Do We Need White People?
Do we need white people?
What kind of question is that, right?
Well, it’s a really good one if you’re a person of color looking to stop the unending and increasingly brutal attacks launched upon our communities by white supremacists. It’s an unnerving one, though, if you’re just an average white middle class person clicking through Twitter.
So, I guess it really depends on who you ask. And how you look at the question.
Let’s say the context is a fictional planet where white people are being threatened with genocide at the hands of an evil alien overlord. The overlord asks, “Do we need white people?” That would be a fantastic time to strongly advocate for your presence.
Or maybe the context is this planet. Today. And a group of scientists is looking to explore the effects of sunscreen on individuals with low levels of melanin. One scientists ask another, “Do we need white people?” Well, hell yeah you need white people. You need the whitest people!”
Do we need white people…on the planet? Of course.
Do we need white people…to conduct research on? Sure, why not.
Do we need white people…to form more white supremacist organizations like the KKK? Definitely not.
Do we need white people…to socially, economically, and politically control people of color? No again.
The answer depends on who you ask, though.
If you ask the Trump administration the latter questions, well you just can’t be sure they’d say no. If you ask as person of color — chances are you’re going to get some very emphatic no’s and hopefully more than a couple of fuck you’s.
So, who am I posing this question to? And in what context?
Specifically, I am talking to people of color — in the context of white supremacy. I am asking:
Do we need white people to tell us how to fight white supremacy? Do we need white people to stop the Republican Party? Do we need white people to take back Congress and control the White House?
And I’m going to argue: No. We do not need white people. We do not need white people for these very specific things.
Let’s start with a look at the general statistics.
In the United States, just over 60% of the population is just straight up white. That means 40% of us identify as people of color. Not bad. Especially considering that just before the Civil Rights Movement reached its peak, people of color only comprised 15% of the population and whites made up an overwhelming 85% of the population. We’ve been catching up.
So, my fellow indigenous, brown, black, Asian, and intersected friends — we are well on our way to matching white people in terms of percentage of the overall population.
Political power isn’t about head count, though — it’s about strategy. (If you are unsure about that — ask yourself how the candidate with the most votes lost the Presidential election.) It’s not enough for people of color to outnumber white people. It is how those people organize and strategically operate to achieve those goals.
In the United States, political power is organized though parties, policies, and elections. In order to change the policies of the United States, white supremacists needed to win the elections that would put them in positions of federal authority. In order to win elections that would put them in federal authority, white supremacists needed to take over the party that had the resources to implement their agenda and the ideology to absorb their causes. In order to strategically take over the government, white nationalists assumed leadership of the Republican Party, strategically took over the Senate and the White House, and have been implementing white nationalist political policy shifts ever since.
Now the question becomes: Do we need white people to politically end the white supremacist takeover of the federal government by the Republican Party?
The United States operates today as a two-party system. (Independent voters, hold on. I’ll get to you in a minute.) The two parties dominating the political field right now are the Democrats and the Republicans. Ideologies between parties have shifted over time, but currently the Republican Party houses the most overtly anti-nonwhite political groups, actors, and policies while the Democrats control the majority of pro-civil rights organizations, individuals, and voters.
This competitive political dynamic was originally designed to split and balance powers held by white, landowning, able-bodied Christian men. And it still functions to do so today. The majority of white Americans are held under the umbrella of the Republican party, while a large minority of white Americans take shelter under the Democratic umbrella.
58% of white people voted Republican.
32% of white people voted for Clinton.
10% of white people voted Third Party or Write-in. (Again, we’ll get to you folks later.)
89% of the 63 million Americans that cast a vote for Donald Trump were white.
60% of the 67 million Americans that cast a vote for Hillary Clinton were white.
In other words, the current two-party system splits the white constituency into 56 million white voters on the Republican side and 40 million voters on the Democratic side.
Outnumbered by at least 16 million votes, white Democrats would find themselves all but completely unable to defeat white Republicans in any election, let alone Senatorial and Presidential elections.
Clearly, white people need us. But do we need white people?
To answer this question, we need to identify what white people we are talking about.
Do people of color need white supremacists?
I’m going to argue no on this one.
Politics is a competition. Currently that competition is being dominated by white supremacists operating under the formation of the Republican party. They are actively and successfully trying to kill, deport, incarcerate, exploit, and impoverish us. They are our enemies. And Trump himself has declared them as such. So, no. Do we need white supremacists or the Republican party? No. Collaboration, bipartisanship, compromise, and subjection to the needs of white supremacists is not something we need or something we should strive for. Self-preservation, logic, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement give us enough to make that statement.
Then the question becomes: Do we need white Democrats?
Again, let’s take a closer look at the numbers.
While 40 million white people voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Election, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are 40 million white Democrats. That’s right, 3rd party voters, now it’s your turn. The white Democrats have an ever-increasing fissure between two groups: the Clintonites and the Berniecrats.
Only 30 million Democrats, less than 45% of people that voted in the General Election, voted in the primaries. Of these, Clinton won approximately 17 million votes while Sanders brought in around 13 million. (Ultimately, 10% of the Berniecrats would go on to vote for Trump in the general election.)
