When Voters are Too Traumatized to Take Chances

IN EARLY MARCH, as part of a weekend of events in Selma, Ala., to commemorate the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid and DNR Studios’ Mark Thompson moderated conversations with presidential candidates. When Elizabeth Warren took the stage, the racially mixed audience roared, many attendees holding signs in the air that read “Warren for President.”

Many black women activists, advocates, and leaders endorsed Warren early in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Black Womxn For, a coalition of more than 100 black women influencers, endorsed her in late 2019. I endorsed her in February 2020, as did Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors. At the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, the premiere annual gathering of justice-minded black clergy, her name buzzed in hallways and around dinner tables. She had listened deeply to the African American community and many other marginalized communities, and the result was a deeply intersectional platform.

So, when Super Tuesday came, I was hopeful that black women across the South would go to the polls with enthusiasm for Warren. But overall, they didn’t. Joe Biden won the black vote throughout the South. What happened?

Our nation has absorbed more trauma than we realized, especially Southern people of African descent. Since 2016, voting rights have been suppressed and stripped to degrees not seen since Jim Crow. White nationalist judges have streamed into our court system, pushing aside legal precedents for the protection of civil rights. Prosecutors are finding ways to hold more black people in for-profit jails and prisons, while black people outside prison walls absorb overt white supremacist microaggressions and worse at Starbucks, hotels, supermarkets, and picnics in the park. Nowhere is safe.

We are wounded. And black people are terrorized. In the middle of terror, dreaming becomes nearly impossible. A person has one goal: Make it stop.

Perhaps in normal times black voters would risk a Warren vote. But here’s the calculus Southern black families had to consider: For them, the results of this election will mean life or death. They know that white women tipped the 2016 election into the hands of Donald Trump, that they did not vote for one of their own.

I weep for America—but not because Warren will not be our candidate. We will miss her sharp mind and intersectional platform, but my tears flow from a deeper place. I weep for our pain and pray for our healing.