Well, it has happened again. After months of being subjected to the spectacles of Donald Trump’s traveling circus — I mean, presidential campaign — complete with race-baiting, immigrant-bashing, music-swaying, retribution-threatening, woman-taunting and debate-dodging by former president Trump, as well as a mixture of “they’re all the same” dare-the-oppressor-to-win bravado and “we must stop Trump” Vote-Blue-No-Matter-Who desperation from Pan Afrikan activists, Black Nationalists, mainstream political operatives and the grassroots Afrikan American community, Trump once again has ascended to the most powerful political post on earth and control of the planet’s deadliest arsenal.

This time, not only did Trump win the much-maligned Electoral College, he also won the popular vote, having somehow persuaded the majority of the American electorate that he was the best choice to lead the United States for the next four years despite what could only be described as a “shit show” of a campaign in which he embarrassingly lost a debate to vice president Kamala Harris and then refused any more debate offers, held numerous rallies in which he rambled almost incoherently and swayed to music almost absent-mindedly, and finished off with the infamous event at New York City’s Madison Square Garden complete with references to a “floating island of garbage” called Puerto Rico and authoritarian speeches by Stephen Miller and more of his right-wing acolytes. People watched the November 5 election returns with a mixture of disbelief and horror, then ran to whatever sources of comfort they could find on social media and personal telephone trees to help pull them from the deep depression and sense of resignation they had plunged into because of the sudden and shocking knowledge that their Deadly Enemy, Oppressor and Tormentor, who they thought had been vanquished four years ago, was back with a vengeance.

The blame game has already started in an attempt to hold someone responsible for Harris’s shocking defeat to an old, brash, proudly ignorant man who promised to deport a record number of immigrants, finish his “Wall” which he never completed in his first term, implement “concepts of a plan” for health care which he also failed to complete in his first term, grant immunity to police for their “stop and frisk” misdeeds, support even more atrocities against Palestinians by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/us-israel-trump-phone-call-netanyahu-gaza-cease-fire-2024-election.html; https://nypost.com/2024/10/18/us-news/trump-accuses-biden-of-trying-to-hold-back-netanyahu-after-israels-killing-of-hamas-leader-yahya-sinwar/), coddle dictators from Mohammed Bin Salman to Vladimir Putin, re-establish “drill baby drill” oil exploration in protected areas and more as he establishes himself as “dictator for a day” (certainly no one expects his “dictatorship” to end after only one day).

As the reports of the polling results poured in, analysts discussed the districts that had voted to support Trump, as well as those where Harris won but seriously underperformed compared to Biden in 2020. In the run-up to the election, speculation had abounded that Black men were supporting Trump in large numbers, but this turned out not to be the case at all. Black men and Black women had come out heavily in support of Harris’s candidacy (though in some areas, not as strongly as expected). Instead, support for Trump seemed to come from two rather surprising (to me) communities. I’m looking at you, Latino community. I’m looking at you, White women.

Maybe I didn’t understand you as well as I might have thought. Maybe Great White Father’s oppression isn’t such a big deal after all.

According to demographic information that was coming in with the voting numbers during the night, in several districts, especially in the critical “battleground” states of Georgia and Pennsylvania, Harris was not receiving the support that Biden had four years earlier. Many of these turned out to be heavily-Latino districts, and the dwindling support in these communities ultimately made the difference between Harris overcoming or not overcoming areas where Trump was expected to receive heavy support, a difference that might have at least swung Pennsylvania to her and won her the White House. But that support did not come, at least not as strongly as expected, and in the wee hours of the night Trump took the Keystone State, essentially sealing his victory. These districts were known for their heavy Latino (the news reports used the term “Hispanic”) populations, and the support Trump seemed to receive from them came despite his regularly denigrating Mexican “illegals”, threatening the largest deportation action in US history, spreading lies about Haitian immigrants “eating the dogs … eating the cats” of the citizens in Springfield, Ohio and having a guest at his Madison Square Garden rally refer to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”. If this support was because these communities were “legal immigrants” and Trump’s vitriol had been directed at “illegals”, then they forget the occasional references to broader deportation plans as well as the danger that Trump (or Vance) would target them later, as was explained by the words of German theologian Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemoller, best known for this 1946 poem written after the Nazis’ genocide against the Jews, Muslims, Roma, Afrikans, the disabled, homosexuals and others during World War II:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller

Even more surprising, in Florida, where an abortion-rights measure won a majority of votes (but short of the 60% plurality required to pass it), White women in Florida — for whom the measure was written in support of their right to bodily autonomy and life-saving medical care — voted in support of the Florida Senator (Rick Scott) and the presidential candidate (Trump) who had campaigned on defeating that same measure and banning the right to reproductive choice across the country. If this trend held in other areas of the country, it indicates that the “gender gap” which would have favored Harris was offset by a “race gap” in favor of Trump. (https://newrepublic.com/post/188061/white-women-harris-trump-exit-polls)

Thus, the community that Trump had demonized since the day in 2015 when he rode down a New York escalator and declared that Mexicans were “bringing drugs … bringing crime” appeared to throw much of their support behind this same man in district after district, and White women were identified as having voted for the accused serial adulterer and misogynist Trump almost as heavily as White men. This would strongly imply that, despite the segments of the general American community that have rejected racism, there are still considerable numbers of citizens who, quite frankly, have not.

