When I received the text saying, “Trump lost!” at exactly 11:40 a.m. on November 7, the words sent a little thrill through me. I don’t approve of a leader who spews hate and misinformation on a national scale. A baby facist, if you would. So after sitting in suspense for days, Donald Trump’s loss is something for me to celebrate. 

But Joe Biden’s win? Not so much.

White supremacy didn’t end because we decided to elect someone with half a brain. Although the massive support Trump has received is an obvious example of how apathetic America is to racism (or how outright racist Americans are), Biden will not stop Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) from being hurt by the institutions that white supremacists created for us. 

Biden does not want to defund the police, he would lose his moderate and centrist support. He would rather “reform.” He’s not going to provide universal healthcare or free college. The police were created to catch enslaved people in the south, to keep Native Americans from white spaces in the west, and to perpetuate the class divide in the north. Despite this, and despite their failure to genuinely protect and serve, Biden won’t defund the police. And even though healthcare and college are both things that have been made purposefully inaccessible to BIPOC, Biden won’t make them more attainable. He will pretend to listen to our voices, but he will fall short of our demands. 

Biden is going to feed America crumbs, he’s going to take baby steps. I know that these are baby steps in the right direction, but baby steps still leave people dead in this country—baby steps inevitably dilute social issues and make them more difficult for non-marginalized people to pinpoint and care about.  

And that’s just our government. The culture of exclusion, of privilege, of entitlement, will remain until white people at an individual level decide to do something about it. Liberals are celebrating his victory as if he didn’t create the 1994 Crime Bill, as if his own running mate, Kamala Harris, didn’t say that she believed the women who accused him of sexual assault. As if she didn’t use his racism to her advantage when debating against him months ago. 

White people need to take anti-racist action so they are not complicit to their own whiteness. The government can’t make laws to force white people to organize and pay reparations to Black people. The government can’t force everyone to participate in land-back movements and give the taxes they pay on the land to Indigenous people. And, to be honest, the government would never want to. If white people are interested in creating a better America, they need to start organizing themselves, educating themselves, and giving BIPOC back what was taken from them, because our government is almost completely uninterested. 

Ergo, Biden is not going to save us, and no politician will. 

Of course, I would rather have Biden than Trump, but we can’t just take this very, very, very small step towards a better future and discard our advocacy shoes. We need to continue to dismantle white supremacy and the colonial mindset; white people especially need to take stock of what is going on in white America, because almost half of white youth, half of white women, half of white what-have-you, have chosen whiteness and white supremacy once again, even if the other option was just less racist. 

The soul of our country rests in the hands of all of us—but please remember that BIPOC are minorities. Biden may not be as racist as Trump, but we can’t forget his record. We need to keep him in check and stay vigilant. This country will never do the right thing without a push, and we need to make sure we don’t get complacent, especially after winning a battle that we were so close to losing.