When Barack Obama was still our president, I was one of those people who was so mesmerized by his magical speeches that I dismissed racism as a thing of the past. I thought that my job as a citizen was done simply by voting for the first Black president – twice. I did not pay attention to the foreign bombings he authorized or why he was nicknamed “Deporter in Chief.” The birtherism and racist attacks on Obama by Donald Trump and Republicans provided a convenient distraction for liberals from all things Obama did wrong. I was also oblivious to how the police were militarized under progressive leadership in many cities.
[image_caption]Adnan Ahmed[/image_caption]
Imagine this awful scenario for a moment: Your spouse and child have been kidnapped. The kidnappers present you with two options. Option A is that you get to pick between your spouse and your child. Only one of them gets to live. Option B is you say no and let them both die. This is the situation in which many people who identify as being somewhere on the liberal spectrum finding themselves today – where Option A is Biden and Option B is Trump.
Most people would feel forced to choose option A. I get it. They would look at the choices before them and do what they think is least harmful in the moment. But what if there was a third, less obvious option – an Option C? What if we could zoom out of this situation and say, “Who are these kidnappers? Why have they kidnapped my family and what will stop them from doing this again?” Option C is rejecting the false choices before us, mobilizing our community and rescuing our family. Once we are done with that, we abolish the kidnappers and eliminate the circumstances that allow kidnapping to occur in the first place.
Even if we picked option A, Biden, health care is a human right only if our insurance plan approves it. We can still get evicted in a pandemic. We are still racially profiled, and because we are expendable; we are forced to come to work in unsafe conditions during a pandemic. So, option A guarantees our right to live but only if we can afford to.
In this real-world false-choice scenario, the kidnappers are white supremacy and the capitalist systems that support it. Biden’s being the presumptive Democratic nominee is the biggest giveaway that the Democratic Party is just as invested in upholding white supremacy as the Republican Party, just not in a Klannish way. It is a thinly veiled attempt to court white conservative Americans (“the real Americans”) by giving them a candidate who is Republican enough but is also not Trump. As for the rest of us, the Democratic Party will tell us that they support Black lives and other nice things. They will tell us that we will get our basic human rights – eventually. What they will not tell you explicitly is that they must first allay white anxiety before they will support Black lives.
National uprisings in response to police killings and corporations making record profits in a pandemic as workers get sick all point to the fact that people no longer trust electoral politics and have no reason to. As both Trump and Biden refuse to rise to this moment, these uprisings are our option C. People all over the country are embracing option C because they do not trust our institutions and leaders to look out for us. We are doing so through mutual aid, civil disobedience, protesting and by being street medics. Option C means refusing to choose our oppressor (a white supremacist president or a white supremacy-friendly neoliberal president) and instead choosing to not be oppressed. Option C means not falling for vote-shaming tactics. It means telling the Democratic Party that it does not have power over us, that — election after election — it cannot continue to hold us hostage and that members of the party knew what the odds were when they chose Biden as our savior.
Option C does not necessarily preclude one from voting for Biden. Regardless of whom people vote for or don’t vote for, option C calls out the game for being rigged, and unapologetically states that we will no longer follow rules that prescribe our oppression.
Adnan Ahmed, MBBS, is a community psychiatrist in Minneapolis.
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Donald Trump and the Republicans are grateful for your work on their behalf. They have been spending millions on social media ads convincing people that there is no difference between the parties, and you are doing your part with your (I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here) free contribution to the Trump campaign. You think you have figured out some secret or something and that you have risen above it. The reality is that you are doing exactly what Trump wants. You have played into his hands.
There is this fantasy among many on the left that the Democratic party is controlled by its leadership, that it can manipulate and fix elections. Voters had a choice between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, and they overwhelmingly picked Biden. When you look at African-American – the primary victims of police violence being discussed here – the preference for Biden over Sanders was even more decisive.
If you want a progressive nominee, run a better candidate. Because a guy who is not a Democrat and attacks the Democratic “establishment” is going to alienate those voters.
Dr. Ahmed: Meaning no disrespect, your reasoning is muddy and your argument, at least in its effect, is malignant.
Imagine this awful scenario: your spouse and child have been kidnapped. The kidnappers present you with two options. Option A is that you are given 5 minutes to deliver the ransom (or devise a rescue). Option B is that you are given a week to deliver the ransom (or devise a rescue). Which do you choose?
In the election, there is no Option C. It is binary: either Trump or Biden will be president. If it is Trump, our nation, and likely our civilization, is done. If it is Biden, we’re not quite there. Maybe just about, but not quite.
Option C, working against concentrated power, and for American values of freedom and opportunity for all, is not an option, it’s a necessity. It’s a necessity before November 3, and a necessity after November 3. But on November 3, there is only Option B, and if you don’t choose it, well, I guess you didn’t care that much for your demanding wife or snotty kid anyway.
I was thinking about this piece and went back and re-read it, and it was even worse the second time.
I did not go out and protest myself due to my concerns about Covid, but a number of my Biden-supporting friends did. And as I pointed out in my initial comment, African-Americans overwhelmingly chose Biden over Sanders. Biden is the nominee literally because African-Americans chose him.
I find it offensive that you are trying to reframe the anger and frustration displayed about police violence as a re-hash of the Democratic primaries. The African-Americans out on the streets aren’t protesting Biden – most of them voted for Biden. You are making false claims in an attempt to co-opt a movement to fit your petty agenda.
The odd thing is that Bernie Sanders is enthusiastically supporting Biden. The two of them came up with a set of joint policy proposals. Noam Chomsky is supporting Biden. Angela Davis is supporting Biden. These people understand what is stake in this election. But you are still talking about neoliberals and grossly misrepresenting the nature of the police protests. I don’t get it.
Option C is to write in the name of Kanye West so that technically Trump doesn’t get the vote. With Trump safely reelected it’ll be comfortable to be in the opposition which will be comprised of the majority of somewhat like-minded Americans, whereas if Biden wins a lot of people in your world will cheer, and being among the dejected will land you in the same camp as the Deplorables.
Response to Lester Dean: No, the half-baked argument made by the writer is quite clear, and it is not at all original. If he cannot see any difference between Trump and Biden then his vision is cloudy indeed. Whether he likes it or not, the choice is one or the other. And no, you cannot just decide to have a revolution whenever you don’t get your own way in an election. I hope Mr. Ahmed is a better community psychiatrist than he is a political analyst.
Dr. Ahmed says, “option C calls out the game for being rigged, and unapologetically states that we will no longer follow rules that prescribe our oppression.” That’s a statement that “calls out” for practical examples that might be effective while not harming the rights of others.
“When Barack Obama was still our president, I was one of those people who was so mesmerized by his magical speeches that I dismissed racism as a thing of the past.”
Does anyone think this sentence is true? Do we believe the author was “mesmerized” by a politician’s speech? Do we believe any speech President Obama ever gave was “magical”? Do you or anyone you know think racism could be dismissed as a “thing of the past” based on a speech or even a series of speeches given by a politician?
Maybe our electoral process doesn’t work. If it doesn’t, I think the reason has a lot to do with gullibility, either real or pretended, by many of it’s participants. Disingenousness may not be democracy’s greatest enemy but it is certainly one of them.