Political Conclusions We Can Draw About Black America with Dr. Christopher Towler (Part 2)

Ethnicity and Politics. And we are talking about the data of black voters. And I know the election is over, but there's still a lot that we can learn and are learning right now from black voters. And of course doctor Taller is helping us sift through his data. But before we go any further, it's time to be aba, become a better ally Baba and today's Baba comes from the Black Information Network. This ain't Amazon, It's the Black Nile.

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So again, check them out. It's black Nile, all right. So well, you know, the two of you obviously been talking about drawing some meaningful conclusions from the data, really and setting the record straight, because that obviously is very important. As we kind of get our bearings as a people.

As we get our bearings, many of us vote Democrats, so as we get our bearings relative to that party, and I feel like we might have stopped you a little short there, So any last words there you want to pick up.

older generations. And I think it again, it comes back to this connection to history, connection to generational struggle, especially the Civil Rights movement, where younger people now, right, people who have grandparents or maybe great grandparents that lived during the Civil Rights era might not be previewed to some of the conversations that we were and our parents were growing up, where we were hearing direct stories from relatives who live through it, if not our parents, right, And

so building that connection is a bit different because now people are hearing these stories second third hand, if at all. And we already know the push to get rid of black history, to remove these stories from the textbooks and from our education altogether, all in the sense of trying to destroy this solidarity that the black community has had

for generations. Right since really the Civil Rights movement, in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, there's been this sense that the Democrats are the party for civil rights, the party for the black community,

and that seems to be waning a little bit. That's not to say that there's a lot more people, as we talked about, voting for Republicans, but there are fewer young black people that st only identify with Democrats or strongly have a liberal ideology, and that can become a threat to black solidarity in the future if the party politics do not take this into consideration and find a way to speak to these young people in ways that still brings them home and still connects them to their

history and to the rest of their community.

this case, Harris or the Republican candidate Trump. Where we did see change is in the raw number of people that actually came out to vote, and there were significantly less Black people voting in twenty twenty four than in twenty twenty and for the first time in a long time, we actually had fewer people cast a ballot than the year before. Right every year since pretty much the Obama years, the number of Black people voting had gone up and

up and up. This year it fell off. And in some states such as Georgia, we know that black voters are the only voter where turnout only group were turnout dropped, where every other group turnout rose. And what that does is that creates sort of this situation where the gap between the amount of black voters and other voters grows wider in a case like twenty twenty four, making it less likely that black voters can affect an election. And in a state like Georgia, where almost thirty percent of

voters are black. It's very, very important that everyone gets out and vote so that they can have the same effect on the election in Georgia as they did in

twenty twenty when Georgia went blue for Biden. In twenty twenty four, with less voters actually turning out to vote, even though the same are more voted for the Democratic candidate, the state turned red because you had far more of other types of voters, predominantly white voters coming out to vote, shifting the ballots the other direction right, And we see this taking place across the country. We don't have raw

turnout for every state yet. That typically comes from the Secretary of State's offices across the country, but in places like Georgia where we do have those numbers, it's very clear what's taking place, and that getting people out to vote was the issue this year, not trying to figure out who they were going to vote for.

the head our ancestors, our parents. I use my mother as an example because when she turned of age, it was not yet legal for black women to vote in this country. So this is not three hundred years ago. This is not my great great grandmother. This is my mother with what seemed like a very clear and obvious threat to us more than everyone else. How are people so comfortable not participating this time, like this idea that I'm just not going to vote this time, I'm just

not going to participate. How do you think we got there?

in many ways by the Civil Rights Act. So since then, racism has become far more covert and harder to just point out the record, Right, there's absolutely still clear racism and bigotry out there, but the systems have become far more secretive in the way that they perpetuate racism, where now it's a about, Okay, did I get the job because I was black, or because my name sounded ethnic, or was it something else that happened in the job interview? Right?

Did my house get evaluated differently when it came to the appraisal because of the artwork that I had in that might be African American? Or was it because of

something actually having to do with the house. And these are the types of questions that we have to ask today when trying to figure out where racism and discrimination still lives in society, and so it makes it harder to point them out, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, especially for people, as we said, these younger generations of black people who haven't grown up either experiencing segregation or a lot of direct

over racism themselves, or haven't talked with elders who experienced this, and so they are sort of one step removed from our history of extreme overt segregation and racism, something that has dictated the way our institutions work in this country today. But it's much harder to see. You can't just point it out and say, oh that you can't go in there because you're black. Right, you can go in there, but you might get followed around by the security guard.

