The coronavirus pandemic has caused major economic damage since it hit the U.S. with force in March. It also put the spotlight on racial disparities that had been simmering beneath the surface, from the wealth gap to racial social injustice.

The unemployment rate remains elevated at 7.9% – and stuck in double-digit territory for Black workers.

With that state of the job market and the economy in mind – along with no new round of fiscal stimulus to help boost people’s finances on the immediate horizon – Americans have been voting early in droves. More than 95 million people have already voted ahead of Nov. 3 – a number that has surpassed two-thirds of all ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election.

“Americans are going to the voting booth. They’re thinking critically, more so about every aspect of their life, and not just their wallets when they go in,” Rev. Willie Bodrick, senior pastor at the historic Twelfth Baptist where Martin Luther King, Jr. once preached, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.

“I think Americans should not just vote with their wallets, but they should be voting with their hearts, with their conscience,” Bodrick said.

“We’re talking about economics, but we’re also talking about health care,” he added. “We’re also talking about the environment. We’re also dealing with so many issues as it relates to state action against Black bodies.”

‘America needs to repent...even Joe Biden’

The continued cycle of violence against Black people is rooted in systemic racism, said Bodrick. “America needs to repent,” said Bodrick. “And I think both the president, who has continued to stoke the racial climate in this country, and even Joe Biden, who has admittedly said that, you know, there were some things that he’s made mistakes on,” should repent, he said.

Biden sponsored the 1994 crime law which criminal justice experts view as one of the key drivers of mass incarceration of Black men in the 1990s. Prior to announcing his candidacy for president, he apologized for his role in getting that law enacted.

According to a Brookings Institution report, the incarceration rate more than quadrupled from 1980 to 2006 because of that law, before reverting back to pre-1994 levels. The authors write that by reinforcing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the 1994 crime bill contributed to racial disparities in drug offense sentencing.

“A person was sentenced to a five-year minimum sentence for five grams of crack cocaine, but it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. Because crack is a cheaper alternative to powder cocaine, it is more prominent in low-income neighborhoods,” wrote Rashawn Ray and William Galston. “These neighborhoods are more likely to be predominately Black and in urban areas that can be overpoliced more easily than suburban or rural areas.”

Biden took some blame for the bill. In a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speech in Washington, D.C. in January, he said: “Back in 2010...Barack and I finally reduced the disparity in sentencing, which we’d been fighting to eliminate, in crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. It was a big mistake when it was made. We thought, we were told by the experts, that, “crack, you never go back.” That it was somehow fundamentally different—it is not different. But it has trapped an entire generation.”

Ray and Galston said the damage caused by the crime law is permanent. “While the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, enacted under the Obama-Biden administration, reduced the crack/powder cocaine disparity from 100:1 to 18:1, the damage had been done, and its effects continue to this day,” they wrote.

Bodrick is a senior advisor to Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), who is up for reelection on Nov. 3.

“[Biden and Trump] need to repent and this country needs to repent for the sins against those Black bodies and other bodies in this country who have not been able to be healed and brought forward to a fullness of the Americanness that we all are striving towards,” said Bodrick.

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