‘White guilt’ shakes up the 2020 election
The killing of George Floyd has prompted a reckoning
with racism not only for Joe Biden, but for a wide swath of white America.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said
people who “don’t think of themselves as racists have kind of had the mask
pulled off.”
By ALEX THOMPSON
06/09/2020
04:30 AM EDT
Updated:
06/09/2020 07:50 AM EDT
Joe Biden
says he, like many white people, was wrong about racism in America.
“I thought
we had made enormous progress when we finally elected an African American
president,” he told voters in a livestreamed “Young Americans Town Hall” last
week. “I thought you could defeat hate, you could kill hate. But the point is,
you can’t.”
Days
earlier Biden said he thinks others are experiencing a similar awakening to
their own willful naiveté. “Ordinary folks who don’t think of themselves as
having a prejudiced bone in their body, don’t think of themselves as
racists," Biden said, "have kind of had the mask pulled off.”
The killing
of George Floyd by a white police officer — and the viral video of the
agonizing 8 minutes and 46 seconds with the officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck —
has prompted a reckoning with racism for not only Biden, but for a wide swath
of white America, according to polls conducted since Floyd’s death and
anecdotal evidence from around the country.
Every
state, including ones with overwhelmingly white populations like Utah and West
Virginia, has seen multiple protests the past two weeks. Books like “White
Fragility” and “How to be an Antiracist” have shot to the top of Amazon and The
New York Times’ bestseller lists. Some African Americans have said they've been
overwhelmed by the number of white friends checking in, with some sending cash.
Corporations
across America, from Amazon to snack-food makers, are declaring “Black Lives
Matter,” something even Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley
flinched at saying in 2016 when he added that “white lives matter. All Lives
Matter.” News Corp’s Lachlan Murdoch emailed Fox News employees last week to
say it’s “essential that we grieve with the Floyd family, closely listen to the
voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that black lives
matter."
Many white
Americans, particularly those with college educations, no longer believe that
Jim Crow-like conditions are a shameful relic left behind in the 1960’s or that
instances of police violence against African Americans are isolated, the result
of rogue bad actors. Those swiftly changing attitudes could reshape the
political landscape heading into November, especially as Biden and President
Donald Trump diverge in their responses to the tumult.
Trump has
stuck with his brand of white identity politics that won him the White House.
While he has condemned the killing of Floyd, he has retweeted people saying
“Floyd was not a good person” and was a “symbol of a broken culture in black
America today.” As part of a larger promise to restore “law and order,” the
president has focused attention on looters and “thugs” that have devastated
some businesses during the unrest. And as many Americans are protesting police
violence, Trump and his campaign have resumed attacks on NFL players who kneel
during the national anthem to protest police brutality, tweeting: “There are
other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag — NO KNEELING!”
In
contrast, Biden has deployed a sort of white identity politics for the people
whose consciences have been shaken — the woke or, perhaps, woke-curious. It is
part of a larger bet since the beginning of his campaign that the country is
recoiling at Trump’s incendiary appeals and that the traditional “law and
order” playbook won’t work in 2020. While Biden has denounced rioting, he has
focused more on police reforms and pledged “an era of action to reverse
systemic racism.”
"There
is action we can take right now to truly start treating the wound and not allow
the wound to just scab over, and I think that that's something all Americans
can get behind." said Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders.
While
Biden’s approach could alienate some white voters — which Hillary Clinton
suggested happened to her in 2016 when she supported Black Lives Matter
activists, as she recounted in her book "What Happened" — there are
signs this year is different.
A Monmouth
poll this month found that 35 percent of white independents and 48 percent of
white Democrats say that race relations will be a “major factor” in their vote
for president. In the same poll, seven of 10 white Americans described racial
discrimination as a “big problem,” a 26-point increase from 2015. Another
survey found the percentage of white people with a favorable impression of
police dropped more than 10 points over the past week, although over 60 percent
still approved of police, suggesting that Trump’s law-and-order message could
still resonate.
“I don’t
know if [Biden’s] consciously appealing to” white people disturbed by police
misconduct, “but I certainly think he’s giving voice to them,” said Cornell
Belcher, a pollster for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “It’s a
shock for so many white Americans that racism and discrimination is still a
thing in this country.”
Several
black politicians, activists and pollsters told POLITICO that it’s been decades
since they’ve seen as many white Americans being so proactive and reflective
about their own prejudices. Similar protests of police violence against black
people in recent years, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to Eric Garner in
New York City, did not attract anywhere near the amount of support from white
people, they say.
