Jim Zirin-Why Were Black Voters Disillusioned with Hillary Clinton?-Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

[Music] [Music] oh hi there I'm Jim zyen welcome back to more conversations in the digital age Hillary Clinton was hoping to win the key swing state of North Carolina which Barack Obama carried in 2008 but narrowly lost to Mitt Romney in 2012 North Carolina has 15 electoral votes and approximately 22.1% of North Carolina's population is black yet black voting declined in the presidential election by 8% contributing to Donald Trump Trump's carrying the state by a slim margin of almost 4% did North Carolina suppress the black Vote or did blacks consciously decide not to vote for president as an ironic protest against the record of our first African-American president here to help us answer this question is Princeton Professor Eddie s glaud Professor glaud has just written a book that will change your thinking for sure a changed mind about race and politics in America it's called democracy in Black how race still enslaves the American Soul Eddie GL we're delighted to have you with us it's my pleasure to be here with you now congratulations on your book which I found so riveting and um starting with the theme of politics and race democracy and black uh African-Americans were not wild about Donald Trump right uh they weren't wild about Hillary Clinton either uh what does the African-American Community um think they're going to gain from a trump Administration well I don't know so much about what what the community thinks they will gain from from a trump Administration I think if we look at the at the data the exit pole data we'll see that um educated African-Americans voted for Hillary Clinton almost at the same levels as educated white Americans right in the suburbs um uh uh uh for Clinton uh but we saw something very distinctive around class right that the PO the poor working class and and the most marginal um uh in some ways did not turn out at the same level as 2012 and many just stayed home and I think that has something to do with substantive Judgment of the of the economic policies of the democratic party and particularly over the last eight years even with the symbolic significance of President Obama in the white house uh the economic policies didn't fundamentally transform their life circumstances so we saw in a place like North Carolina given your opening not only the we saw the convergence of voter suppression uh and right a substantive judgment on the failure of of democratic policy economic policy and in some ways the failure of the Clinton campaign to actually appeal to the circumstances of of workingclass people of all Races not just simply white working class folks uh we saw something similar in Michigan and we saw something similar in Wisconsin like in Detroit around Detroit and around Milwaukee pick North Carolina because it's a state you're very much familiar with and also because um uh there's the uh irony that Trump won in North Carolina by 177,000 votes while the incumbent Republican Governor Pat MCC unofficially lost to his Democratic Challenger attorney general Roy Cooper by 10,000 votes out of 4.7 million cast now mccy refuses to concede and is now talking about challenging the result for fraud right uh do you think there was fraud in the balloting in North Carolina absolutely not in some ways I've been in in in consistent conversation with Reverend William Barber who's the chair uh president of NAACP in the North in North Carolina uh and what we saw more than anything is not kind of voter fraud which has been the the kind of red herring of of Republicans over the last few election Cycles but we saw very clearly closing of U of of particular election polling sites uh attempts to in some way suppress the vote among black and Latino voters having an impact on College voters um College age voters so I think mccy is just trying in some significant way to undermine the Democratic process in North Carolina but what we do see what we have seen not only in North Carolina but in places like Texas among Latino voters is that you saw split tickets right folks voting for uh Trump at the at the top of the ticket and then voting for a different set of folks down down down Ballot or the other way around uh so you see an electorate that's in some ways uh pretty dissatisfied uh with with what was um uh put forward the candidates put forward so you see what only 43% or something like 43 to 46% of the electorate did not participate did not vote at all in the election in the presidential election and I think that's a substantive judgment about the choices we we we we confronted were there instances where particularly African-American voters did not vote for either candidate for president but voted U Down ballot yeah outside of uh Michigan and uh outside of Detroit and in Flint we saw over 990,000 ballots uh submitted uh uh where folks left the presidential ballot blank and voted down ballot um so this is um this was in a Battleground State like Michigan I I I I in my own thinking I think that was a mistake but we saw folks making choices and and not only did we see this among African-Americans we saw this among some Republicans right and and so folks were just simply dissatisfied with the choices at the top of the ball now in your book you Advocate among other things as a solution to various problems you perceive in society and many uh the u a form of electoral nihilism where African-American voters uh vote for local candidates because local that's where the rubber meets the road and that's where uh they can have candidates if elected could really help them uh but uh will not vote for either candidate for president because they feel betrayed by both parties you think their instances where that happened in this well I don't want to I don't want to attribute that kind of influence to to the book and you know I don't want to say that I have more influence on on those voters than say President Obama coming to Michigan or or going to Miami or the like what I do know is that uh when I wrote that in in in in in in democracy in Black I had in mind that the the the choices would be Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush and to my mind there's no substantive difference between those two candidates in terms of their policies um but then you had Donald