After losing her father during the pandemic, a young Wisconsin voter tries to persuade her community to vote in unprecedented numbers against Trump.
Riley stands near an urn containing her father Lawrence Riley’s ashes, inside her family’s home in Milwaukee.
Riley’s father, Lawrence, was the first person in Milwaukee to die of covid-19. As Trump initially downplayed the lethal nature of the virus, covid-19 had invaded Black neighborhoods like her own. Health departments in majority-White areas were more likely to receive resources to set up testing sites, distribute masks and engage in public education campaigns, even as rumors proliferated that Black people were somehow immune.
Pandemics tend to be forgotten - public health experts note that hardly any memorials remember the flu of 1918, which killed 675,000. The pundits Riley Her boyfriend, Kenneth Bargy, 26, sometimes wondered if she took it too far. When they started dating two years ago, she told him, “A man who doesn’t vote is a dealbreaker for me.” He said he regularly cast ballots, but she searched for his voting records online to verify his account.
“We were in the news a lot when my daddy died,” she said. When she’d look through the comments on news articles, she said, many online did not offer condolences or question the country’s pandemic preparation. Instead, they looked at her father’s pudgy belly, and blamed him for having diabetes and other preexisting conditions.“They didn’t even consider why he might have had diabetes,” Riley said. “Look at what is being offered in our community.
Yes, the excitement about a female president was “cute,” but Noel said she had grown tired of campaigns run on vibes. Barack Obama was a vibe - she was 8 when the first Black president was elected, in part because their city had some of the highest Black participation rates in history.The adults in her life were so joyous back then. But her neighborhood never got much cleaner, nor did she think her schools got better.
Harris’s speeches felt like more of the same. “It feels like she is going to say whatever she’s going to say to win,” Noel told her. “I would just prefer if she got up there and said, ‘I ain’t gonna lie. I can do some things and I can’t do some things.’” Riley tried to personalize her feelings to send a message. She talked about how terrible she’d feel if she didn’t vote. “If Trump wins, I’m going to be like, ‘Damn, what if my one vote could’ve did something?’” she said.
In the first days of early voting, Democratic observers were concerned that the share of early votes from Milwaukee was lagging. Obama was dispatched to draw out voters on Harris’s behalf on Sunday. There are no plants here that make computer chips. Biden’s lead pipe replacement program has yet to replace a single pipe in the neighborhood. And the antipoverty agency that was supposed to distribute funds from the stimulus package closed down in April, mired in scandal.
Canvassers Asani Taylor, left, and Elijah Porter, right, speak with Lula Wright as they knock on doors. “Black people have always known the risk of losing democracy and we as Black women have had the burden of trying to save it,” Cross said. “What’s exciting now is that it seems like more people, White people, are recognizing that risk.”In the dining room of Whitley Riley’s childhood home hangs a framed photo of her father, decked in a fedora and stroking his chin, clouds in the background.
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