I write these words between a pervasive enthusiasm embodied in car horns, screams, and even singing. The celebratory fervor permeates a nation, despite the electoral race proving uncharacteristically paired with those supposedly exasperated with “Trump’s” America. The projected victory for former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris has engendered many to believe we have arrived at a new era. The reality is that this election preserves the racist foundation necessary for this anti-black nation.

This election functioned as a supposed counter to the Trump administration. Biden and Harris as President and Vice Presidential elect posit that America is not racist, yet to the incisive gaze, their “victory” proves the exact opposite.

To offer an analogy, it is as if the 2020 election placed the black community at a bar and presented the choice between a cocktail and a shot of vodka. The celebratory fervor in the projected victory illuminates a preference for white nationalism as a cocktail. The option to not drink or total abolition of white supremacy is usurped by the pseudo “sweetness” of a social and systemic drug.

Yet, many employ Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory as a bandaid over a bullet wound, a lethal combination to say the least. Those celebrating betray a desire for systemic disenfranchisement masked by a smile and display normalized cowardice which brings the prodigious presence of blackness to the feet of their master. Harris and Biden’s victory proves that white supremacy is still the president, and white nationalists still have their foot on the neck of the black collective.

We still cannot collectively breathe, or sleep, in peace, and with a cop and crime bill author in office, this “victory” actualizes the law and order that serves as a cornerstone in the previous presidency and every presidency before it. Thus, we depart only in the optics of a change that many fear. This celebratory sound was undoubtedly silent after Nat Turner’s rebellion and centuries after his earthly departure, the descendants of this black hero, his adversaries, and oppressors would meet his contemporary presence with the scorn of fear that would reproduce the same fate.

Nat Turner embodies the black power we as a nation saw wielded to aid a white nationalist to acquire a systemic victory. The same forces that confined a mass of people to the dichotomy of two choices circumscribe black possibility into what the black community can do for white people as delineating the apex of their collective power. Nevertheless, the real revolution awaits the black collective behind eyes that see past the optical allure of veiled white supremacy.