Trump and Donald Trump represents to me a kind of Neo fascist turn uh in the United States a kind of uh legitimizing of of not alt-right but white supremacist white nationalist sensibilities and so what I wrote In in in time in Time Magazine with the Columbia professor of political science Fred Harris is that black voters should strategically vote that we had to do two things simultaneously we had to keep Donald Trump out of office and we had to alert uh we had to let Hillary Clinton know that business as usual wasn't acceptable um and so the idea was that if you were in a decidedly Red State or decidedly Blue State you could vote your conscience you could leave the ballot blank or vote down ballot and vote down ballot but if you were in a Battleground State like Michigan or North Carolina or the like you should turn out in massive numbers and vote for Hillary Clinton but I think part of what what happened is that the Hillary Clinton campaign the Clinton campaign was confused on the one hand it tried to activate the Obama Coalition and on the other hand it tried to do exactly what Bill Clinton did in during his time and that is to kind of triangulate to appeal to those moderate Republicans and so the Clinton campaign spent the majority of the summer and going coming into September really going after mod Republicans and collecting in some ways Bush Republican uh uh uh endorsements and really assuming that the fear of Donald Trump would be sufficient to motivate its base um and what it turned out is that that was just wrong and so she didn't go to Wisconsin she didn't take take the time to register there were over a million black and Latino voters unregistered black latino voters in Florida so all she needed to do is spend $25 million to get them registered she would have won Florida uh instead she spent over close to a billion dollar on on on advertisements on on on television ads and the like so it was a strategic problem as well as an ideological problem well you have expressed dissatisfaction with uh the promise of U Bill Clinton and the promise of Barack Obama and said at least the promise was not fulfilled as far as blacks in America concerned but uh Donald Trump during the campaign said and I quote uh we have an African-American president and yet less has been done for African-Americans than anybody this is one of the worst times they've ever had and his advisor Steve Bannon said the middle class has been shafted black Hispanic white everybody the political class has given them happy talk but delivered nothing now both of those statements sound like things you might have said it's true it's just a wrong messenger you know I think you know it's certainly the case uh that the Trump campaign you know um uh embraced a kind of populism I think we need to add the adjective authoritarian populism that we saw on the left with Bernie Sanders's campaign uh because what we do know is that the fundamental fundamentals of the economic philosophy that has in some ways governed this country over the last few decades uh the contradictions that are EV that are evident in our form of life have made it such that people who are working hard who are playing by the rules who are busting their behinds every single day are falling behind they can't imagine a brighter future for their children and this is particularly the case right among black and brown folk in this country and so when When Donald Trump made the claim right cuz I said in in democracy in Black that that Barack Obama is a melvan confidence man selling the snake oil of hope and change and of course Clinton is from a place called hope and what we saw glass deagle was passed under the Democrats welfare reform under the Democrats crime bill under the Democrats right in all the ways in so many ways well glass seagull repealed under the Democrat repal I mean repealed under the Democrats right in all of the ways that we can begin to measure right the the Democratic party since the the ascendance of the Democratic Leadership Council has in some ways uh uh Left Behind the most vulnerable the most marginal workingclass people in this country um and so part of what I was suggesting uh in this book is that you know uh black voters who are often taken for granted were captured electorate we needed to strike back we needed to figure out how to act act and behave right uh and participate in this political process in a very different way uh but Trump can't be the messenger of that because Trump doesn't give a damn about black or brown people well uh certainly uh one of the uh traditional goals of minority groups has been Powers sharing to have some of their guys in office uh who will be better disposed to their point of view or just symbolically so you say that uh High office is not uh unavailable uh to this group or that group so we've tried our political leaders have tried to construct tickets uh that were balanced to have representatives of various groups I you look at the Supreme Court right even uh identity politics has been the order of the day so uh I ask you here you had uh his the historic election of Barack Obama to two terms uh first African-American uh to be elected as as leader of the Free World as president of the United States uh he appoints two African-American Attorneys General uh he appoints uh Susan Rice first as ambassador of the United Nations and then as National Security advisor uh his consiliary as opposed to Steve Bannon Trump's consiliary is Valerie Jarrett another African-American so um you must have thought that um you accomplished a great deal when Barack Obama took off no not really you know I mean symbolically it was significant you know for my son uh who's a junior at Brown he came of age politically with the black family in the White House but he also came of age with Trayvon Martin Mike Brown Ria Boyd Eric Garner uh and I can go on and on and on fando Castile right um Alton Sterling um um Ayana Stanley Jones uh we can keep going on and on and on so he's come up age in an age of in a moment of viral death uh he's come of age in a moment in which uh 240,000 homes were lost uh in the collapse of the housing market and many of those folks whose wealth were uh was in some significant way located in their homes still find themselves struggling still find themselves living in homes that are barely above water uh