Black leaders greet Biden win, pledge to push for equality

President-elect Joe Biden’s victory was celebrated by civil rights activists and Black leaders who warned that a tough road lies ahead to address America’s persistent inequalities and the racial division that Donald Trump fuelled during his presidency.

Biden will take office in January as the nation confronts a series of crises that have taken a disproportionate toll on Black Americans and people of colour, including the pandemic and resulting job losses. Many cities saw protests against racial injustice during a summer of unrest.

During a contentious campaign against Trump, Biden made explicit appeals for the support of Black voters. He pledged to unify the country, acknowledged systemic racism, criticised his rival for stoking division and picked Kamala Harris as his running mate, making her the first Black woman on a major party’s presidential ticket.

While those were all welcomed steps, Black leaders and activists say they will keep pushing the incoming administration to do more.

This is just the beginning of change and the election of any one administration does not mean the work is done, said civil rights leader Martin Luther King III, who noted the vision of his father, Martin Luther King Jr, has yet to be fully realised in America, 57 years after he delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

“Dad and Mom wanted to eradicate poverty, racism and violence from our society and that will take a monumental effort. A Biden-Harris administration has to constantly be challenged and pushed to move.”

Black voters powered Biden’s successful campaign, particularly in critical states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. Nine in 10 Black voters nationwide supported him, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 110,000 voters across the country.

“Vice President Biden understands that we are fully formed American citizens who deserve to have full access to all the parts of progress in the United States,” said Stacey Abrams, a voting rights activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate. “He’s been willing to commit not only to plans, but he’s been willing to take responsibility for how those plans get lived out. I want to see proper access to opportunity and I think fundamentally that is the wish, that is the hope, and that is the deserved right of every Black person in this country.”

Latino voters supported Biden over Trump, 63 per cent to 35 per cent, according to the survey. White voters, who made up roughly three-quarters of the electorate, were more likely to support Trump, 55 per cent vs. 43 per cent for Biden.

More than 74 million Americans voted for Biden, more than any other presidential candidate in history. But some Black political strategists and activists noted the 70 million votes for Trump, suggesting that some of those Trump supporters at a minimum turned a blind eye to the racism he demonstrated.

We have been lullabied for so long in this country that when you have somebody like President Donald J Trump come along and be so blatant with his racism, its a shock to the senses, said Nina Turner, a Black progressive and former Ohio state senator.

“But this country should not be deluded that it’s just Trump, its millions of people. A lot of white liberals, they’re very comfortable with pointing the finger at President Trump. But they need to look in the mirror…because he is just a reflection of what is already a reality in this country. While Biden enjoyed strong support from Black voters, there was also frustration about the pressure placed on their communities to deliver a victory.”

African Americans, who are the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc, face a battle for racial progress in a nation whose very founding embraced racist, predatory systems that continue to disparately harm Black people today.

And America has yet to fully reckon with that racist past, which left generations of Black Americans struggling to achieve the American dream or to overcome the effects of Trump’s election in 2016, which many experts saw as a blow to civil rights and race relations.

“We’ve been here before where we’ve seen a country that has been deeply divided over race and the complicit role of whites who should be sympathetic to Black interests and issues due to the shared economic fate but they aren’t,” said Nadia Brown, a Purdue University political science professor.

The killings of Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed inside her Kentucky home, and that of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee into his neck for nearly eight minutes, sparked global protests against police brutality and thrust racism in America into an international spotlight.

Those protesters will be looking for Biden and Harris to address their concerns and create progressive policies to address the root causes of police violence, according to Jessica Byrd, who leads the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project, and believes Biden and Harris have demonstrated a willingness to engage with the protest movement and organisers.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Federal staff and is auto-published from a syndicated feed.)