenophobia, and misogyny didn’t just play on a national stage, it forced what should have been a landslide into a close race. What Trumpism means going forward, well, we will just have to wait and see.
Once again, white women have claimed allyship with Black folks; they marched, they tweeted Black Lives Matter, they claimed to detest the inner workings of Trump’s presidency and then they did it again. According to Newsweek, some 55 percent of white women, a full 2 percent more than 2016, voted for Trump. Make no mistake about it, Black America, and more specifically, Black women, saved the world. I’m sure they’re tired of doing all the heavy lifting, but until the 45 percent of white women snatch up the 55 percent of white women who continue to try and sink the ship, I don’t really want to hear anything from any of y’all.
So Biden’s fight will be uphill. America is divided; white women are still out here white womening, the coronavirus is still raging and unemployment rates are higher than Biden’s proposed tax increase on the rich.
But for this day, just this one day, Biden needs to remember that he won and that’s the first part of righting the ship even if America is looking a lot like the Titanic.