struggling often times in a in in in a brutal rental market you know New York City right um so there's been the symbolic significance of President Obama and we we we have to we have to acknowledge that but the idea of just having you know brown and black faces in high place as if that's going to transform the circumstances of everyday Ordinary People um I think that's a pipe dream and we have to begin to look at um um the politics of the folks who are in these positions uh there is a presumption and it's a presumption that we ought to hold that people who come from our community should be open to uh the circumstances and the feelings and aspirations of our communities that seems to me a reasonable assumption whether you're from Little Italy or little Cuba or you're from Black communities but it doesn't follow from that assumption that there will be concrete policies that will transform the life circumstances of Black Folk so as soon as Barack Obama was elected he had to declare that he was the president of all America and so you had a constituency that voted for him at 93 95% and we didn't care if he was the president of all America we just cared that we had voted for you at that level and we needed something to be delivered in order to transform our the circumstances of our communities but what we do know in this country is that the more likely the more that a policy position is supported by African-American constituencies the more likely that policy Position will fail to pass because it has something to do with How Deeply uh overdetermined this country is by the value Gap by the belief that certain people white people are value more than others and so whether you have black people in high places or not until we uproot that uh we will find ourselves on the hamster will well uh black lady is did approach um President Obama to enlist his support for various policies that they champion and his answer was I'm not the black president I'm president of all the people in substance he said that isn't that right yeah and what could you imagine him saying that to the lgbtqi community could you imagine him saying that to uh uh uh women activists who were pushing for the passage of the Lily Le better bill in other words Black Folk are this captured electorate they are according to my colleague Paul frer right that is uh Democrats take us for granted their only role their only uh position or orientation to us is to deliver us to the polls every 2 4 years with no intention on delivering policy because they understand that we have no place else to go and so African-Americans who are rational actors in This political process see that the Republican party has really no interest and they're full of these rabbit racist and the Democratic party knows we have nowhere to go so we vote for the lesser of two evils in some ways and so you get this moment with President Obama when folk world like can there be an agenda to address the jobs crisis in Black communities can there be specific policy initiatives to address the racialized dimension of the housing crisis the incarcerated society and so it was only with black lives matter that he began to with the push in the streets that he began to tackle criminal justice and so all of this reveals that we can't just simply assume by having black people in Black Faces in high places that it's going to transform the circumstances of the most vulnerable in our communities we do much more Grassroots organized uh politics that will reflect uh uh the interest of the Working Poor and the poor in our community that's what we need well many political observers have said uh with the election of Obama we became post-racial we' made so much progress that and perhaps with black lives matter there was a retrenchment of that position but you look at the Supreme Court on voting rights their analysis in the Shelby County case which included Clarence Thomas and the majority the 5 to four majority they said we made so much progress in the South and voting rights that we uh uh it's unconstitutional to have bad active States even though Congress said that they were and uh what did we see immediately what did we see immediately afterwards voter ID laws in North Carolina Draconian laws in in in Texas right um of course they corrected the voter ID law I guess in July or August of before the election but was that too little too late it was too little too late to in my opinion and and part of what I I've what I argue in the book is at the heart of this country is what I call the value Gap and the value Gap is the belief that white people matter more than others and that belief animates our our PR our social practices our political and economic arrangements and it's evidenced in what the political theorist John RS calls it's evidenced in our basic structure right in our institutions um and and so what we see is that at every moment of Advance every moment of of of attempt in which we try to overcome the contradictions in our society there's a reassertion of the value Gap that limits it so we have the articulation of the principles of Freedom Liberty and equality we reconcile those principles with racial slavery the value Gap we have radical reconstruction attempt at multi-racial democracy what do we have in response convict leasing Jim Jim and Jane Crow the value Gap reasserts itself we have the mass mobilization of everyday Ordinary People in the civil rights movement in the mid 20th century what do we get in response the call for Law and Order tax revolt in California reassertion of the value Gap we get the election of Barack Obama the first African-American president what do we get in response the vitory all of the Tea Party attack on voting rights the value Gap so and what do we get in response to eight years of Obama Donald Trump right and so this is just this reassertion this is this kind of repeated minstral show that we can't get out of well but it's almost the uh the observation of a kind of hegelian dialectic where you make progress as one step forward and two steps back but what's the answer I mean how do you how do you break out of that well I think we need a revolution of value we need to change what we mean by we need to change our demands of government we need to change our understanding of black people and we need to change what ultimately matters to us and that revolution