By Erin Aubry Kaplan
Guest Columnist
As President Donald Trump’s second term begins, Black people remain in the throes of a post-election emotional hangover of historic proportions. The picture that has emerged since Nov. 5 has some encouraging details, mainly that Kamala Harris lost much more narrowly than originally thought, a mere 1.5 percentage points in the popular vote.
Trump did gain voters in various demographics across states, but the presidential election was, as predicted, decided by inches.
In any other year, with a different candidate and normal political energy, this would be a good fight fought, an honorable loss. Or, if you just look at the numbers, Harris did quite well, especially given that this was a truncated campaign in which she was vying to become America’s first woman president.
Based just on those headwinds, you could say she exceeded expectations. And then you look at who she lost to: a frighteningly unqualified, felonious, sexually predatory, pathologically lying white man who built his political capital attacking (baselessly) the American citizenship of the country’s first Black president, eventually turning that anti-Black animus into a broader white nationalist movement far more successful than even he could have imagined.
In this bigger picture, Harris’ loss is less a reflection of her than it is of a poisoned political culture, one that moved a critical mass of voters to embrace anti-democratic views encouraged not just by Trump, but by elected Republicans.
What’s been so dispiriting for Black people is the failure of the Democrats to meet the Republicans passionate hate for ”wokeism” with an equal and opposite passion. For all the historic millions raised for Harris’ campaign, there was not a real commitment to anti-racism, support that was in many ways more essential than money.
What do Black people do from here? Of course they’ve always known that struggle is more or less eternal, that vigilance is always necessary. But in 2025 we’re at the strange opposite of struggle — there’s been a kind of collapse.
Where there’s always been engagement with the whole question of racial justice at the top levels of government, it now feels like there is a vacuum. This is new. Ancestors like Harriet Tubman may have had greater challenges, but she had an abolitionist movement at her back, and the whole moral question of slavery in play everywhere in the country.
We’ve had a sharp break with that kind of engagement, which has been the main mission of Trump. For my generation and younger, this is a great betrayal. We did not think the civil rights movement solved the country’s deepest problems, but we thought Black people’s fight for justice had at least earned a permanent relevance in the political landscape, regardless of who occupied the White House.
To be proven wrong, and by a character like Trump, violates a trust in the baseline decency of our fellow Americans many of us didn’t even know we had.
Black people have always been tasked with loving a country that rarely loves them back, yet we’ve continued to do it, for our own sanity and for the sake of a country that is, after all, our country. It is our home.
For the second time in eight years, the country is getting a president and an administration that’s as openly hostile to racial equality as Woodrow Wilson was a hundred years ago, or Andrew Johnson was in the 1860s.
It feels like all the genuine energy and hope of the Harris campaign has been suddenly snuffed out, with nowhere to go. Small wonder that so many Black people, especially women, are saying they need to turn inward and focus on “self-care” — a classic American move against that classic American malaise, depression. This one goes deep.
I get it. But Black people can retreat into that kind of individualism for only so long. Even as I continue into 2025 to avoid the news in favor of binge-watching TV shows from my childhood (“Bewitched,” “Sanford & Son”), I know at the same time that the fight is worth waging, that Black love of country is not about sentiment or weakness, as Martin Luther King once said, but about holding firm to ideals of fairness that many fellow Americans reject out of hand.
I don’t know how the push for justice that’s as old as America itself will unfold for the next four years, or even the next four months, but unfold it will. To appropriate a phrase — minus the menacing overtone — from Trump: Black people are going to continue to give this country progress, whether it wants it or not.
Erin Aubry Kaplan is an award-winning journalist who examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and opportunities for progress in an era of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and California. This article was produced by Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication focused on inequality. It is published here with permission.
LIFTOUT
In this bigger picture, Harris’ loss is less a reflection of her than it is of a poisoned political culture,