The most American Americans

I've had one thought that keeps repeating in my mind over the last few weeks: African-Americans are the most American Americans. When they voted in massive numbers this past election, they stood up for the world's first, oldest constitutional democracy - America, the country that treated them as less than human, as property, for most of its existence. African-Americans have quite literally saved America from autocracy, they saved America from itself. When Obama was elected president, I thought that America had crossed a monumental racial and political barrier erected by its history. Not that Americans had crashed through that barrier, or eliminated it, but that this barrier had been decisively crossed. trump's presidency I think proved me more right than wrong, because it showed that there was a racially motivated constituency that could resist the tide forcefully. They had pushed back forcefully against Obama throughout his term in office. They had tried to politically render his administration impotent, and was quite successful. This constituency was and remains a minority of the country, but unfortunately the American political system is skewed enough at this point to elect a minority to power, hence trump's victory. Biden's election I believe is more significant than Obama's from this perspective: It's one thing for huge numbers of African American folks to become politically activated to elect one of their own, which was groundbreaking. It's even more earth-shattering for huge numbers of African-Americans to come together in massive numbers to elect a white man for president to represent them. What I mean is that, as the first African-American POTUS, Obama had to be careful not to seem like he was favouring African Americans with his policies and treatment. He made extra efforts to act like the President of all Americans. Biden has no such worries. Biden unquestionably owes his election to African-Americans. From Rep. James Clyburn who literally, almost single-handedly, pulled Biden's campaign out of the gutter during the primaries, to the voters of Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia who handed him the presidency and eventually the Democrats control of the Senate. Biden's choice of Kamala Harris I believe was an acknowledgement of how key the African-American constituency was going to be for his success. But in my mind the political tide had really turned during the massive nationwide BLM protests during the summer set off by the murder of George Floyd. The manifestations were multi-racial in nature with almost as many white faces as black. And watching the protests grow over the course of months, and how utterly tone deaf and inept trump's response to the discord was, I felt a palpable sense of how the zeitgeist had shifted. It was during this summer of protests that I felt sure for the first time (as sure as anyone can be about such things) that trump was going to lose the election. It wasn't the pandemic that turned the tide, it wasn't the economy in shambles, or the lies and the incompetence of the administration, it was the widespread public sense that America was systemically racist, that the police unjustly targeted and victimized African-Americans, and that this mattered to all Americans and they wanted it to change. I'd always thought that pocketbook issues determined elections, the economy, jobs and taxes, but for the first time it seemed to be a pervasive sense of social injustice that was going to determine this one. Americans could not longer stomach seeing themselves and their nation (and their political representatives) in the indecent and inhuman image of an African American man being suffocated to death under the knee of a white cop. The image was just too real, too resonant, and too personal, no matter what your skin colour may be.