of value is going to require strategy in the streets a strategy of The Ballot Box and a strategy in the courtroom your your wheelhouse right and I think um so we need a a fundamental Reawakening of the deos uh and we saw some of that uh in the Bernie Sanders campaign but we also saw some of it in the populism of of Donald Trump and the question is will we go with the kind of left populism of Bernie Sanders or the authoritarian populism of trump uh we see where we are now but what I do know is this is that everyday Ordinary People are reimagining politics at the local level they're going to challenge and change uh the direction of this country and and and that's going to require us to really look the ugliness of who we are squarely in the face uh to con to confront our fears and to confront this idea cuz it's a dying idea that this is a white Nation it's no longer that it will never be that that's dead it's gone white nation is gone well uh that's very interesting was it gone in North Carolina you uh were part of a march called forward together uh and I think you mentioned U the charismatic speaker Reverend Barber who spoke there now uh voting rights not the only issue in in North Carolina was it no why don't you talk about some of the things that prompted you to March and yeah so North Carolina's ground sent ground zero right uh after the election of Barack Obama the Koch brothers uh really uh funneled a lot of a lot of funds uh into the state is that why he lost in 2012 um in that state well it had everything to do with uh precisely the ways in which you know Republican interest and and and financial interests decided to to use North the state of North Carolina as a test case Reverend Barbara's fond of saying we don't need to ask what a trump presidency will look like we've already seen it in North Carolina with governor mccy and what do you What did what happened we saw increasing efforts to PR underfund public education as they moved public dollars into private hands we saw a wholesale attack on public health care we saw a wholesale attack on teachers unions we saw a wholesale attack on undocumented workers we saw right attack on women's rights so we saw across the board in North Carolina right um uh the the extremist on the right tried to implement policy that devastated everyday ordinary workers and what forward together and what Reverend Barber and NAACP did which is really an example for the kind of coalitional politics we need in this moment is that they cut across racial lines they cut across right uh seeming self-interest and built coalitions that went from the eastern part of North Carolina to the Research Triangle where you had folks who were black brown yellow right folks who were undocumented folks who were lgbtqi to folks who were just simply Union folk right folks who just wanted a hospital in their communities that hospital was closed because the North Carolina governor refused to accept federal dollars with regards to Obamacare right and he created that Coalition and I saw the largest mass mobilization of people in the South since Selma right uh and it wasn't a movement predicated upon the suppression of of race it was a movement in which race Discord racial animus right was at the center of a broader Justice and morally driven movement so it I invoked the the forward together movement as one example of the kind of democratic Grassroots Democratic politics we need uh to challenge right this uh extremist turn this author authoritarian turn that we're seeing in the country today so and and that uh March in North Carolina involved both blacks and whites and lgbtq Union yeah undocumented and women because the North Carolina laws make it Place burdens on women seeking abortion they need a sonogram and counseling absolutely and all the rest that'll be tested in court I'm sure and what we saw was right everyday ordinary people who thought of themselves in relation with other people who hold similar interest who face certain similar problems where the stuff that that that that connect us were more was more important than the stuff that divided us right and you know that's a rhetoric that we hear from the White House with Obama but it's a rhetoric that wasn't in support of of business as usual where Wall Street benefits and Main Street suffers right it was it was a view of what connects Us in light of a broader and more robust idea of the public good that is in I think a better stad with our ideals of democracy okay so to borrow a phrase from uh Dr King where do we go from here where do we go from here we go I think we go to a radical politics we go to a radical Vision one of the most Insidious dimensions of our contemporary moment Jim is that there's a wholesale attack on our imaginations Ralph Waldo Emerson said I I'm paraphrasing him that God speaks to us through our imaginations and I always ask my students at Princeton if that's true then what is the devil doing right and so part of what part of what the moment is all about is to get is to convince us that our only options are those right in front of us and part of what imagination is all about is to begin to see right possibility beyond the limitations of now and so we do that in radical in radical politics with others who are who are similarly situated and you do that on the streets in the courtroom and at The Ballot Box with electoral nihilism not necessarily electoral nihilism but with electoral imagination electoral imagination so I I have a question uh for you Professor ready GLA uh is do you see more democracy uh are we making progress absolutely not my colleagues so you're not optimistic I'm I'm a it's a hope that's not hopeless but UNH hopeful to quote the boys so you have to keep working it's a blue so hope Eddie GL thank you so much for coming by appreciate and thank you for coming by great great book Thank you so and tune in next week for more conversations in the digital age four conversations in the digital age I'm Jim zyen all the best and take care [Music] oh

Channel: Conversations with Jim Zirin

Views: 13,301

Keywords: Jim Zirin, James D. Zirin, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Eddie Glaude, Princeton University, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, POTUS

Id: ZelqlkWCstY

Length: 25min 59sec (1559 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2016