In the midst of the two-party, seemingly now two-candidate, political brawl this country finds itself engaged in, there are young black voters who are saying no to politics as usual, no to a Democratic Party that has morphed into a moderate Republican Party, and no to a Republican Party that believes in big government only when it encompasses corporate welfare, bloated military and tax loopholes for the wealthyโwhile jumping the shark into a dark abyss of blatant racism, misogyny, xenophobia and an aversion to scientific facts.
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As Leah Wright Rigueur writes in the New York Times, these โare young people who shun two-party politics altogether, critical of a flawed system that all too often marginalizes black voices and needs.โ
โAround election time every year, African Americans are constantly told that those who do not vote are disparaging the legacy of the civil rights movement and those who died in the struggle for the ballot,โ says Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University and author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. โIt is a simplistic formulation that reduces that historic movement to a struggle to choose between this politician or that politician, when that movement was about so much more.โ
Sheโs absolutely right. Our ancestors did not die simply for the right to vote. They were slain fighting for the right to autonomy; they were beaten because they fought against inequities and inequality. Voting was merely the conduit through which they thought success would be attained. It was supposed to provide accessโaccess to the life, freedom, liberty and pursuit of happiness that textbooks and fairy tales tell us about. Yet here we are, being told that to vote on principle, to vote for whom we believe in, is endangering the United States of America, and our liberal friends call that progress with a straight face.
For many people of color in this country, particularly black people, the past is always prologue. Still, we are asked to forgive and forget that policies implemented by President Ronald Reagan were expanded by President Bill Clinton, and that policies implemented by President George W. Bush were expanded by President Barack Obama. We are expected to forget, as W.E.B. Du Bois said in 1956, โthat democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no โtwo evilsโ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party.โ
We are told that refusing to buy into a system that has โFor Saleโ signs on our childrenโs backs is dangerous and that we owe it to the future of the democracy to push our principles to the side for the greater good.
We are expected to hide beneath our beds, cowering in the dark, afraid of the Republican bogeyman known as Donald Trump, when our time would be just as well spent searching for an honest politician with a lantern in the sunlight.
We are told to walk along the smooth road of โnegative peace,โ the preferred route for many white moderates who have never been victims of perpetual, systemic violence. The type of person who, according to Martin Luther King Jr. (pdf), says, โโI agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct actionโ; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another manโs freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a โmore convenient season.โโ
This is why, according to Taylor, centering politicians in black liberation has never been effective.
โIn many elections, people are faced with choosing between two elected officials who are often full of campaign promises and short on postelection action,โ Taylor said. โIt gets tiring, and people begin to feel like their vote does not matter. โฆ Thatโs not a prescription not to vote, but it is to say that we need to tap into the larger legacy of the civil rights movementโwhich is that it is the struggle itself that makes the difference in black peopleโs lives.ย
โThe Black Lives Matter movement has done more to bring awareness and potential action to stop police abuse in black communities than any elected official has ever done,โ Taylor added. โIt is through organizing and building the necessary social movements where we are at our strongest and stand the best chance to transform our neighborhoods and communities.โ
When it comes to the necessity of voting to bring about change, the Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, a Bayard Rustin fellow with the Fellowship of Reconciliation who has been on theย front lines of the Movement for Black Lives, says that both internal and external pressure to cast a ballot is rooted in this nationโs dark history.
โThere is a flat and unsophisticated analysis that fetishizes voting,โ Sekou says. โVoting has a particular meaning in black communities because it has blood on the ballot. The nation was so recalcitrant and so hard-hearted that it didnโt even want black folks to participate in a morally bankrupt system, and continues to attempt to thwart the basic right of a citizen to elect their leaders in the context of a morally bankrupt system inย an attempt to confine democratic energy into whatโs ultimately a dog-and-pony show every election cycle.
โShould we vote? Yes,โ he continued. โBut voting is like marching: Ainโt nothing changed with it, and ainโt nothing going to change without itโฆlike prayer, without works it's dead. Itโs harm reduction, thatโs all. Weโre just trying to give the democracy a clean needle.โ
There are those who believe that working within the two-party construct is the more effective way forward, and that is their right. Change can comeโindeed, it must comeโfrom both inside and outside corrupt walls of power.
Still, as more black voters refuse to swallow the red and blue pills of American politics after centuries of โfirst stepsโ and neglected campaign promises, they have also earned the right to just say no.
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