Outright hate would seem to win the day, except on the day Wisconsin's votes gave the Biden-Harris team a blue state, I checked Kenosha's vote tally. In the red of Kenosha County, where Trump racked up 44,972 (51%) votes to Biden's 42,191 (48%), Republican representative Samatha Kerkman, attributes Trump's last-minute visit to Kenosha for favorable outcome, favorable for residents concerned about "public safety" ( Kenosha News ). Trump, the representative suggests, showed Kenoshans that "he cared," as they did, about "safety." "Our area was in crisis and he came."
Wow! I recall, or maybe I was imagining things, this same Trump, the man concerned with the "safety" of Kenoshans, openly defending Kyle Rittenhouse, a white supremacist who fatally shot two Kenoshans and seriously injuring another. Law and order rhetoric, however, is reserved for wrapping around the necks of Black Americans.
The narrative doesn't speak of anyone's concern about the safety of Black citizens, after all, the protests happened because a member of the community, a Black man, was shot in the back seven times by Kenosha Police. And when Blacks craft their own narrative around the pursuit of justice, it's smeared in violence of whiteness.
Kenosha County's largest demographics is white, by 87%. Of this number, according to Kenosha News, 75%, aged 25 and older, are "non-college-educated whites." In this seas of red, Biden receives only 34% of the vote to Trump's 60%. Nonetheless, the City of Kenosha went blue. Absentee and early voters are sending the Biden-Harris team to the White House! In Kenosha, Trump received 19,566 votes while 26,158 votes were cast for the Biden-Harris.
The anger and focus on injustice paid off!
But there is still this seas of red to consider.
I'm not suggesting that America further embrace a culture of white supremacy or values of the cold and callous. As journalist and Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonza'lez points out, white women cast more votes for Trump in this 2020 presidential election (54%) than they did in 2016 (52%). More white Americans voted for Trump, 72 million plus, than did in 2016. Is the message from this sea of red that millions of Americans identify with a harden culture dedicated to inflicting cruelty on children of color, on women, on people of color, on the LGBTQ community, on the imprisoned, on the unemployed, on the homeless, on on the uninsured, on the hungry?
No we can't embrace hate. We can't embrace people who are quite comfortable with the suffering, indeed, the death of others. A survival of the fittest mentality isn't a principle of Democracy. Stand with and work with Black and Latinx and Indigenous women. At stake is the fate of Earth, the fate of all humanity.
Again, are we ready?
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