Lucha Bright, a member of a group called Refuse Fascism, addressed people through a P.A. system. “This is a new phase in the struggle!” Bright told the crowd. She had gathered a small audience together, and one of the activists who accompanied her urged them to raise their arms in the air and wave “bye-bye” to Trump. “The celebration is righteous—we should be celebrating,” Bright told me. “But Trump is also saying he won. And he’s also got fascist thugs in the streets.” (At that moment, Trump was at one of his golf courses, where he’d gone for a morning round.)
Up the block, Michelle Healy, a longtime organizer for the Service Employees International Union, was part of a group of people wearing S.E.I.U. purple. She’d been out on these streets a number of times in the past few years, she said. She pointed to the spot where she’d stood during a protest against the Trump Administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border. “Trump created this idea that there is, like, a violent left,” she said. “My experience is that it has been moms, dads, grandparents, kids.” She looked around. “It’s all Americans here.”
Nearby, in the shade of a building, a young man named Rahim—he declined to give his last name—stood with his arms crossed. “People just show up for a celebration, but they weren’t here two weeks ago, when we was protesting for our rights,” Rahim said. “It’s really weird to hear a bunch of white folks yell, ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ on Black Lives Matter Plaza because Biden won the election.” Rahim, who is twenty, said he had been helping to organize protests since May, when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. He’d just voted in a Presidential election for the first time. “It was cool to vote, but it just sucks that I had to pick between two shitty candidates,” he said. “I just hope people focus on the bigger picture that there’s still work to be done. Like, just because Biden won the White House does not mean that everything is all happy and dandy.”
A few feet away, a middle-aged woman named Ingrid Vaca was resting for a moment on a bench. Vaca, who was born in Bolivia and lives in Virginia, has two children in the DACA program, and has been involved in organizing for immigrant rights for years. “I breathe, like, democracy today,” she said. “Since Tuesday, I couldn’t sleep. My stomach was tight, thinking, and waiting. Three days ago, when they said that in Pennsylvania Trump was winning—you know, I started to cry again to God because I’m scared a lot. He wanted to deport everybody.” She was holding a homemade sign that read “Here to stay,” and she had one mask layered on top of another. That Biden has pledged to protect the DACA program meant everything to her, because it would help her kids. “I came to this country for a dream,” she said. “I think some of my dream, today, is going to be real.”
In McPherson Square, in the shadow of the Department of Veterans Affairs, a band was playing in the bed of a truck, and CNN was being projected onto a giant screen. Someone had blown up an inflatable Trump with rodent teeth. Deniz Houston, an American-flag fanny pack worn like a sash across her chest, was standing around with her friends, smiling. “It feels like we won the World Cup for the first time and defeated Fascism in the same day,” Houston, who is twenty-six, said. “I understand that this feeling might be limited to very select parts of America. But I’m confident that Joe Biden, unlike Trump, is going to try and do what he thinks is best for everyone.” Her father had voted for Trump, twice. “I tried really hard to persuade him, but he just fell victim to fake news and the people who surround him,” she said. I asked if she’d talked to her father after the race was called. She said that less than an hour after the news broke, “He texted me, ‘Don’t forget to bring your hair dryer when you visit tomorrow.’ ”
