While there are many voters decrying the choices in the 2024 presidential election, there is a certain voter segment treating the upcoming election as business as usual.
I’m talking about the pragmatic Black voter.
Ever since Blacks could vote in America, we have approached the process with a peculiar combination of optimism and fatalism.
During election cycles, Blacks are usually in one of two voting scenarios.
The first scenario finds us disenfranchised and discouraged from voting. This scenario existed in the South during slavery, was resurrected post-Reconstruction until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed and has returned since the Supreme Court has issued ruling that have severely curtailed the law.
Some states, primarily below the Mason-Dixon line, are passing laws gerrymandering minority and poor voters into disadvantageous voting districts, creating limited polling options, and instituting rules such as restricting drinking water in long polling lines. All of this has been added to the deliberately racist, classist voter ID laws.
Almost every time major incidents of voter fraud are discovered, the perpetrators are neither People of Color nor Democratic voters.
The Republican Party is working overtime to rig the voting because history has demonstrated that their ability to win honest elections is increasingly limited.
Therefore, Black southern voters do what they have to do to cast their ballots and put up with this nonsense.
The second scenario Black voters find themselves in is being a key demographic that can greatly impact election results.
After the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party could count on Black voters to vote for their candidates. This was the case until Franklin Delano Roosevelt defied Southern Democrats and not only courted the Northern Black vote but made sure that People of Color benefitted as well as Whites from the back-to-work organizations he created like the WPA and CCC.
From that time on, Democrats gradually made huge inroads in attracting Black voters until John F. Kennedy’s election and his successor Lyndon Johnson’s skill at getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed caused Black voters to abandon en masse the Republican Party.
Concurrently, the GOP began to attract southern Democratic voters. By the end of the 1960s, most southern conservative voters had left the Democratic Party. By the 1980s during the Reagan Administration, the few Southern conservatives who were left in the Democratic Party followed suit.
The Democratic Party have made lots of promises to black voters. Some promises have been delivered. Some have not, but even though we are understandably impatient, most of us realize there is no reason to support national Republican candidates.
The truth of this has never been clearer:
· The leading Republican candidate is a demonstrable racist who never misses an opportunity to demean non-Whites
· The once-rising party contender has been busy banning books that honestly discuss slavery and systematic racism
· Another party candidate is a minority but has begun to push the Great Replacement Theory that European Whites are being deliberately “replaced” by non-Whites and non-Christians
With candidates like these, the fact that President Biden is 80 years old is of little or no consequence to most Black voters.
Yes, the president is unpopular because of actions taken during the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But pragmatic Black voters know and understand the following:
· There will not be another candidate replacing Biden at the head of the 2024 Democratic ticket candidate
· The former president is his party’s likely presidential because he is the most popular candidate in his party
· If the former president is re-elected, democracy in America will become extinct, and People of Color will suffer the most
Once can hope that White voters will learn to be as pragmatic as Black voters.
It’s not that we have ever had a choice.
And the difference in 2024 for People of Color may literally be a matter of life and death.