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Even If Biden Wins, Have We Really Won?
An elegy for a revolution that never happened
The news could not have come at a worse time. One of my co-workers, a passionate Bernie Sanders supporter and a woman of color, was celebrating her 27th birthday. It was a brief glimmer on an otherwise gloomy day during the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, it was Tuesday. Just moments after she posted images of herself celebrating alone on Twitter, I scrolled down and saw a breaking headline: Bernie Sanders was suspending his campaign. Immediately, my entire timeline knew that this day was a wash before the clock struck noon.
Of course, I knew it was coming. Sanders had received support from 917 delegates compared to Biden’s 1,217. In Florida, a swing state, Biden bested Sanders by 40%. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 2,807 delegates and superdelegates compared to Sanders’ 1,893; it seems that we are back to where we started. But what makes this moment exceptionally macabre is that in the midst of a global pandemic, where the constant sirens ring like death knells in major cities and our current president lies to the public and speaks of mortality as if he’s casually reporting the weather, this was the end of the campaign for a man who stood for Medicare for All. It stuns me into absolute silence if I think too hard about it.
We wanted not just a better future, but an upheaval. This virus has shown us how terrible our safety nets truly are.
I am not looking forward to voting in November. I lost my optimism back in 2016. Hillary Clinton was not my candidate. I winced at the thought of her “superpredator” comment and how her former defense of the 1994 crime bill led to not only her husband garnering the presidency but also the destruction and severance of many Black and Brown people’s lives and their families. But I supported her instead of a White supremacist.
I’m a Black woman whose people have been in this country since before it became the United States of America. I’m as American as anyone can get, and I think about this country in terms of the collective good despite my misgivings, because what was the alternative: Donald J. Trump? When Ohio was called for Trump on Election Night in 2016, I heard a wail in…
