Biden offers a chance for real heroism: ‘When we get knocked down, we get back up!’
Following the fallout from his one-night debate debacle, some big media have led the call for President Joseph Biden to abort his run for president. Ironically, most of the press did not lead a similar crusade against Trump — twice impeached, twice convicted of sexual crimes, found guilty by a jury of his peers of 34 felonies involving paying off a porn star — and who, in the debate, continued adding to his record of the 30,000 documented lies during his four-year presidency.
In his own defense, Biden threw back: “When we get knocked down, we get back up.” Those short nine words have touched the hearts and souls of many Black Americans. With this one-liner, Biden moved his candidacy into a space from which real heroes could rise. In one tight sentence, he summed up our DNA. As a people, we have been ruthlessly and brutally knocked down. But this special fighting spirit in our culture and religion has worked to propel our determination to get back up.
Biden’s call for support was to the left-out, the lost and the locked-out. It resonates for those who remember him as a decent guy who has lifted the elderly, low-waged workers and those needing affordable health care. These are the people that the GOP has demoralized with a system awarding the hellish and punishing the good folks who believe there is nobility in telling the truth.
If pollsters would focus on Black churches, civil rights and worker rights groups instead of spineless, crybaby Democrats and those who want Biden-Harris out so they can get in, they could see a different narrative unfolding. A poll taken before the debate showed 72% of registered Black American voters prefer Biden over Trump. It is doubtful that Biden’s one bad night, measured against four terrible years of Trump, would show a mass departure.
Being knocked down and getting back up is the unwritten national anthem of many unfavored groups, especially Black Americans, who will — no doubt — show their colors for Biden, because their enemies are also Biden’s enemies. There is a formidable common enemy in Trumpism, which is pushing voter suppression, especially in the battleground states, destroying the protections of affirmative action, pushing a conservative agenda that punishes women in need of reproductive health care, and ensuring big tax breaks for the rich and heartaches for the poor.
This common enemy has sanctioned some of the name-calling judgementalism that historically has kept groups fighting each other rather than focusing on the white-privileged groups that — despite representing about 1% of America’s population — hold enough power to buy our Supreme Court. It recently gave Trump immunity over most acts, including his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that included an attack on the U. S. Capitol.
On the other hand, the belief that “when we get knocked down, we get back up” makes room for the guys with the sagging pants, the straights and gays with their purple and rainbow hair, the hungry families in rural America, suburban and urban women who want to eject the Trump politicians out of their wombs, and the workers without a livable wage. Perhaps it would even open the eyes of the white political Christians who are working to put the Ten Commandments in public schools, while ignoring Trump’s adultery.
Going forward, Black men, who pollsters claim are voting up to 25 percent for Trump, must see what Donald Trump has said of Black people. According to Trump, Black and Brown people are from “sh*t-hole countries,” and he called Black NFL players who protest police brutality “sons of bitches.” In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in New York City calling for the execution of five young Black men falsely accused of raping a white woman. After 13 years of civil rights protests, the men were found not guilty. But Trump never apologized to them. Trump and his gang also plan to institute an assault on families from top to bottom by instituting voter suppression laws and reducing Social Security payments and child-care credits.
Trump and his MAGA Republicans must think their Black male supporters are fools, since once in office, their rhetoric and policies could revert to 1857 when the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision decreed that Black people in America had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”
It is also possible that Trump surrogates, while working to ban books about African American history, have made the infamous Willie Lynch theory required reading for their white supplicants. The story goes that in the 1700s, British slave owner Willie Lynch taught slaveowners in America how to control slaves unto future generations.
In short, it called for first, keeping the slave ignorant, for knowledge is power and power is dangerous; second, instilling fear in Black people to make them believe other Black people are their enemies; third, by any means necessary making enslaved people forget their true identity and heritage; fourth, injecting them with the poison of self-doubt, self-hatred and inferiority to the extent that they become so docile and submitted that they will try to prove their worth by being even more oppressive to Blacks than whites themselves. Could this define the Uncle Toms of today?
African Americans have made great gains by leading from the bottom to make massive changes at the top. In this regard, Black Trump supporters have a blood covenant with all the Black and white martyrs who have shed their blood to gain our voting rights.
One final reminder to those who still find little hope at the bottom: The same New York courtroom where the Central Park Five were wrongly convicted is where Trump was successfully prosecuted on 34 felony charges by a Black district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated and freed Central Park Five, is now a New York city councilman. The Black vote helped make that happen.
This year, the severity of Trumpism has moved more Black pastors to urge their congregants to vote. Playing it safe by ignoring politics is not, and has never been, an option. As the Bible says: “Faith without works is dead.”
The Rev. Barbara A. Reynolds is an award-winning journalist, activist and educator. This piece was originally published at TriceEdneyWire.com.
