Well, we didn’t have to worry about social distancing at the Trump rally in Tulsa after all. Even Asa Hutchinson, Republican governor of Arkansas, wryly told Judy Woodruff on the “PBS NewsHour” Monday that those Arkansans who crossed the state line to attend the event at the Bank of Oklahoma Center and had seats on the main floor had better get tested on their return. Those, however, who were spread out in the vast blue expanse of the upper tiers? They’re good, Hutchinson said.
Poor President Donald J. Trump: Trolled not only by Gen Z falsely inflating ticket requests for the event but also by a member of his own party. It’s been that kind of spring for him — and us. In the backlash to the narrative in which whites are headed to becoming a majority minority in America, which ushered in Trump’s Make America White, uh, Great Again, there’s been a sea change, a backlash to the backlash. We’re seeing it in the way the Black Lives Matter movement has been embraced by a multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational coalition, the way the old white icons, not merely Confederate statues but those of Presidents George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, have been toppled, the way corporations, religious organizations and sports teams have abandoned the old clichés.
Not all of white culture is bad, a co-worker reminded me plaintively. And indeed there would be no union without Washington, no preservation of the union without Grant and no expansion of it on the global stage without Teddy Roosevelt. But slavery, police brutality against blacks, the apartheid of the native peoples on the reservations, the Japanese-American internment camps in World War II, the demonization of Muslims, the caging of immigrant children on the Southern border, the denial of rights to the LGBTQ community, the degradation of women — these are debts that have not been paid or fully addressed, until now.
But the debts are still outstanding as the backlash to the backlash to the backlash continues. I’m not just talking about the police shootings of African-Americans or a noose being found in the garage of the only African-American Nascar driver, Bubba Wallace. I’m talking about the disgraceful number of hours that blacks have to wait to vote in places like Georgia due to tech foul-ups.
With all the police brutality and violence against blacks it’s easy to forget that there are few more insidious forms of racism than making it difficult for people to vote. (According to the “PBS NewsHour,” there is only one polling station in Jefferson County, Kentucky, which has the largest number of blacks in that state, 616,000.) What is Trump’s tirade against mail-in ballots but another form of voter suppression?
But if seeing long lines of people waiting hours to vote in Georgia filled me with sadness, it also gave me hope. They knew what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached and what former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams espouses: Voting is enfranchisement. Voting is powerful.
Voting can transform the world. Indeed it is one of the few mass activities that ever has.