Black men are encouraging others not to vote, and/or clowning for the Right-wing and MAGA
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I told two Black male friends in late 2015 that I had lived too long, when they, younger men, told me they were voting for Trump. The cognitive dissonance was too much for this old(er) activist.
I’m still alive, and now another younger Black male friend is encouraging people not to vote at all. Mind blown. Grief activated. Rage engaged.
Dr. Leo Croft made the argument against the Black male and female “influencers” who have sold out to White Supremacy. I told him I would write a companion piece, but I can’t compete with what he wrote, which is linked below.
What I can, and am doing here, is speaking clearly to Black men who voted for Trump and those who encourage others not to vote, about how they are selling out. Like Dr. Leo, I’m not pulling punches.
Racists, blatant or covert, throughout American history, have been afraid for Black people to vote
Call me an old radical, I’m fine with that. I was in a relationship in the early 1990s with a member of the All African Revolutionary party, which was headed by Kwame Turé, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael. In the early 2000s, I was in a relationship with Arthur Silvers, the former head of the Congress on Racial Equality, CORE in Los Angeles. My receipts started long before then, though.
My activism stared in my early teens.
My activism didn’t start with those relationships. The relationships happened because I was an ally and activist from the age of fourteen. I had known about and believed in the Movement before, but was too young and too stuck in a small Texas town to get personally involved. To my everlasting regret.
In 1966, I learned more about the movement from Youth Ministers from the Disciples of Christ, who had marched in Selma and Birmingham with Martin Luther King, Jr. My deeper education began one year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing communities of color the right to fair congressional districts.
Why we needed a Voting Rights Act and why we must not destroy it
Prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering kept the votes of members of those communities from counting, by dividing them and grouping the pieces into majority white voting districts.
Today, and for the last nine years, Republicans are and have been working to erode or eliminate the historic Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court is complicit.
Gerrymandering is happening again. Republicans in red states are calling it redistricting, but the results are the same. Destroying the power of the vote in communities of color, and making sure districts favoring Republicans are drawn. Democrats in Blue states, have retaliated by redrawing districts to favor Democrats being elected. Tit for Tat is the only way to keep red states from keeping control of Congress
At the state level, the Virginia Supreme Court rejected redrawn lines that would favor Democrat candidates. Each state will have to defend their redistricting, which can then be brought to the Supreme Court.
More to the point of dismantling the Voting Rights Act, A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down a Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana. Republicans in several Southern states can now work on eliminating House districts with large minority populations. The very ones that were previously protected under the Voting Rights Act.
So, to those Black men who don’t think voting is important, do all of you live in fully integrated communities? Do you already live in voting districts where your vote could be diluted because you are surrounded by MAGAts? Then maybe you can get away with not voting.
But if you, or your relatives or friends, are still residing in communities that are a majority of people of color, why would you think your vote doesn’t count? That thinking is exactly what Republicans and MAGAts want you to believe. Just as their ancestors, who fought to keep you from voting in the first place, wanted Black people to believe.
Racists, blatant or covert, throughout American history, have been afraid for Black people to vote. Jim Crow laws originated after Reconstruction, when hundreds of Black men were elected to State and Federal offices in the South.
When officials from the North left, who had been appointed to make sure elections were fair after the Civil War, racist Southerners wasted no time in kicking out the newly elected Black mayors, sheriffs, clerks, city council members, and State representatives. Federal Senators and Representatives who were Black were removed by gerrymandering.
They also instituted poll taxes, and outrageous Literacy tests in order to vote, which at the time kept poverty stricken Black people from the polls. In addition to the arbitrary literacy tests and poll taxes, Black people in many southern towns were intimidated, harassed, and assaulted when they triedt to register to vote. All of these efforts to keep Black people from voting continued until the Voting Rights Act passed.
The Voting Rights Act, propelled by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality, who organized the Freedom Riders, SNCC, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and others, put an end to all the actions taken by racists to keep Black people from voting, which had also kept them from serving as elected officials.
