Source: Kianna Naomi | Short Film
With the midterms right around the corner, I asked a friend if he had registered to vote. He said “no” in that way that shuts down a discussion. It was the type of dismissiveness that made me embarrassed. He couldn’t believe that I thought by voting I was actually making a difference AND I couldn’t believe that he didn’t think it was worth a shot.
To him, registering to vote was just playing the puppet and allowing the master to pull our strings. To me, refusing to vote was a silent tap dance towards our people’s demise.
My friend was completely resigned from the democratic process and for a split second I believed he was onto something. This is the oppressor’s master plan at work: Don’t just make it hard for them to vote. Make it hard to imagine it being worth it and they’ll do the rest for us.
Voter suppression isn’t new; we aren’t new to being suppressed. And every day the powers at be find new ways to perfect their methods:
They change ID requirements to make sure that we don’t have the right ones.
They close voting locations.
They intimidate us from showing up.
It’s the faceless bots on social media feeding us misinformation.
It’s the billionaire class trying to placate us with music, but it’s also us, a refusal to regain our power.
These aren’t accidental barriers. They’re part of a system that has spent generations convincing us that participation in the “Great American Experiment” is complicated, inaccessible, and pointless. It’s easy to blame voter suppression because voter suppression is real. But if we step back, we should realize that by not voting, we are playing into their game, a game that has always been more difficult for us to get ahead. And when we don’t vote, we don’t play, and so we DAMN SURE never win.
Anxiety of Civic Engagement
We feel the weight of the oppressor long before reaching the ballot. It’s a pressure that builds in the chest and ties bricks to our shoulders. It is a heaviness that settles deep in our bones each time the news mentions purged voter rolls, ICE presence at polling locations, or the fresh set of hoops we have to jump through to exercise our rights.
We question the point of the weight we carry trying so hard to join a system that tries even harder to keep us out and before we know it we decide to put the weight down altogether. Carrying it around never got us anywhere. Right?
Eventually some of us stopped trying to change the world we live in and decided that surviving it was more than enough. Frustration, unchecked, calcifies into fatigue around the spirit. It feels like voting is just trying to decide which whip has the prettiest handle. And it’s not just about Republicans or Democrats, the right or the left. Because despite both sides pandering for our votes, making promises to decrease the bodies in jail and increase the jobs for our families, not much changes.
Both sides, let niggas down. Have thrown niggas to the side and out to dry.
When distrust in both parties is as widespread as it is, voting feels symbolic at best and delusional at its worst.
It’s easy to ask ourselves, “Why even bother?” So we don’t. Caring just costs too much. It’s too much to realize we’ve been lied to, our hopes thwarted again. That defeat is deafening.
With everything we go through we must focus on what’s right in front of us and call it a blessing. Do I have a job? Are my people good? Are they alive? Is my home safe? Shit do I even have a home? All of this is great, but what is survival without an attempt of change?
Black people are in a toxic relationship with America. And America is a partner that would kill us and say we made them do it. They didn’t want to hurt us. We just didn’t know any better. Didn’t do any better. Never asked for any better.
But since we aren’t leaving America, we have to BUILD the one we want. We’ve just been so busy getting it out the mud, like we’ve always done. We spend so much time refusing to be broken that we forget it’s also our duty to create.
But that’s their hope. That’s what they want us to do. To feel like the voting doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, Elon bribes other voters to the polls. You see that right?! They know voting matters. They just don’t want your vote. They have enough people agreeing with them. They just need Black people to stay quiet.
They want us to feel that it just isn’t worth it. Resignation to the “inevitable” isn’t a byproduct of voter suppression. It’s the goal.
They want Black people to believe change is too difficult, too impossible to even think about striving for it. But if it were the truth, then they wouldn’t be trying so hard to convince us of it. They wouldn’t need to spend billions and yes, I mean BILLIONS on fake narratives and misinformation.
We have to accept that not voting isn’t as powerful of a statement as we think it is. We have to admit that by giving in, we’ve given up our power. We’ve given up our lives to the fate of the world, to the whims of white powers who we KNOW would kill us. Continue killing us if they can.
Showing up is your refusal to disappear. Your refusal to allow anyone to silence you. We’ve come too far to stop caring. We have too much freedom now to stop here.
We have too much freedom now to stop here.
We are meant to do more than survive, my nigga. You and your children are meant for more, my nigga.
Vote because power is something we must demand. We must claim it and we must use it at every turn.
Go to the poll to show them “WE WILL NOT BE REMOVED”.
It’s our voice in collective fashion. It’s the direct line to those who hoped we’d given up on reaching them in the first place. I can’t guarantee what the outcome of participation will be, but I know what we get when we resign ourselves to the box they’d prefer to keep us in.
You get the silence that the system was engineered to deliver on our behalf.
Our Contributors Brian Lauderdale & AAV
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Who are some good candidates that truly support us in some way? I stay in Texas and midterm election ads are ridiculous on both sides, I want to vote for the people’s party ✊🏾