After the election

Again, millions of non-white people crouched over their mobile screens. We crouched just as earlier generations of Black people crouched below window panes, wondering if they managed to outrun conservative white mobs. Mobs that the popular media, then as now, apologised for and referred to as aggrieved.

Again, we peered into our screens as if they were a rural town’s night, watching for early signs of trouble. To see if the preferred candidate of the vehicle-ramming white nationalists had won or if we had been snatched to safety by the other one. The one who shoos us away from window-breaking and tells us to behave ourselves until we can be escorted peaceably back to the promised land of police reforms.

Millions of us waited on election results to see if we had, in fact, yet again, eked out a survival, jumping from the fire back into the frying pan. And now that it is over, now that Joe Biden has won, we are asked to unify with the shouting men and women still holding signs that the movement for our right to life is a communist conspiracy.

Pundits continue to peddle the same false equivalency: there is fear on both sides. But our fears, like everything else, are unequal. Racists do not fear being dragged off in cattle cars. They do not fear having their wombs stolen or being snatched off a street in broad daylight for saying their lives matter. They fear that the three strokes in the “E” on Biden campaign posters represent communism, or whatever the latest QAnon YouTube influencer suggests that they fear.

Notwithstanding what the racist-coddling press would have us believe, their “economic anxieties” are no greater than the countless Sandra Blands collapsing under the harness of traffic and court appeal fees, starvation wages and healthcare costs that their conservative candidates work tirelessly to unload onto poor peoples’ backs.

Minutes after projecting Biden’s win, presenters on major US news networks waxed poetic about the “genius” of the American system. It is like a ship, one said, that tacks left and tacks right but always moves forward despite the choppy waters. But left and right are not two equal destinations. The state is less like a ship than it is like a rope in a tug of war where one side makes every effort to draw us into concentration camps while the other tries to draw everyone towards universal health care.

After this election, we should not come together. It is not a beautiful thing when the arrestor embraces the arrested. It is not good when the exploited is lured into the belief that they are one with their exploiters. That is the triumph of oppression – not of peace.

There is no virtue in waiting to see if the next election – in a colony that has proven its willingness to elect a white nationalist administration in the 21st century – will carry us off one more time onto the brink, huddled over mobile phones, wondering which liberal institutions might withstand the darker machinations of the next white nationalist autocrat’s heart.

Excerpted: ‘After this election, we should not come together’

Aljazeera.com