Tagged: election 2020

Selected Media

The Politics of White Anxiety

By Jonathan M. Metzl

Read the full article from Boston Review here.

“For commentators such as Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, the spectacle of white sympathies shifting away from Black communities—so-called whitelash—highlighted the mercurial nature of white support for Black communities. ‘And so here we are, barely three months after George Floyd was choked to death, and already white allyship is waning,’ Mystal wrote. ‘A majority of white people were always going to value their own comfort over justice for Black people.'”

Selected Media

Births of a Nation, Redux

By Robin D. G. Kelley

Read the full article from Boston Review here.

“We keep telling ourselves that Trump was elected as a backlash to a Black president, but really he was elected as a backlash to a Black movement. President Obama presided during the killing of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland—ad infinitum. It was the mass rebellion against the lawlessness of the state—in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Dallas, in Baton Rouge, in New York, in Los Angeles, and elsewhere—that prompted Trumpian backlash.”

Selected Media

The Voice of Black America?

By Rachelle Hampton

Read the full article from Slate here.

“Getting cast as the political spokesman for all Black people requires exactly two qualifications: be Black and have an audience that is primarily Black. Whether or not your audience views you as a serious political thinker is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether your opinions are actually widely held in the community you claim to represent. For the politicians looking for campaign pit stops and the media outlets looking for sound bites, the only thing that really matters is a young Black audience.”

Selected Media

AOC Is Standing Up for the Left

By Lichi D’Amelio

Read the full article from Jacobin here.

“Her strategy in responding to detractors has been threefold. First, she’s setting the record straight politically. Contrary to what the centrists would have us believe, left-wing stances aren’t electoral suicide. ‘Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat,’ she told the New York Times. ‘We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. [California representative] Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.'”

Selected Media

Juan González: The Media Has It Wrong. Record Latinx Turnout Helped Biden. White Voters Failed Dems

By Juan Gonzalez

Watch the video and read the full article from Democracy Now here.

“‘The main story is that people of color, especially Latinos, flocked to the polls in numbers that far exceeded what the experts had expected, while the total number of votes cast by white Americans barely increased from the last presidential election,’ says González. ‘How come none of the experts are asking why white voters underperformed the Democratic Party?'”

Selected Media

Juan González: The Media Has It Wrong. Record Latinx Turnout Helped Biden. White Voters Failed Dems

By Juan Gonzalez

Watch the video and read the full article from Democracy Now here.

“‘The main story is that people of color, especially Latinos, flocked to the polls in numbers that far exceeded what the experts had expected, while the total number of votes cast by white Americans barely increased from the last presidential election,’ says González. ‘How come none of the experts are asking why white voters underperformed the Democratic Party?'”

Selected Media

Trump’s Pathology Is Now Clear

By James Hamblin

Read the full article from The Atlantic, here.

“To look on, inert, as Americans suffer and die is one thing; to deny that it is happening is another. This is a clear and ominous glimpse of how the pandemic will continue to play out if Trump remains in power. During America’s final lurch into the election, the president has become an even darker caricature of himself, laying bare his willingness to abandon Americans’ health and well-being for his own self-preservation. He is now even more dangerous as a vector of disease than when he was actively shedding the virus.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor / Selected Media

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Limits of Representation

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from The New Yorker, here.

“We are living in the recent shadow of a two-term Black President and two Black Attorneys General. And, despite this unprecedented concentration of Black political power, not much has changed for the vast majority of Black people. This was certainly true before the ravages of COVID-19 measured the exact depths of racial injustice in the country. There may be a multitude of contextual factors and contingencies that explain the impotence of the Black political class to change the conditions experienced by ordinary Black people, but those explanations do not change that basic reality.”

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