Black Americans Have a Message for Democrats: Not Being Trump Is Not Enough
Joe Biden wants to heal the soul of the country in this moment of protest and loss, and win the White House. Simply telling people to vote in November may not help with either goal.
"I just don't think that's how change happens," Ms. Moore said of voting. "They've been telling us to do that for so long — and we've done it — and look at everything that's still going on."
The moment may still test Mr. Biden's priorities, as a weary black electorate desires far greater change than the promise of a return to normalcy that has fueled his campaign. Energizing those voters, activists and elected leaders say, means addressing their demands for change and the realities of racism. But the former vice president, one of the Senate architects of the
modern criminal justice system, cannot confront racism without addressing systemic inequalities, and he cannot address systemic inequalities by simply returning to a pre-Trump America.
"Our needs aren't moderate," Mr. Jackson said in a recent interview. "The absence of Trump is not enough."
Ms. Pressley, an insurgent progressive in 2018 who beat a Democratic incumbent partly with a strategy to engage nontypical voters, said if elected officials want to speak to people's pain, they have to understand the "deficit of trust" they're operating under.
"People don't participate, not because they're ignorant and they don't know enough," she said. "It's because they know too much. They live it every day."
