This has been a year of deadly viruses. We are currently facing the coronavirus crisis, which has taken the lives of 200,000 Americans, making us one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. However, in the background, a more vicious virus has taken the lives of many innocent and selfless beings and has torn apart communities: racism.
Institutional racism within police departments has been an outstanding problem for black Americans. The brutal killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake have created massive civil unrest on both social and political sides.
In the unrest and dismay surrounding the police shooting of yet another black American, we see why Vice President Joe Biden is precisely the executive the public requires at this charged moment. His combination of deep empathy, and proven knack for reaching across the aisle, will be more needed now than ever.
After Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, Barack Obama convened the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, bringing together a range of subject matter experts to issue recommendations for improving policing. Regrettably, however, only a small number of police departments adopted its recommendations, and the problem of racialized police violence continued largely unaddressed.
Thus far, the case for President Biden has often been a negative one — he is not President Trump. Trump’s oddly apolitical nature sets him aside other politicians. It brought him success in the 2016 presidential election. However, over the last four years the American people have seen right through this and have realized that his incompetencies are causing civil and economic unrest. This has resulted in massive unemployment rates and a failure to protect American citizens.
Making matters worse, Trump and the Republican Party have now begun to misrepresent legitimate civil rights and social justice grievances as part of an anarchic campaign undermining law and order — indeed, during the Republican convention, they campaigned off of that misrepresentation, twisting Biden’s stated positions and claiming themselves to be the party of law and order.
The task for an incoming administration led by Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris will thus be formidable. They will have to bring people together who have been rejected by the system and restore confidence. It will not be done overnight.
Not only will they have to revisit the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, but they will have to speak to a nation torn between those who believe law enforcement is systemically prejudiced against Americans of color, and those who believe the protesters themselves represent a systemic threat to the country.
This is all exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic which has increased unemployment rates, especially among non-whites. On the one hand, we have Trump stirring up the far-right and on the other, Vice President Biden who is bringing people together from both sides to restore confidence and to make us the nation we once were.
Though the challenge before them remains immense, Biden and Harris possess strengths relevant to this moment. Harris, for example, is a prosecutor and attorney general and herself a woman of color; she has straddled, for much of her professional life, identities and responsibilities that allow her to see, with nuance and sophistication, the depth of the systemic challenge before us.
Biden, meanwhile, has repeatedly exhibited that deep reservoir of sympathy which is necessary in addressing any national crisis. But Biden has also made it a point, historically and currently, to cultivate relationships across the aisle. America right now urgently needs to find common ground upon which to build the consensus necessary for durable progress.
Basim Elkarra serves on the Executive Board of the California Democratic Party.
