by Ruth Rachel Anderson-Avraham
Just shy of one year prior to his death, my 83-year-old father, known affectionately by many as “Abe”, a Jamaican national of diverse heritage who was the holder of a Green Card and a Permanent Resident in the United States, received letters from the General Registrar of the City of Norfolk, Virginia Department of Elections and the Democratic National Committee (the "DNC"). The Department of Elections encouraged him to complete a Virginia Voter Registration Application which had been presumably partially filled in and submitted by him online. The DNC wanted him to complete the official 2018 Democratic Party Survey, and had addressed my father with designated DNC membership and registration numbers.
At the time, my father’s renewal of his Permanent Resident Card was overdue, and I was afraid that he would have problems with the normalization of his immigration status if he were falsely suspected of voter fraud under a Trump Administration implementing a hard-line immigration policy. I therefore helped my father to draft and sign letters addressed to the General Registrar of the City of Norfolk, the Virginia Board of Elections, and the DNC clearly stating that he was a not a U.S. Citizen, had never applied to register to vote in the Commonwealth of Virginia, had never registered as a member of the Democratic Party, and requesting that his name be cancelled and removed from all relevant voter and Party membership rolls.
When my father suddenly passed away on 22 January 2019, he had had lived more than 5o years in the United States, where he studied at Howard University – the undergraduate alma mater of Kamala Harris, where his brother, my uncle, is also Professor Emeritus – and became a physician, married and had children, and paid taxes. His Permanent Resident Card had still not yet been renewed. Although he was not a U.S. Citizen, he was concerned about and committed to making positive contributions to the public welfare in the country in which he lived, as a family man, medical professional, teacher, and member of the larger community.
He felt honored to have witnessed seeing Barack Obama, with whom I share the honor of having graduated from Harvard Law School, elected as the 44th President of the United States. He would have loved to have seen Kamala Harris elected as Vice-President alongside Joe Biden, the 46th.
In respect of politics and the economy, however, my father and I had differences in respect of which we enjoyed many lively debates. Myself a centre right Conservative who has lived over 10 years of her adult life abroad, and who now remains decidedly Independent of the Democratic or Republican parties, I am profoundly concerned about the future of America, whether one looks to the “Left” or the “Right”.
In 2016, as a woman, I admired Hillary Clinton’s historic Presidential campaign, and her aspiration to become the first female President of the United States. At the same time, I also believed in and defended the idea of Donald Trump – the idea that the contribution of the layperson in the building and governance of our country is at the very heart of the United States Constitution. However, ideologically, I did not feel that either candidate truly captured the whole of what The United States of America so desperately needs. Hillary Clinton was not in tune enough with the economic concerns of “middle America” and the working class. Donald Trump was too insensitive to the concerns of women, minorities, and immigrants, although a great defender of Israel. As in 2000, the Electoral College, contradicting the popular vote, ultimately decided America’s fate in a hotly contested race.
In 2020, while working as a Contractor for the United States Small Business Administration Coronavirus Relief Project, I mailed in an absentee ballot to the City of Norfolk Department of elections for the second time in my life in order to protect myself from COVID-19 (the first time I was living abroad in Paris, France), and took great care to track my ballot online in order to ensure that it was received prior to 3rd November, Election Day. I wanted to be certain that my vote would be counted, and not cast aside.
Feeling that corruption is a growing problem for the country of my birth is something that I never would have imagined as a child or young adult. Today, however, I have the deepening sense that unacknowledged elitism, lack of communication, the growth of armed domestic extremism and terrorism, and disconnect with the daily hardships now being experienced by the average American household have taken their toll on the political landscape of our nation's Capital.
Do I think electoral fraud exists in the United States? Yes. Was it so widespread in November 2020 that it cost President Trump re-election? In my humble opinion, not at all. Nevertheless, the violent pro-Trump attack on the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, during the course of which at least 5 people — including at least one police officer and one military veteran — lost their lives, makes the growing need for electoral and economic reform in the United States tragically apparent. Likewise, the fact that more people died in the United States from COVID-19 on that same day than ever before serves as a chilling reminder of the pressing need for stability in healthcare reform providing access to affordable healthcare for all Americans.
And so, as a Jewish woman of color with a diverse heritage and a global sensibility, who is still all too often made subject to judgment based upon physical form and appearance rather than internal substance, the victory of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the loss of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, the victory and ensuing loss of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, are all bittersweet for me.
Domestic markets, and, by reaction, international markets, currently fluctuate within the rift between the potential for the America we know at its best, and the America which we know is sincerely struggling today.
Nevertheless, three years after Charlottesville, “Johnny Reb”, towering eight stories high at the intersection of Commercial Place and East Main Street, not far from City Hall and the City of Norfolk Department of Elections, came down peacefully in June 2020; I wholeheartedly support his final resting place in a Civil War museum or the Elmwood Cemetery. A ferry ride away, just across the Elizabeth River, in Portsmouth, Virginia, however, the battle over the future of the Confederate Monument has been much more fierce, foreshadowing the entry of the Confederate Flag into the Capitol Building for the very first time in American history on 6 January 2021.
American political, social, and economic stability in the pursuit of justice hangs in the balance. In the era of COVID-19, the international prowess of the United States as the model democracy is no longer a post-Civil Rights assumption, although imperfect, but something for which Americans, whatever their heritage or background, must now find some way of coming together in order to defend.
When Ruth Rachel Anderson-Avraham first published the above article on Tuesday, 12 January 2021, she was not aware that her father passed away in 2019 on the anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade decision, 22 January 1973 (410 US 113 (1973)). Such came to light during the controversy following the handing down of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on 24 June 2022 (No. 19-1932, 597 US ___ (2022)).
As stated in his Obituary published by the Virginian-Pilot:, Dr. Anderson was "a champion of a woman's right to choose." (Anderson, Abraham S. Dr., The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Virginia, Friday, 25 January 2019, Obituaries, page 10).
