Opinion: Could Americans look past race and gender biases? Not in 2024

WASHINGTON – One day after the presidential election, people milled about Lafayette Square seemingly looking for common ground – or at least looking for others to converse with about the happenings of the past 24 hours.
Breezy, sunny and an unseasonably 80-degrees outside, visitors and residents were drawn to the White House. Well, as close as one could get to the White House.
A 10-foot-high metal fence erected at the direction of the U.S. Secret Service because of the prospect of violence on Election Day gave visitors only a perimeter peek at the sprawling structure Donald J. Trump will reoccupy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
A white man wearing a “Gays for Trump” t-shirt and hailing from Charleston, South Carolina, said he just had to be in Washington D.C. for Election Day. He was happy his candidate won and excited for the next four years.
Trump has once again been elected to the nation’s highest office. Call him a want-to-be dictator. A fascist. A felon. Unhinged. Call him what you like. But come January, Trump will be called America’s 47th president.
He defeated Vice President Kamala Harris early Wednesday morning by capturing the 270 of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. He becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland 132 years ago to lose the office and win again four years later.
Despite neck-and-neck polling in all seven battleground states, voters didn’t seem to struggle with Trump’s criminal history, erratic behavior, racist ramblings and wispy policy offerings.
Instead, Americans struggled with the racial and gender equality that would have been necessary to elect Harris. And it’s something we’ll likely grapple with for at least the next four years and beyond.
“We have systemic problems in America, and we cannot pretend that the outcome is isolated from the socioeconomic, cultural context that is the United States of America,” Gladys Francis, Howard University’s associate dean for academic student affairs, told me. “Patriarchy is big. Misogyny is big. Racism is big. And I think we have to look at this outcome through that intersectional lens.”
I admit I fretted about this election for upwards of a year. It was worrisome when President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee. He’s too old. Too establishment. Too out of touch. When Biden dropped out and Harris became the nominee, things became downright terrifying. Because for all the criticism and doubt lobbed at him, Biden is still a white man in America.
Harris had only three months to mount a campaign. And I think she ran a strong one. But I lacked confidence in Americans to look beyond our gender and racial biases to elect America’s first woman and Black and South Asian commander in chief.
I wanted to be wrong. I wasn’t.
Because the campaign alone brought out the ugliness – the racist memes mocking Harris’s racial identity, the false accusations about her deciding to become Black out of convenience and the hunt for votes, the questioning of her intelligence and the sexualized way Trump and his supporters referred to Harris.
Yes, Trump led this march of hostility and America joined in misogynistic and racist lockstep.
I’ve heard Republican cries that they’re tired of the status quo, that Democrats have allowed the country to grow stagnant under its party’s leadership. What’s more status quo than the idea that America is unable to elect a woman president? What’s more stagnant than the idea that a highly qualified, accomplished and intelligent woman of color just can’t break through that ceiling?
White women constitute America’s single largest voting bloc at around 59 million people. Yet they voted for Trump – again – in droves. Exit polls show he received at least 52% of their vote.
They voted for a man who has been found liable for sexual assault. They voted for a man who has been accused of sexual assault or harassment by more than a dozen women. They voted for a man who has openly discussed grabbing women by their genitals. They voted for a man who has stripped reproductive rights away from women nationwide.
Talk about voting against your own interests.
Trump also won support from about 45% of Latino voters, according to CNN exit polls. In the 2020 election, Trump won 32% of the Latino vote. This shift even as Trump has promised mass deportations of undocumented migrants and eliminating every open-border policy of the Biden administration. He’s pledged a direct assault on immigrants.
Talk about voting against your own interests.
“I’m worried about how immigrants are going to be treated,” Samantha Banks, 59, a Washington, D.C. salon owner and Jamaican immigrant told me. “I am an immigrant. I came here legally. My parents worked very hard for me to come here legally, and this negative perception that immigrants come here and we take your jobs is B.S. Do you know that we take the jobs that you don’t want?”
I’m trying not to be negative. I do believe many Americans lack moral decency when they idolize Trump, the first convicted felon ever to win a presidential election.
“This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen before and, frankly I believe the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said early Wednesday morning, speaking from West Palm Beach, Florida. “There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal. We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly.” 
Trump is a big reason Americans are as fractured as we are. The name calling. The taunting. The outright mockery. But as a nation, we must rally around each other to try to move past another painful election – even if our president-elect isn’t capable. 
I am not angry or bitter about the outcome of this election. I am extremely disappointed but not at all surprised. This country keeps failing itself. Americans continue to tolerate and embrace our deep and ugly record of racism and sexism.
Sadly, voters proved Tuesday we’re just not ready for new possibilities. I pray it won’t always be that way. Because in darkness, we need hope.
“I am someone who believes that the moment we stop trying we are dead,” Francis told me. “Even in times of sorrow, in times of trials, when it seems that there is no hope, you know at the end of the journey that we have to keep pushing. I have to keep pushing. I have to keep believing as well, not just for me, but for all the women coming after me.”
Suzette Hackney is a national columnist. Reach her on X:@suzyscribe