This is only the beginning

After a taxing week of incessantly watching the electoral map reach 270, many of us received the outcome we were expecting. Joe Biden pulled through on Saturday, Nov. 7, an announcement that allowed BIPOC, the LGBTQIA+ community and women a sigh of relief. As we’ve mentioned before, a lot was riding on this election as far as essential human rights. 

While we can allow ourselves a moment to breathe a sigh of relief, we need to acknowledge that our job is not over yet. In fact, it has just started. Voting was just the beginning. There is still much work to be done. 

We are still upholding an inherently racist judicial system that does not value Black and brown lives. We still have a Supreme Court justice that was appointed under rushed and partisan circumstances and is a threat to women’s health care. And, nearly half of the country decided that all of the racist, homophobic, mysoginistic, xenophobic and anti-democratic words and actions of U.S. President Donald Trump weren’t prioritized concerns when casting their votes, and were willing to vote for another four years of him in office. 

Trump’s motto for this election season was, “Keep America Great,” when America is far from it. The Trump campaign gave the people who hurt and destroyed our democracy a platform to further their inherently anti-democratic agenda. The values these people hold aren’t going to go away because their “fearless leader” does. America is based on white supremacy and will demonize anyone who gets in the way of it. 

Maybe we won’t have a white nationalist as our president anymore, effective Jan. 20, 2021, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to hold President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris accountable for the next four years. Both of them have a track record when it comes to Black incarceration, and following through on some questionable policies in their respective roles as vice president and senator. 

This serves as a reminder that most of us settled when it came to electing Biden and Harris, because they would enable us to work towards the democracy that has been wrongfully barricaded from us for the past four years. 

The question remains: where do we go from here? Our neighbors with Trump-Pence signs will still be here, the Proud Boys who were told to “stand by” are still standing by and our system is still broken. As members of the Philadelphia community, our votes were a part of the deciding factor for who was going to be elected president. If anything, this election did not solve our problems, but it showed that change can start in our own city when people work towards it, especially young voters. But we have to follow through with that change. We cannot leave it in the hands of politicians, as we’ve seen that none of them are perfect. 

We must continue to hold our government and politicians accountable, and not on a pedestal. We must continue to protest for Black lives and women’s rights. We have to challenge this system that does not allow for equal opportunities and representation. The most recently elected Congress has more BIPOC and women than ever before, a result of this election showing us that it’s possible for us to move towards an ideal U.S. 

While we’ve been holding our breaths all year leading up to this election, it’s time to let it go, but not let our guard down. This is only the beginning.