And for those looking for an excuse to pin responsibility on third-party candidates and their supporters (as has often happened in the past), those voters were at least voting their conscience, supporting candidates such as Dr. Cornel West (independent candidacy), Dr. Jill Stein (Green Party USA) and Claudia De La Cruz (Party for Socialism and Liberation) because of specific platform planks favoring reparations for the descendants of Afrikans who were enslaved in the United States and support for Palestinian freedom, defense, independence and recognition by the international community. They were not voting for these candidates because “he’s just like me” as one White woman was reportedly quoted as saying about the man who is most assuredly nothing like her, or because of “his policies” as some members of communities of color seemed to think of the man who shows his racial animus on a regular basis, and will likely prove that animus as he rolls out more brazen and more draconian policies during this next term, from deportations to increased police powers to “anti-woke” employee pogroms. And it was not third-party votes that tipped the balance in the contest between Harris and Trump. No, that falls squarely on those who were playing the binary “him or her” game and came down on the side of “him” even when it seemed contrary to their own personal or community interests.

The election of Trump to a second term despite his earlier felony convictions, his attempt to incite a violent overthrow of the US government on January 6, 2021 and the consistent race-baiting and xenophobic tactics of his campaign rallies told me one thing: America is still a deeply racist (and sexist) society. A White male who was impeached twice, convicted several times, indicted dozens of times, declared bankruptcy seven times despite having inherited millions from a father who himself was charged with acts of racism, sued scores of times, and who has often bragged about his ability to escape the consequences of his lawlessness was seen as a better representative of the people of the United States than a veteran prosecutor, district attorney, Senator and vice president who happened to be a woman of color. Harris’s campaign, despite the recriminations of some, was a far more focused and disciplined effort than that of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Harris had enlisted the support of Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Republican former Senator Liz Cheney, former president Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama, as well as former Trump Cabinet members John Kelly and Mike Milley who attested to Trump’s unfitness for the presidency. None of that mattered, as Harris failed to even secure a sufficient chunk of the popular vote from two groups for whom she had specifically campaigned on behalf of reproductive rights and immigrant rights. Both of those groups in large measure seemed to turn on her, siding with their Great White Father when it counted. (Perhaps that should not be so surprising considering the parade of prominent Afrikan American athletes and entertainers who had marched to Trump Tower in New York after his 2016 victory to meet him and, essentially, kiss his ring.)

Now, having cast about for appropriate targets to whom to apportion blame, it’s time for the hand-wringing. How did we wind up in this situation again? What can we expect from Trump and his plans to implement his Agenda 47 and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025? How can we protect ourselves in the future from the abuses of a president who had already shown us what we once thought was the worst he could do to us, the country and the world? And what could we now expect from the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the January 6 insurrectionists and other, less well known right-wing groups now emboldened by their hero being given one more bite at the apple?

We have found ourselves in this situation before. So often, in fact, that we should not have been taken by surprise this time. It happened when George W. Bush won in 2000, when Ronald Reagan won in 1980 and when Richard Nixon took the White House in 1968. Each time, activists in the Afrikan American community reacted as though hit in the head with a hammer. This same tired act plays out every time a reactionary right-wing politician seizes control of the levers of power and we as a community suddenly feel cornered.

On November 10, 2016, I wrote a commentary, “So … Are You Ready To Organize NOW?” in which I challenged our community to finally make good on our collective bravado. Back then, I had written:

My friends had dared America to elect another hard-right president with ties (in Trump’s case) to White nationalist right-wing groups, predicting that such a result would shake us out of the complacency we had willfully enjoyed (failing to pressure the most recent administration to deliver on the great promise of the last eight years) during the presidency of Barack Obama.

When a similar situation had arisen in 2000, many of our activists failed to rise up and organize in opposition to the Bush-Cheney agenda.  Whites did more on a national scale with Occupy Wall Street and the anti-WTO protests that had been named the “Battle in Seattle” than we did to mobilize our community.  Of late, only Black Lives Matter (launched during the Obama Administration as a result of police–and police wannabe–killings of Black youth such as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown) has reached the level of serious grassroots organizing among the Black community, and many of us have questioned BLM’s orientation toward gay rights and its alleged connections with George Soros.  Still, those critics have yet to birth a serious national Black movement of their own. …

Will the ascendancy of Trump to the single most powerful political position on the planet serve as the spark for us to finally organize ourselves?  Or will many of our people once again retreat to the shadows, afraid of the repercussions of opposition to the latest Head of the Oppressor State?

Well, we got our answer in large measure after that. Again, many of us hid under our beds, waiting for the storm to pass. Then, when Joe Biden won in 2020, we relaxed, came out, enjoyed the sun, and went to a blissful sleep. When we did gather, ostensibly to discuss our situation in America and plan our response on behalf of our people, the results were mixed. In April 2023, there was the State of the Black World Conference at the Baltimore Convention Center, where a line of activists spoke about Black people coming together, but no concrete action was taken at that Conference to make it so. Since that time, at least four planned Pan African Conferences, in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ghana and Togo, were announced, scheduled, and suddenly canceled. The Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition (MPACC) was started in January 2022 to encourage us to finally take concrete steps to at least encourage Pan Afrikan organizations to begin the process of working together and to explore possibilities of expanding that effort outside the state of Maryland. But even that effort has not been embraced by many of our activists. Then, as the presidential election came closer and closer, some of us became nervous and started proposing broader meetings with the idea of promoting unity. But before that effort could get rolling, we saw the “American carnage” of the November 5 presidential election, and there have been numerous fearful posts on social media about what to expect next.

We should have gotten used to this by now. In fact, we should have prepared ourselves for just this eventuality decades ago. It’s almost as though the Nixon administration and COINTELPRO taught us nothing. As organizers and activists, we should have been organizing our communities and working with each other cooperatively long ago. We gather at conferences and talk about coming together and organizing, but we don’t just go ahead and do it. I would ask, as I did in November 2016, if after the fear and loathing that this latest electoral insult has administered, we are ready to organize ourselves at last. But I think I will save my breath on that particular question, and just wait for the wailing and gnashing of teeth to subside.