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Election 2020

What Police Reform and Election 2020 Have in Common

Reforming is hard, be it a police department or an entire country

Denise Clay
Momentum
Published in
4 min readNov 5, 2020

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Portland police officers near the police union building on September 28, 2020, in North Portland, Oregon. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

I’ve found myself repeating the late Maya Angelou a lot over the last four years as I’ve watched Donald Trump — a man who did so much harm to Atlantic City, New Jersey that it’s still trying to recover—do the same to the United States as its president.

The only big difference is that 232,500 people didn’t end up poisoned at the Taj Mahal casino buffet.

Trump has always shown you exactly who he is: A crass, brazen, incompetent racist who refuses to pay what he owes, leaving bankruptcies — moral and financial — in his wake. He has never met a rule that he thought applied to him, not a consequence he would accept by way of accountability for his own actions.

And yet, millions of people, many of them White, have given him their votes.

This is why, no matter what ultimately happens with the presidential election, I’m going to need White people to stop telling me that “this isn’t who we are as a people.”

Because for the last two election cycles, White voters have shown America’s…

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Momentum
Momentum

Published in Momentum

Momentum is a blog that captures and reflects the moment we find ourselves in, one where rampant anti-Black racism is leading to violence, trauma, protest, reflection, sorrow, and more. Momentum doesn’t look away when the news cycle shifts.

Denise Clay
Denise Clay

Written by Denise Clay

Independent political journalist, wordsmith, believer in media diversity, representing Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware…

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