Will African-Americans Turn Out To Help Other Minorities?

If you think about it, Donald Trump hasn’t really come after African-Americans in this campaign. Sure, he’s a bigoted, xenophobic birther who is making a direct appeal to white supremacists. That alone should inspire every black person in the country to get to the polls. But Trump’s most famous ire is reserved for Latinos, Muslims, and, ye Gods, women. Hey, he hasn’t actually said the N-word (on camera… that we know of… so far). Still, you can understand if some black people think Trump would be no worse on racial issues than 90 percent of the presidents we’ve had in this country. Trump would be the most racist President in modern times, but that’s a presumption.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has spoken well about justice reform and equality. But the first President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill hangs around her neck and is clearly creating some drag among millennial African-Americans. Thanks, Bernie. Super-helpful contribution.

And African-Americans are no more capable than any other group of Americans in understanding “IT’S THE COURT, YOU SELF-ABSORBED MILLENNIAL BASTARDS.” Sixty years of progress can be stripped away by one or two Trump appointees — but hey, Hillary Clinton said “super predators” once so, by all means, “vote your conscience.”

Regardless, at the end of the day, Clinton is going to get the vast majority of the African-American vote. Percentage-wise, it’s going to be at Obama levels — maybe more, which is shocking when you think about the historic nature of his candidacy. But will African-Americans turn out at the same levels as we turned out for Obama? It doesn’t look like it.

It seems to me that turnout would be just as high in the African-American community for Clinton as it was for Obama if people are inspired to help their brothers and sisters “of color.” Maybe Trump doesn’t have black people in his cross-hairs the same way he has Mexicans, but why should that matter? An attack on one group simply for the color of their skin, or for their national origin, or for their parents’ national origin, is an attack on all of us people of “difference.” If Trump can’t treat white women with basic respect, imagine what he thinks of black women? There’s simply no excuse for ignoring Trump’s vitriol simply because he’s giving it worse to somebody who doesn’t look exactly like you.

Of course, getting black people to vote requires appealing to different black people differently. We take for granted that white people do not vote as one block. Think about how many times this election season you’ve heard about “working-class whites” versus “college-educated whites” versus “evangelicals,” or “suburban white women,” or tons of other sub-groupings of whiteness. In contrast, it’s hard to get politicians to talk about “minorities” with any nuance: (a) they lump every single minority group into the same boat, which is incredibly dumb, and (b) even when they talk to a specific minority group, they act like all of our lives are the same.

Donald Trump doesn’t know difference between the life experiences of Carlton from The Fresh Prince and Omar from The Wire. I’m not sure the last time I heard Hillary Clinton talk about black people outside of the context of crime or police brutality, but it was probably when she was running for Senate. Gary Johnson most likely can’t name a black person he knows who doesn’t smoke weed. And Jill Stein probably thinks every one of us who won’t lay down our lives to stop a pipeline is an Uncle Tom.

But the only way the white supremacists win is if we let the divisions within minority communities actually divide us. Sure, there are real, important differences in the struggle faced by an Asian-American immigrant living in Sacramento and a black cab driver in Reno. But the white Trump supporter doesn’t see those differences. He doesn’t discriminate. He’s coming for ALL of us. We are all a challenge to his lost sense of cultural dominance. He wants it back. There are women who came to this country in shipping containers to file their way into a better life, but Billy Joe Bob thinks making their lives harder will bring back the coal plant.

Trump is counting on blacks staying home to leave Mexicans to their fate, just as surely as he’s counting on white suburban women to be so afraid of RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM that they’d vote for a beauty-pageant pimp who promises to keep them safe. This game of pitting minorities and other disadvantaged groups against each other has worked for Republicans in the past. And it will work again if we can’t recognize that the bonds that hold us together are stronger than the forces that keep us apart.

If there’s one thing I learned from the gay rights movement, it’s that groups need other groups to stand with them when the time comes. Our Mexican and Muslim friends need us now. Trump is threatening to set their communities on FIRE, let’s not haggle over the firewall.

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Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. When they came for them, let the record show that he was not silent.