Anyone who insists race does not matter in this country any longer should look carefully at last week’s US election.
Race was the key issue in the poll. According to exit polls, most whites voted for Donald Trump, continuing a pattern in which the majority of whites support the Republicans. Black, Hispanic and Asian voters overwhelmingly supported Joe Biden, even though more black and Hispanic men supported Trump than in 2016. If all US voters were white, the Democrats would win only a handful of states. If all were black, Hispanic or Asian, the Republicans would win few if any.
This is not the only sense in which race was crucial. Race also explains why US politics has become so polarised. While Trump’s refusal to accept the result may have much to do with his personality, the fact that many of his supporters won’t accept it, despite no evidence of fraud, shows that its divisions are now deeper than at any time since the civil war. Republicans now talk openly about breaking the rules to ensure Trump remains president — threatening, in effect, to end democracy in the US. Then as now, race is the reason.
This election had little or nothing to do with “the issues”. Voters did not, in the main, vote on how they are affected by Covid-19 or the recession it has brought, or any of the policy questions we usually expect to dominate election campaigns. Trump’s Republicans barely bothered to frame policy, they relied on urging their voters to support Trump. Despite this, more than 70-million people voted for him.
Race is surely the reason. Until recently it was assumed the US would always be controlled by a white majority. But black, Hispanic and Asian people are playing more prominent roles: the country has elected a black president, it will soon have a black woman vice-president. Most important, whites will no longer be the majority in 20 years.
Many white Americans see this as a threat to their survival and have rallied around the Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, in the hope that they can restore white America’s control. This is why so many voters backed Trump despite the pandemic and recession, and why many of those will accept only a result in which he is the winner. It is also why claims that Barack Obama’s election showed race no longer matters proved false: its effect was to heighten these fears and trigger a backlash.
Since most whites who feel threatened live outside the big cities, where most black, Hispanic and Asian Americans live and whites are far more cosmopolitan, this also triggers a cultural divide between the values of the city and everywhere else. The divisions run so deep that US democracy is in serious trouble.
This sends an important message to this country. One core similarity between us and the US is that both have histories in which one race dominated. If race is the key source of division in a country that scrapped racial laws more than half a century ago and elected members of the dominated group to its highest offices, it makes little sense to claim it is not central to politics here.
While the details here are not the same as in the US, its experience shows that the patterns created when one group dominates another do not vanish because laws change. Much work is needed to make the promise of racial equality a reality. That work is clearly impossible if racial reality is ignored.
If this country is not to spend the next quarter century divided by race as the US is, it needs to recognise that race and racism remain a reality and do what it needs to do to deal with them.
• Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.
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