If the left split in 2020, and Bernie Sanders decided to run for President in the General Election as an Independent, we can generously estimate that the field would be split between 21 million white Berniecrats on one side and 25 million white Democrats on the other. Both of these groups would be attempting to defeat 56 million white Republicans. Clearly, neither would.
If Sanders runs within the Democratic party, he does not carry enough delegates to defeat the Clintonites in the primaries. The Clintonites would carry the majority of white progressive voters; however, with a total of only 46 million white voters, they would not be able to defeat the white Republicans in the General Election then, either.
White people on the left, regardless of their support for either Clinton or Sanders, mathematically need people of color to defeat the Republicans. But do we need them?
Do we need white people to beat the Republicans?
Let’s take a look at the numbers again.
219 million people total were eligible to vote in the 2016 General Election. Of these, 139 million actually cast a ballot. 67 million voted for Hillary Clinton. Of these, 21 million were Democrats of color and an estimated 6 million were Sanders supporters of color — giving us a total of 27 million left leaning voters of color.
Only 30 million Democrats voted in the primaries, though.
Let me repeat — only 30 million people showed up to vote in the Democratic Primaries.
To put that into some perspective, 39 million people live in California. 28.5 million people live in Texas. And both of these states are minority majority.
Out of the 30 million people that voted in the Democratic primaries, 17 million voted for Clinton and 13 million voted for Sanders. Of the 27 million left leaning voters of color, approximately 8 million showed up for Clinton in the primaries. Just over 1 million cast a ballot in favor of Sanders.
That would leave us with:
12 million white Berners and 11 million white Democrats on one side and
8 million Democrats of color and 1 million Berners of color on the other (9 million people of color total)
People of color would only need to bring out a little over 3 million more voters nationwide in order to advance their candidate through the primaries if we can consolidate our votes around a candidate that represents us, our communities, and our political needs in general, but especially in the fight against white supremacy.
3 million people.
To put that in perspective, the nonwhite populations of Alabama and Louisiana roughly total 4 million people.
If Sanders decides to run for President as an Independent, that means we only have to bring out 2 million people of color to put our candidate on the Democratic ticket.
2 million people. The black populations of Memphis, Baltimore, and Detroit total around 2 million people.
Incentivizing 2 to 3 million more voters of color to come out and vote for a candidate that actually represents them should not be difficult, especially considering the number of untapped voters of color just waiting to be activated.
Out of 27 million voters of color that turned out for the general election, only 9 million turned out for the primaries. That leaves 18 million active voters that can reach the polls, but chose not to participate. 18 million voters seem like a large enough pool to draw from, but there is another pool of voters that white Democrats refuse to engage — suppressed voters.
80 million people that did not vote in the general election. Of these, an estimated 46 million voters were suppressed or obstructed from voting. The overwhelming majority of these voters were intentionally suppressed by the Republican party in order to undermine the Democratic party. Tactics include voter ID restrictions, voter purging, felony disenfranchisement, polling place closures, ADA violations and in-person voting requirements.
The removal of ID restrictions would add 21 million potential voters back into the voting pool. Reopening polling places, expanding them and providing alternatives to in-person voting would enable millions more people of color, poor voters, working class voters, voters living with disabilities and elderly voters to reach the polls. Eliminating felony disenfranchisement and voter purging would add another 7 million voters back onto the field.
Not all of these voters will be people of color, but the overwhelming majority will be. And because these voters were intentionally suppressed by the Republican party according to the standards of white supremacy — exclusion of people with disabilities, the poor, and people of color — they WILL be targets of white supremacy. As such, it can be expected that there will be crossover allies from these communities in the battle against the Republican Party.
But white allies aren’t necessary to take the primaries.
With a gap of as little as 2 million votes and as large as 4 million votes, and a pool of 18 million active voters and 46 million suppressed voters to mobilize — Democrats of color should have no trouble mobilizing enough voters to carry a candidate of color with a community agenda through the primaries and into the Presidential Election.
The candidate of color that rises to the challenge of running in the primary elections should by then have a number of wins in the field of re-enfranchisement under his\her\their belt, and should expect to see a significant portion of re-enfranchised voters of color joining their ranks. These voters could potentially tip the scale in favor of Democrats of color in the Primary elections.
So, do we need white people?
It is feasible that with a strong candidate carrying a community agenda and a solid effort to re-enfranchise and motivate our constituencies, Democrats of color could easily defeat both the Berniecrats and the Clintonites. These victories can and should also carry over into the Congressional elections.
In other words, my fellow targets of white supremacy — we don’t have to wait for white Democrats to do their jobs and live up to their promises anymore. We don’t have to settle for candidates of color that may look like us, but just carry out the same white Democratic agenda. We don’t have to stand by and watch Democrats in power let our rights and lives fall to white supremacists. We can take them on ourselves.
My fellow indigenous, black, brown, Asian, and intersected brothers and sisters: We do not need white people.
If we work fast, we can start changing the color of Congress in 2018. And if we start making waves in 2018, we can build the momentum necessary to put ourselves in the positions of power necessary to take on the Republican party, end the white supremacist assault on our people and establish a new norm in electoral politics.
Then the question is turned on white voters: Do you need people of color to defeat the Republican party? Do you need people of color to defeat white supremacy? Do you need voters of color to stop the Trump Administration?
And the answer to that question is: Yes.
