In the last four years, President Donald Trump has defunded social programmes, rolled back civil rights protections, and overturned federal protections of land at lightning speed, while carrying on an unrelenting spectacle of suffering. His hires to cabinet positions have been disastrous. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed billions of dollars in cuts to public education. Scott Pruitt, formerly in charge of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was a climate change denier who persuaded Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. His former National Security Advisor John Bolton was a warmonger who brought the US to the brink of war with Iran.

Trump's presidency was spectacularly bad for people of colour, including policies such as the Muslim ban, family separation at the border, raids on undocumented immigrants, and calls for deploying the National Guard to quash protests against police killings of Black Americans. However, as another election comes around, not all people of colour are rushing to the polls to vote for the Democratic candidate Joe Biden either.

In Florida and Pennsylvania, Black and Latino voters did not turn out in sufficient numbers during early voting. In Philadelphia, people are out in the streets protesting the police killing of a mentally ill Black man named Walter Wallace Jr. When a reporter asked Joe Biden to respond to the shooting, Biden chose instead to criticise the protesters: "What I say is that there is no excuse whatsoever for the looting and the violence."

Many young Black voters feel angry about being told to save America by voting for Joe Biden, whose policies have ravaged Black communities for over 40 years. Biden was the architect of the 1994 crime bill that led to the mass incarceration of Black men and the decimation of Black communities. Biden was also responsible for passing the bankruptcy bill, which denied college graduates from claiming bankruptcy if they were unable to pay back their loans. The Obama/Biden response to the 2008 financial crisis was to bail out Wall Street rather than homeowners, leaving Black families to lose their homes. Middle class Black Americans lost most of their wealth under Obama and Biden.

No matter who wins, many young Black voters feel that they will lose. Michelle Alexander and Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor have written about how Black communities have been brutalised by a racialised criminal justice system and cut off from wealth in a white supremacist society, in which the majority of Black Americans still do not have access to decent housing, good public education, healthcare, or a college education. Angela Davis has written about how a capitalist, racialised justice system profits off the imprisonment of Black bodies.

The most brutal aspect of the Trump administration was his family separation policy, which led to the separation of children from their parents at the borders. We now know of 545 children who have still not found their parents. Yet, Biden has the lowest support among Latino voters. Obama and Biden deported three million people and also separated children from their families.

Professional South Asians tend to be reliable Democratic voters. South Asians working for Silicon Valley, oil and gas, or Wall Street are financially comfortable and benefit from a liberal Democratic Party that values diversity and favours corporations. They loathe Donald Trump's hateful rhetoric and xenophobic policies. Hate crimes against Muslims and other minorities have been rampant and brutal under Donald Trump, and there are fears that a Trump reelection may lead to a rising tide of fascism and efforts to denaturalise citizens. Yet, there are South Asians who support Trump, as evidenced by the visual spectacle of the 50,000 Indians who attended the Modi-Trump rally in Texas. Mehnaaz Momen, Associate Professor at Texas A&M International University, Laredo, says, "A Trump reelection will probably mean a huge economic and health crisis nationwide. It would also mean the rise of white supremacist power. On the other hand, in a Biden presidency, I see upcoming foreign wars." Many Yemeni voters will not vote for Biden because the US supported the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen. Other Asian voters worry about what any US president could do to other countries, from invasion to regime change to bombing and Tuesday kill lists.

Working class people of colour are the least likely to support either candidate. A Pew research study shows that almost half of the non-voters in 2016 were people of colour. More than half of non-voters make less than USD 30,000 a year. In Michigan, Florida and Wisconsin, Black non-voters who did not vote in 2016 hailed from communities ravaged by incarceration, police brutality, and unemployment because of trade deals that exported jobs overseas.

This may be the easiest year for a Democrat to win an election, with a pandemic raging on. More than 230,000 people have died, the economy has been savaged, and people have lost jobs. But most working-class people of colour think that they will continue to suffer under either administration.

Dr Gemini Wahhaj is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College, North Harris, Texas, USA. Email: [email protected]