Okay. Here's a postmortem.

 I have been avoiding the election postmortems. I don't think the handwringing and the fingerpointing are going to help us organize against racist and fascist atrocity. 

I keep seeing white pundits (and grass-roots white liberals, too) who are just astonished that Black and Latino voters "shifted" to Trump, as if our own white relatives and neighbors didn't cast enough ballots already to win victory for xenophophia, misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, and an end to the Constitution. They really seem to be believe that the Society of Magical Negroes has an obligation to save us white people from the logic of our own privilege.

I also keep seeing Latino friends yelling at other Latinos that when the white supremacist mob says "Illegal!" they're not talking about immigration status; they mean every person of Latin American origin. I see Black friends yelling at other Black people that DJT's racism doesn't stop at Brown people. And - of course - I see Black friends who are endlessly enraged at Boricuas and Dominicanos who truly believe that they are white... and voted that way.

I have written publicly that I don't think dwelling on any of this is helpful. But I will take a few moments for a closer look by examining one particular Election District here in the Bronx. It's just a few blocks where a lot of my close friends live. I have spent a lot of time in their homes. I have attended a lot of parties in the basements of their buildings, celebrating milestones in their lives and the lives of their children.

This Election District coincides closely with a census tract, so I can look at demographic as well as voting data. 68% of the people are what the US Census calls "Hispanic." I'll say, based on my observation that they're mostly Dominican and Puerto Rico. The Census says 24% of the people are Black. Only 1% of the people in this tract are white.

It's a comparatively poor district, too, although I don't know anybody there who admits to being poor. 36% are listed by the Census as below the poverty line, which is more than twice the New York City average. I will add, for the benefit of those who haven't studied this question: most economists agree that people earning double the official "poverty line" are still poor. That means that the Census Bureau's poverty numbers are dramatically understated. And that is nation wide. New York City is more expensive than most places. 26% of the children in the district live in Census-defined "poverty." So do half of the seniors over 65.

So how do these people vote?

The official tallies for the 2020 election show that 93% of the people in this small Election District voted for Biden and 7% for Trump. Those are truly astonishing numbers, overwhelming, in fact. And they conform rather closely with previous elections. So it is definitely noteworthy that the (still unofficial) tallies for this week show a shift: On Tuesday, Kamala Harris received 74% of the vote in these blocks, while DJT got 26%. That is a 19-percentage point shift, and that is a lot.

Harris still won an overwhelming majority in the district, in the borough, and in the city. But it means that an awful lot of people on those streets and in those buildings are looking around wide-eyed at their neighbors and asking, "What the fuck are you thinking? How could you possibly vote for a man who says - loudly and daily - that he hates us? When he says he has day-one plans to deport you and me, do you think he's talking about someone else?"

I'll say these things: 

• Even DJT himself doesn't seem to understand how tariffs work so it's a little hard for me to get angry at people who never had a college economics course and believe what he says about that.
• Male supremacy and its corollary - rape culture - haven't really gone away. That didn't just make it hard for lots of men (and women, too!) to vote for Kamala Harris. It also made it easier for them to look at a weak, blustering, misogynist and see him as the imaginary tough guy he thinks he is.
• We saw in his first campaign that a lie, repeated often enough, establishes itself as a kind of alternate truth. And his lies never let up: about the economy, about immigrant "armies" seizing towns and eating pets, about emergency hurricane relief... do I need to go on?
• I will add that white-supremacist thinking is a drug, along with great nation chauvinism. White people aren't the only ones who are susceptible. How often have I noted that the first thing new immigrants to this country want to do is close the door behind them?

These things are all true. But as I said at the outset, they should not distract us too much. We should certainly not let them divide us. In this one little microcosm I have been looking at, DJT only fooled one-quarter of the people. The other three quarters were unmoved by his bullshit. That is no small thing. If we are going to beat back fascism we have to begin by uniting with the people around us who see the truth. We ourselves would be fools to reject unity because someone in their family or someone of their ethnicity fell for DJT's propaganda. And beating back fascism is only a start. If we hope to defeat racial capitalism itself, we're going to have to win over those people who did fall for the lies. Berating them today as weak-minded and treasonous may satisfy our anger and disappointment, but I don't see how it helps us in the long run. Laughing at them when they themselves get deported may feel like justice, but I don't see how it helps us convince them to join us.