There’s a white lady on Twitter with a very long thread about the 2016 election that I am absolutely not going to read, because all I needed was this:
What Black Americans do significantly affects the United States. Indeed, it's her own, very famous, thesis that this is insignificantly appreciated. In 2016, many Black Americans didn't vote at all. Had they done so, Trump wouldn't be in power. pic.twitter.com/csVZh8A4Oe
— ClaireBerlinski.substack.com (@ClaireBerlinski) August 31, 2020
In case she deletes the tweet, because sometimes people do that online when they’re getting dragged, Claire Berlinski said Donald Trump would not be President if Black people who voted for Obama had turned out in the same numbers for Hillary. I see variations of that all the time, trying to shift the blame for Trump onto Black people instead of examining it where it lay, with racist whites. White people blaming us for the election are embarrassed to be associated with them, so they deflect, but Black people don’t exist in large enough numbers to have the kind of impact these Embarrassed Whites want to imagine. Very very simple math proves this, so let’s just get it out of the way up top.
In 2016, 11% of Black people who had voted for Obama didn’t vote at all. 12% of white people who had voted for Obama voted for Trump. The US population is 63.4% white and 13.4% Black. There are almost five times as many white people in this country as Black people, so let’s apply that to the graph she posted.
For simpler math, say the top bar shows 100 white people, which would mean the bottom bar would show 21 Black people, because that’s our ratio in this country. You see where this is going already I’m sure. This means 12 white Obama voters voted for Trump while TWO Black Obama voters didn’t vote at all. Embarrassed Whites want to shift blame from 12 white people to 2 Black people because it makes them feel better about not addressing politics with their relatives and acquaintances.
That part is factual — the original graph is from an article on the Washington Post. What I’m about to say next is more conjecture based on common knowledge that’s already out there because I don’t have the research background (time, really) to pull the numbers on all of this. Take what you know about gerrymandering, about housing discrimination, and about redlining, and apply that to the numbers. We don’t have a 1 person = 1 vote system. We have an electoral system where 100 people are consolidated into 1 vote based on who the majority of that 100 wanted.
51 people vote A. 49 people vote B. A wins.
51 people vote A. 49 people vote B. A wins again.
10 people vote A. 90 people vote B. B wins.
The votes are 112 to 188, but A wins the whole shebang because A won twice. (That’s how Trump won.) Because of the aforementioned gerrymandering, housing discrimination, and redlining, most of the Black people are sitting in the 90 person block of people who voted for B. Every Black person in America could have voted in 2016, and it would not have had the effect on the election that Embarrassed Whites like to pretend it would have because the US electoral system has consolidated our voting power into tiny blocs cordoned off from the rest of the population.
Harlem is going to vote Democrat. The equivalent of Harlem in Dallas or Birmingham or Memphis is going to vote Democrat. You can convince another few thousand Black people to go vote for your candidate in the Harlems across the country, and it didn’t do anything to tip the balance of the election because Candidate A has still won two contests. It’s only increasing the margin of victory for Candidate B in one result. There aren’t enough Black people in these 95% white voting districts (dotted all across the country in red states with more cows than people) to say, “well if Black people voted we wouldn’t be here.” You’ll have one extra Black vote in Montana for every 20 extra Black votes in Harlem.
Handwringing by Embarrassed Whites over the Black vote has to die. Y’all lost the 2016 election because you didn’t do enough to convince your families and social circles that Trump would destroy the country. You are going to lose the 2020 election for that same reason if you keep worrying about what we are doing over here. Spend less time focusing on Black turnout and more time convincing your communities that they need to go vote. Ours has been taken advantage of, disappointed enough, and blamed so many times that we have honestly earned the right to say “screw this, y’all fix it, I’m tired.”
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