Protests, Sacrifice for Justice

America has been awash in massive and daily racial and social justice protests since the police murder of George Floyd on May 25th. These demonstrations have expanded to include the unwarranted vigilante and police killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and others and the recent maiming of Jacob Blake whom a Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer shot in the back seven times at point black range while holding on to his shirt. Blake is now likely paralyzed from the waist down for life.

The most disturbing elements of these shootings and chokeholds are that most have been recorded on cellphones and police body cameras, and in most instances, the cops were fully aware that they were being visually documented.

What is unique about these dissents is that they are occurring in majority white and majority minority cities in every region of the country from Portland, Oregon to Atlanta, Georgia. The participants include representatives from all racial, age, and income groups. The protesters look like the America we are becoming.

But what is also reminiscent of the civil rights protests of the 1960s is that whites have sacrificed their lives in order to achieve the social justice goals of minorities. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, the most recent protest flash point, Anthony Huber (age 26) and Joseph Rosenbaum (age 36), both unarmed, were gunned down by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a militia member and ardent Trump supporter, using an illegal assault rifle. He was driven to the demonstration by his mother.

After the murders, Rittenhouse proceeded to walk down the street, past police officers, with his long gun slung over his shoulder while bystanders screamed that he had just shot three people. He returned home, and after a good night’s sleep, was charged with two counts of homicide.

In 1965, Viola Liuzzo, a 40-year-old white Detroit housewife and Rev. James Reeb, a 38-year-old Universalist minister from Washington, D.C., heeded Rev. Dr. Marin Luther King, Jr.’s national call to come to Selma, Alabama to join the movement to secure a voting rights bill for blacks. They were brutally murdered by members of the Klu Klux Klan while participating in peaceful protests. Armed right-wing white militia members have also infiltrated today’s demonstrations.

There is growing, national multiracial energy for a more just society, despite President Trump’s continuing campaign to stoke racial division and enmity with his recent focus on law and order as a way of recovering from his sagging poll numbers. Over 70 percent of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, and Trump’s resort to vile racial tropes is an act of desperation.

In addition, Biden is leading Trump in ten of the battleground states that will determine the election. Nonetheless, Trump is closing in statewide polls, getting inside the margin of error in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida. He is also gaining ground in the national polls, reducing his gap to single digits.

Biden’s positive standing in the national and state-level surveys has been buttressed by his selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, but that historic choice has not increased enthusiasm among Democratic voters, especially the young progressives marching in the streets. He and Harris have much work to do if they are to turn their lead into a victory.

Trump’s has pushed all of his election chips to the middle of the table and is banking on his 40-45 percent base, along with a sliver of suburban white women, Asian, and Latinx Americans and coupled with a depressed turnout of Blacks, especially males, to push him over the top in those battleground states and send him back to the White House.

But Trump’s manipulation of institutions and processes necessary for voting – the U.S. Post Office, Voter ID, precinct locations, the reduction of time limits on early voting sites, purging voter rolls, barriers to the restoration of felons’ voting rights – are designed to give him an electoral edge.

He has been successful in throwing up distractions to his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and replacing the fear of dying from the coronavirus with the fear of being killed by the minority hordes storming into suburbia. Trump and his campaign operatives are convinced he can recreate the 1968 racial enmity of Governor George Wallace and Richard Nixon when they were running for the U.S. presidency.

As of now, Biden appears to be winning the racial argument with his call for unity, but he still has some reaching out to do. He needs to overcome the remaining wariness of some LGBTQ groups for his past stances on gay rights; actively engage progressives, particularly those from generation Z, who make up the core of the protestors; and shore up his support among low-income and blue-collar African American males who were and continue to be victimized by his infamous 1994 Crime Bill and received the bulk of mass incarceration sentences.

Most importantly, Kamala Harris needs to show that she can appeal to the mass Black community by generating Obama-like enthusiasm, registration, and turnout numbers. Short of accomplishing this goal, the Biden-Harris ticket faces a steep uphill battle.