Member-only story
Black Voters in the Trump Era
Black voters know they cannot afford to waste time behaving like naval gazing idealists while Donald J. Trump remains in office. Trump’s racially motivated policies are an existential threat to Black humanity. Democracy in Color, a political organization concerned with race in politics, has documented 200 instances of racism committed by the Trump administration. These include well known events such as referring to African American football players as “sons of bitches,” during the NFL anthem protests in 2017, various racialized travel bans, caging children at the border, referring to countries populated by people of color as “shitholes;” and, now, the move to denaturalize the citizenship of immigrants through the Department of Justice — as led by Trump appointee Attorney General Bill Barr.
The U.S. Justice Department has recently opened an office focused on denaturalizing immigrant citizenship. It is not a stretch to suggest that the next move will be to eliminate birthright citizenship. African Americans were given citizenship rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution during the Reconstruction era (1867–1877) with the clause “born or naturalized” that appears in the text of this Amendment. Many black voters have indicated that defeating Trump is one of the most important objectives for them in the presidential election.