“In Selma,” King wrote, “we see a classic pattern of disenfranchisement typical of the Southern Black Belt areas where Negroes are in the majority” (King, “Selma — The Shame and the Promise”).
The Voting Act of 1965 put an end to all the actions taken by racists to keep Black people from voting, which had also kept them from serving as elected officials
All these efforts and sacrifices, including deaths, go unacknowledged by any decision on the part of Black men not to vote.
Now, Black men tell their communities not to vote and Trump laughs
Not all Black men, of course. Maybe only older Millennials, who are buying into the brainwashing that comes with the disenchantment with government overall.
News Flash. We are all currently disenchanted with government overall. However, we have forgotten that those people work for us. Not voting is the same as a manager not giving a performance review to an employee. And without a review via voting, our “representatives” don’t take us seriously, or think about us at all.
Seven Years ago, Trump told a largely white audience,
“They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary. They didn’t come out. And that was big — so thank you to the African American community.”
The New York Times reported,
Had blacks voted in the numbers they did in 2012, Trump would probably not be president. So, his newly announced campaign “Black Voices for Trump,” an appeal to black voters for 2020, rings hollow against his record of racism and litany of lies.
This isn’t about Hillary, or even Kamala winning or losing. This is about allowing a loud, shameless and avowed racist to be elected to the Presidency. In the most recent case, letting him get elected over a Black woman.
I wonder if the Black men who don’t vote today know their history
My friend who claims voting is irrelevant, thinks we should take the country back, not politely ask for it. I don’t entirely disagree.
And neither did “By any means necessary” Malcolm X, or the Black Panthers, or the Congress on Racial Equality later in the 1960s. They agreed.
While CORE trained the non-violent Freedom Riders, interracial groups of young people who rode on integrated busses through the South to register Black people to vote, they changed tactics after some of the Riders were firebombed, beaten, and eventually killed.
After 1966, “CORE focused its efforts on black nationalism and political self-determination in the black community. Following King’s assassination, CORE’s leader, McKissick called him “the last prince of nonviolence” and declared that nonviolence was “a dead philosophy.”
Malcolm X spoke with his whole chest to a gathering of Black leaders in 1963. What he said then and there applies today. When states gerrymander Black communities into a largely white districts, Black people lose power. Voting is one way to keep or wrestle back your power of representation.
“Let me explain what I mean. A segregated district or community is a community in which people live, but outsiders control the politics and the economy of that community. They never refer to the white section as a segregated community. It’s the all-Negro section that’s a segregated community. Why? The white man controls his own school, his own bank, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything, his own community; but he also controls yours. When you’re under someone else’s control, you’re segregated.” — Malcolm X
Malcolm wanted the Voting Rights Act, even if it had to instituted by revolution. He was under no illusion that President Lyndon Johnson was going to push for that bill and sign it into law solely out of the goodness of his heart. Certainly he knew that Congress might not pass it. Voting rights must be fought for.
“Don’t let anybody tell you anything about the odds are against you. If they draft you, they send you to Korea and make you face 800 million Chinese. If you can be brave over there, you can be brave right here. These odds aren’t as great as those odds. And if you fight here, you will at least know what you’re fighting for” — Malcolm X
Substitute in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran, and the same holds true. Today, you may not be forced to fight overseas, although some say that could happen, but you must still be brave enough to fight for your rights here and now.
Some of the Black leaders Malcolm addressed that day, still held onto the belief that if they were grateful for what was previously given to them, they would get more. Malcolm knew better.
It took both non-violent protests using sit-ins, marches and Freedom Riders patiently registering Black voters, and the threat of outright revolt, to bring the Congress of 1964 to its senses. For them to finally pass the Voting Rights Act.
Today we need both the non-violent protesting that’s been going on to continue, and a promise of revolt if the Voting Rights Act doesn’t get its teeth back. Now that the Supreme Court is gutting the Voting Rights Act, it is time to fight to reinstate it in all its original power.
What we definitely DO NOT need is Black men NOT voting.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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Photo by Florida Memory on Unsplash