And if you've never experienced that and you don't know what you're looking for, it might not be as obvious until it's too late, right, until you have that experience where you end up getting arrested, you end up spending some jail time. Right. And if you don't know the statistics, right, about one in three black men in their lives ends up incarcerated at some point, right, the highest rate in

the country. Right. And the United States is already the highest, has the highest rate of incarceration in all world democracies. And so these are issues and problems that still persist, but they're far more difficult to sort of put your finger on it and say, there it is. That's the racism that I'm talking about. That's the institutional oppression that

has always been there but still exists. And so when we see an election like the last one take place, and we have a lot of different messages being put out sometimes on social media, where you only get like a three second clip or a ten second sort of video saying a message, and then you get sixty of those videos in ten minutes, it can be that much more difficult to really decipher what's really going on, what people really stand for, and where you need to stand

when it comes to choosing a political representative or a political party to get behind.

it's that big of a deal. And as we see people the clean version is messing around and finding out, they are realizing that these policies and these agendas that

seek to oppress anyone can very quickly oppress everyone. Ramses and I have a video of the show online that's circulating that's, you know, somewhere close to ten million views, where we discuss having biracial children Hispanic LATINX biracial children who could very well be affected by ice raids and talks of deportation, and how their friends, teachers, you know, their parents, and classmates look at them at school has been different since this device of rhetoric has become the

norm when we're talking about DEI or deportations or anti LGBTQ initiatives. It always startled me that even any Black people could kind of step back and remove themselves from fighting to defend other marginalized communities, something that I thought would have been something that brought us together more than

separated us. From your purview, What has that looked like post election, as we're seeing people realize, oh, that thing that I thought would only affect other people is now knocking on my front door.

cool quickly. I will say this, though, there are and always have been a segment of the Black community that is just conservative. Right. These are people who are Republicans who are going to vote Republican no matter what, many of whom write don the MAGA hat with pride. They're not being affected by these changes, right. They're looking at what's going on and they're satisfying this is something that they really wanted to see happen. They understood these consequences.

And so there's always going to be certain Black people who side with the oppressor, if you will, and who are willing to give up sort of this solidarity or this idea of what's best for their community, for these individual Republican notions of what's going to help them get ahead, right, and what's going to benefit them in their personal lives and those beliefs. But there's absolutely this sentiment right that, oh,

things are happening really quickly. My worry though, is that there's far more Black people who are like, yeah, that's fine, and you know that we're now in the find out phase and we're just going to watch everybody find out, and we're just going to sit back and people are going to have to deal with this, and to me, I understand that sentiment, I really do, but it's a very dangerous sentiment to place ourselves in because we as

black people then lose our political voice. And if voting becomes more difficult, if there are elections in the future where our vote could change things and doesn't, it's going to make it that much harder for us to assert ourselves and re enter the political sphere in a way where we can really make a difference and continue to have the impact on elections that we have had, say in twenty twenty in local and state elections in twenty

twenty four and going forward. And so that's really the worry for me, right is that black people are going to take a step back and everyone's going to be thinking everyone else is going to pick up the slack, but it's not going to be enough. And then when it comes time for elections to be had in people to decisions to be made, black people are going to suffer, right because we're going to have to deal with the consequences of political actions.

want to focus to make voting more difficult. What is that going to look like for us moving forward?

vote that prove citizenship going to change things? And what it's going to do is it's going to affect things at the margins, and you're going to have active voters, people who vote and are engaged in politics, figure out how to get this ID, figure out how to vote right,

they're going to find the resources to do it. But there's going to be those people on the margins who maybe don't vote all the time, or young people who are thinking about voting but maybe are undecided or are going to be affected by this type of legislation, and it's going to cause them not to vote. Right there, that extra step of finding the right ID or figuring out how to get proof of citizenship or figuring out where to go to get extra documentation just to register

to vote. Right if this law ends up being upheld, which we'll see what happens, because states typically have the final say when it comes to voting, especially since the

gutting of the Voting Rights Act in twenty thirteen. But if Trump's executive order ends up being upheld anyway in the courts before twenty twenty six or twenty twenty eight, it's going to affect things at the margins, and it's going to make it even harder for Democrats or anyone else trying to mobilize black voters to get those people

at the margins off their couch into the polls. And that's always been the debate behind voter ID laws, Right, well, is it going is it really a barrier to certain people? And yes, it is right. There's always going to be disproportionate disadvantages in communities such as the black community, where there are less resources, there's less information, there's less political knowledge because of the historical alienation and removal from politics that the community is faced for generations.

so does our community. Sure.

you know, all hope is not lost. The narratives that had been successfully chronicled by those on the right now you know, there's a little there on shaky ground, and some were entirely unfounded. Altogether. There's still work to do, of course, but again, a conversation like this certainly does help at least those of us that are in this space,

and we have to continue having these conversations. So with that, I want to make sure that I thank you on behalf of all of us here at Civic Cipher before we let you go do his favorite shout out any sort of social media websites, anything like that where people can go get more information value.

Black b l K Prof Prof CCT. And again, I just want to say thank you, And just just to highlight once more, this election was a punch in the gut to the black community, you know, seeing the potential for a first black female president sort of go up in flames. But this is nothing new, right, Tough times are nothing new for black people in America. And as we've learned, history can tell us sometimes the biggest steps

forward come from the darkest times. And so I'm really hoping that, you know, we see immense change come from this dark era, change that not only brings hope to the Black community, but changes the country for good as well.