“I think
this is our Emmett Till moment,” said Connecticut State Treasurer Shawn Wooden,
the only elected African American treasurer in the country and the only black
statewide elected official in New England, referring to the 1955 lynching of a
14-year-old African American child. “And like that time in Mississippi, which
opened the eyes of many white Americans to the brutality of racism and moved
many white Americans to say, ‘This has to change,’ and helped advance the civil
rights movement and the cause at the time, I believe that that is what’s
happening now.”
At Floyd’s
funeral in Minneapolis last week, the Rev. Al Sharpton observed that “[w]hen I
looked this time and saw marches where, in some cases, young whites outnumbered
the blacks marching, I know that it’s a different time and a different season,”
referencing a verse from Ecclesiastes.
Some white
lawmakers have found themselves reflecting more on race as well. Rep. Jennifer
Wexton, who flipped a suburban district in 2018, attended her first Black Lives
Matter protest last weekend in her Northern Virginia district.
“I think a
lot of us are starting to recognize — a lot of white Americans are starting to
recognize — our privilege, and starting to try to recognize what our black
friends and neighbors are going through every single day in this country,” she
said in an interview. House Democrats also had Bryan Stevenson, author of
"Just Mercy," speak during a "family conversation" on race
Thursday that had many members in tears, according to an official with
knowledge of the call.
The events
of the past few weeks have forced Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to
reckon with race in a personal way again. In 2019, when reporters found his
medical school yearbook page with a picture of a man in blackface, Northam
denied it was him. But asked in an email whether he felt guilty for not
recognizing racial inequities earlier in his life, he said, "Of course — I
think that's true for many white people."
Over the
past year, Northam has made racial justice a focus and this past week he
announced that a 14-foot bronze statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in
Richmond would be taken down.
It’s
unclear how much these expressions of solidarity represent enduring changes of
opinion or temporary virtue signaling during a period of national trauma.
Several of the companies affirming their opposition to racism have also been
criticized for having mostly white leadership or engaging in discriminatory
practices. And declaring "Black Lives Matter" is a lot easier than
supporting specific policies that could disrupt their own lives.
“People
don’t just get woke overnight,” said Angela Lang, executive director of BLOC,
which focuses on organizing the black community in Milwaukee. “Being in
Wisconsin, we are seeing that white liberals can still have blind spots with
racial justice, but everything now is just so obvious that people are digging
more into being anti-racist.”
Belcher,
who also wrote the book "Black Man in the White House," said he’s
cautiously optimistic about white America. “I’m a cynic but I do think there’s
something different this time around,” he said.
“There
seems to be a consciousness in this country about racism and discrimination
right now that’s different from the last two decades and makes it uncomfortable
for white Americans to stay on the sidelines.”
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Recent
polling suggests this could be a unique moment. A CBS News survey found that 52
percent of white voters believe they have a better chance of getting ahead than
black people, a 13-point increase from 2015 and the highest mark ever on the
question since CBS began asking it in 1997. The survey also found 52 percent of
whites now believe there is racial discrimination against blacks by police
compared with just 36 percent in 2016.
And an ABC
News/Ipsos poll this week found that 74 percent believe Floyd’s death is
evidence of systemic racial injustice as opposed to an isolated incident. Just
43 percent believed that in 2014, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll in the
months following the deaths of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown
in Ferguson.
The
reactions to the killing of Floyd are also the culmination of years of activism
and external events that have gradually changed the attitudes of white liberals
going back to 2014. Beginning with protests in places like Ferguson and then in
response to Trump’s racially divisive campaign and presidency, white
progressives and independents had started to become more concerned with race.
In 2019, a
majority of white people favored affirmative action for the first time since
Gallup began asking in 2001. The proportion of Americans who were worried a
“great deal” about race hit an all-time low in 2010 at 13 percent, before
rising to 42 percent by 2017. Pew even found that by 2017, self-identified
white liberals were more likely than African Americans to believe that racial
discrimination was the reason black people were unable to get ahead. That
coincided with the Democratic Party increasingly relying on college-educated
white voters as their support among working class, high school-educated white
voters dropped off.
Many of
Biden’s opponents in the presidential primary tried to appeal to these white
liberals by embracing policies like reparations and decriminalizing the
southern border, positions Biden resisted adopting. That seemed to work in
largely white states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where Biden finished fourth
and fifth, respectively. But it did not appear to resonate with the majority of
African American voters, who overwhelmingly backed Biden.
"He
correctly diagnosed the issue when he announced his candidacy for president and
that is we are in the battle for the soul of the nation, that we have to
rebuild the backbone of this country, and we have to unite America. And he was
made fun of for that,” Symone Sanders said. “Only now, many people are coming
around to the fact that, 'Oh, maybe Joe Biden had something going there.'"
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