Zerlina Maxwell

“Dems should be looking toward untapped numbers rather than the Joe Lunchbuckets they assume abandoned ship for Trump in 2016. It wasn’t the white working-class voters who flipped from Obama to Trump that the Democrats really lost. To believe this ignores the fact that there are big cities in all of the controversial states Hillary Clinton lost—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—with large black populations. It ignores the fact that the decrease in black turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee was larger than the margin of Trump’s victory by a factor of ten, meaning that it wasn’t the white working-class voters who abandoned them, it was the black voters who felt they weren’t being acknowledged and so chose to stay home who tipped the vote in those states.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide

“Racism isn’t necessarily something that white people think about on a daily basis, but the increased share of people of color in the electorate has created a moment where America’s focus has finally been forced to address issues of racial and gender justice, arguably for the first time since the civil rights movement and subsequent legislature. Our increased numbers demand that the powers that be address racism and white privilege once and for all. This coalition of newly empowered voters of the Obama era along with social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, has to some white Americans signaled that they are losing, when actually it’s just society realigning to become what it is meant to be.”
― Zerlina Maxwell, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide