LOOKING FORWARD
What Will The Election of Joe Biden Mean for Black America?
From the ads he ran calling for the death penalty of five Black and Brown teens, to the false claims that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, Donald Trump has had a strained relationship with the Black community for years. So it’s no wonder he had a hard time winning them over in the 2016 presidential election. In 2016, Trump asked Black voters, “What do you have to lose?” by choosing him over his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. His half-hearted invitation to support his presidential campaign wasn’t enough for him to win over a majority of the AfricanAmerican community, but he did manage to win a small percentage of the Black vote and ultimately the presidency. In his four years in office, Trump showed the Black community exactly what they had to lose. He defended Confederate monuments, called a group of White supremacists ‘very fine people,’ and mishandled a public health crisis that has disproportionately
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claimed the lives of people of color. For those in the Black community who were keeping score, those misdeeds were enough to motivate them to make sure he was a one-term president. Nevertheless, Trump persisted and tried courting Black voters again in 2020. In his reelection campaign message, Trump claimed to have done more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln, citing funding for HBCUs and low African-American unemployment numbers among his accomplishments. And less than two months before the election, he rolled out his Platinum Plan, a $500 billion plan for Black America, which included expanding school choice, criminal justice reform, and making Juneteenth a federal holiday. He even got a couple of high-profile endorsements from rappers Lil Wayne and 50 Cent. But record voter participation sent a message that a large segment of the country wanted a change in the Oval Office. Nearly 80,000,000 Americans cast their
