Diaspora fears Trump return could spell trouble for minorities
Published:Sunday | November 1, 2020 | 12:15 AMErica Virtue - Senior Gleaner Writer
Some Jamaicans in the United States are expressing fear that a win for President Donald Trump in Tuesday’s election will present greater dangers for minorities and further erode gains made over the years.
Most are hanging on to hopes for a Joe Biden victory, with polls suggesting that the former vice president could take control of the Oval Office come January. A Biden victory with Kamala Harris as vice president, they say, would restore America’s standing around the world, which has taken a hit in the Trump era dominated by vitriolic tweets and discarded diplomatic norms.
In a Gleaner Editors’ Forum with diaspora members last week, there was overwhelming support for a Democratic Party win and equal worry for a re-election of the Republican president.
His handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed the lives of more than 230,000 Americans; the economy; racism; and immigration were major concerns.
“Trump’s campaign strategy has been racist. He has been trying to appeal to suburban women, making the case that black and brown people are going to be coming into the suburbs to reduce their real estate values and disturb their well-being,” Basil Wilson, retired professor of criminal justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the forum.
“What Biden-Harris is attempting to do is to bring the country together to make certain that we can, in fact, achieve the American dream,” he argued, adding that the Trump campaign “has thrown more and more conflict in the way of minorities that a Biden win will see him forced to put a fragmented America back together again like the proverbial Humpty Dumpty”.
The retired professor said that excesses in the justice system call for reform of police departments, which would see them learn to understand communities to reduce the level of violence being witnessed.
“There is a tremendous amount of confusion in the US regarding crime. From 1990-2014, the United States had the deepest reduction in violent crime in the history of the country. There was a slight uptick in 2015 and 2016, but we have in fact experienced the highest reduction in violent crime, including murders, manslaughter, rape, felonious assaults, etc.,” Wilson said.
Reduction efforts, he said, were in place before Trump’s ascendency to president in January 2017, but he has “created an impression of carnage being created, which is vicious propaganda”.
Immigration attorney Dahlia Walker-Huntington said America’s history has been tainted with how it has treated people of colour, going back to the days of slavery.
“We have evolved from that and have tried to work with laws that were passed in the 1960s and 70s and what we have seen since Donald Trump came in is a fuelling of white supremacy that has brought about in people a kind of licence to be prejudiced and hateful,” she said.
Trump’s apparent penchant for hate and vitriol has driven numerous cases of white people calling the police on minorities, including children, for trivial reasons such as operating a lemonade stand by the roadside.
Racial profiling, she observed, had also increased, including of young black men driving “nice cars”, “because the leader gave them licence to be this way”.
Said Walker-Huntington: “The leader sets the standard for which these people feel licensed to come out into the open and march out with torches and chants that ‘you will not replace us’, and to tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by, and say there are fine people on both sides gave rise to the climate that has been created,” she stated, referring to white supremacy groups.
She said that it was a shame that in 2020, minorities were fighting the same battles they fought in the 1950s and 60s.
While the panellists said violence resulting in the deaths of young black men at the hand of law enforcement officials and Trump insults of minorities will motivate voters to cast ballots for both candidates in the presidential race, they said America was still of place of good.
Irwine Clare, head of the Caribbean Immigration Service in New York, said the diaspora was more attuned to issues affecting them.
“We have a vested interest in the elections and the fact that we have a sister from St Ann on this ticket, we are looking forward to moving the dial,” he said, noting Harris’ Jamaican roots. “These elections are just as important as the past four years. It shows what we must change.”
Added Clare: “The president is at a place where he feels he is untouchable. So yes, race relations is a major issue created by the president in a negative way.”
Ainsworth Powell, a nurse and a former policeman in Jamaica, cautioned that Biden would not make things better and was only “in it for himself”.
He cited discredited materials on Trump’s ally Rudi Giuliani’s website about Biden’s late son, Hunter, as evidence of corruption, a point dismissed as falsehoods by the majority of the panellists.
Up to Saturday, more than 90 million Americans had already cast ballots in the high-stakes election. Texas, a state won by Trump in 2016, has already recorded more ballots in early voting than cast in the election four years ago.