Shutting My Mouth & Calling Me a Voter: the Right to Vote in the 2016 Presidential Campaign
The fateful day has come for us to choose a new POTUS. I have spent the majority of this election cycle carefully avoiding, for the sake of my sanity, the brunt of the chaos these times conjure. Sadly enough, I have failed miserably. The idiocy of the debates — if that’s what we’re going to call those debacles — and the arrogant violence of Trump and his supporters were inescapable. They were not only thing to avoid, over the last year there has been an onslaught of writers, pundits, moguls, and scholars who demand we, in most cases millenials — and more pointedly black millenials, I observe— vote for Hilary Clinton.
Just recently Oprah, the top media and business mogul of our age, weighed in, saying even if you don’t like Clinton, voting for her is the only option, especially “if you love this country”. She joined the number of critics and platforms who snobbishly order people to vote.
I have been mulling over the gall it takes for someone to say “you have to vote for (name a candidate) or X will happen” or to argue “if you don’t vote then you can’t complain”. Such mulling has led me to draft and erase this essay several times, this preposterous thinking is rather frustrating. These critics are not interested in my exercising my right to vote or politically participate at all, they are obsessed with having their empty and anxious patriotism stroked — they get happy over preaching about the right to vote.
Stop with the scare tactics. Those who decide to not vote know well that Trump could win, since that’s what we’re all so afraid of. While there is still a chance Trump could win (because by some ungodly feat, he is on the ballot), he has been unfavorable in the polls as of late.
Moreover, it is not the responsibility of those refusing to vote to save the nation from Trump or anyone, for that matter. This isn’t to say that voting is bad at all, of course. This critique is about how voting is argued the fact that the U.S. has convoluted ideologies about voting and voters. What our conversations actually do is further expose how disenfranchising America is, and how we have a limited vision of political participation. The citizen’s voice should not stop at the ballot box: that’s what democracy is.
We should intentionally redirect the critique of voters and voting in several directions. In this essay, I name four:
- Political Illiteracy
As a nation, we have failed to have an honest conversation about the political literacy of voters. By political literacy, I mean the grounded, fundamental understanding of how politics and laws interact with citizens’ socioeconomic positioning in society, their education, their employment, their whole life and others, domestically and foreign. The public seems to care more about the act of voting than understanding the implications of who and what they’re voting for.
Trump has been able to triumph because of a national political illiteracy, a mainstream that refuses to listen beyond the political dog whistles that comforts their xenophobic anxieties about terrorists and the jobs that they believe are being stolen (ironically in an age where unemployment is steadily decreasing). These anxieties are not exactly unfounded. The media and politicians have done their part to provoke misinformation and foolishness, on both sides.
And let’s cut the bull with this untruth:“if you don’t vote for Hilary you’re voting for Trump”. Elementary math and common sense tells us different. I’m not even going to dignify that with an example or hyperlink.
The national political illiteracy is indicative of our nation’s lack of understanding of the responsibilities duties of citizenry and elected officials, of governmental offices, of who is lobbied and funded by super PACs and how those running for office seek to fulfill the needs of the people. The political process is something too detached from our everyday lives, this is to the benefit of politicians who solely want a vote.
2. One Vote Wonders
The national political illiteracy disturbs the chance of tangible, consistent political interaction. We have been led to believe that our voice is only heard when we vote. There is something fundamentally wrong with this assumption if we live in a democratic society. There are many more ways to be involved in the political.
The assumption that our voice is bound to our vote allows the age-old argument “people died for your right to vote” to have legs. While it is true, that people have died for the right to vote, we must stop narrowing what the right to vote means. It is a citizen’s right to use the right to vote in the first place. And I don’t believe I am wrong when I posit that the same people we declare fought and died for the right to vote take issue in you telling someone for whom they should vote.
The argument is hallow and immobilized when we consider the fact that this is rarely brought into the discourse surrounding the disenfranchisement of ex-offenders. Didn’t the same people who died for your right to vote not die for theirs as well? Their relationship with the carceral state should not inhibit interaction with the democratic state once their time has been served. Do they deserve to be silenced? This should be deeply considered when we realize that black people have had a history of disenfranchisement in this country and the power of the prison industrial complex over black folk is a continuation of and complicates such.
What about the fact there are hate groups who aspire to inflict violence on voters, have the same pundits who mandate we vote offered resources to escort voters to the polls? Especially since there has been little to no institutional challenge against Trump for inciting violence and Trump supporters for representing and enacting violence at the hallowed polls. Have those same critics offered resources to compensate those who would have to take off work to go vote?
Have these same critics realized that there is an ongoing fight for voting rights that has been silenced in this election? If you care so much about voting, and if you care so much about honoring those who died for the right to vote, what have you done to critique the consistent and purposeful systematic work of voter suppression in this country?
And what about holding our elected officials accountable after elections? What is said and done by these critics who honor voting when state representatives defy our best interests and are silent on the issues at hand?
3. Silent Candidates
This election cycle made clear what the candidates and those who participated in the debates hold to be worthy of political discussion. Often, those discussion vilified and dismissed people of color whether they were citizens of the United States or not. Trump thinks that black people only exist in the inner-city. Clinton has not acquired the vocabulary to fully stand for black lives in the police state — no, her saying “Black lives matter” or having a statement on her website regarding the private prisons and criminal justice is not enough, sorry not sorry. Trump has no knowledge or regard for the law that he may have to uphold if elected to office. Clinton’s canned rhetoric makes us question her authenticity. I am personally dismayed at the choices we have.
The candidates’ shortcomings are not exactly my problem here, it is their silence and disregard of the breadth of the political moment that is troubling, and should be troubling to the voting population. The critics who demand we vote have little to say when policies openly collude in the immunity of oppressors from charge when they poison cities’ children and over-police black neighborhoods. The debates ignored the existence of the Movement for Black Lives, of Standing Rock, and countless issues concerning people of color as if those movements are detached from their political existence. Silent candidates earn silent voters.
4. Trump: the American Monster
Donald Trump is much more American than we want to admit. He is a rich white man who believes he is a product of legendary and oh-so-American rags to riches stories, who hates people of color, women, and immigrants (only if they are brown or black, of course), and is so capitalist it’s disgusting.
At the brink of what could be a Trump era, we have got to question the atmosphere that has allowed him to rise to power. I hope this makes us question the miseducation on politics that has been running amok — like the misconception that the President can “do anything he wants”. I pray this makes us indict in even a small way the Republican party who failed the integrity of the electoral process by allowing Donald Trump to assume the power of candidacy.
We need to start challenging the elected officials who were quiet (read: complicit) in the rise of Trump. To reiterate my earlier point, how is it that someone who has no working knowledge of policy running for President of the United States? If you believe that an “American” ideal is integrity, how do define such and how do you see it in Trump? The electoral process has been made a sham. If you find voting and our voice important, you would see this election cycle as a disgrace to the people who died for our right to vote, you have snuffed their voices out.
We need to evaluate critically the all that has allowed Trump to rise in the ranks as a potential elected official. Stop asking us — millenials, black millenials, those who dissent from Election Day festivities— to fix problems we did not create. We were not responsible for the mainstream who dragged current-President Barack Obama in the mud solely on the basis of his blackness. We were only children as we ran into war blindly against an enemy unknown to us, an act that provokes the thoughts of Trump supporters. The onus of what can come based on the monster you created doesn’t belong to us. Yes, may have to suffer the violence from it, but will that blood be on our hands?
If we are going to understand fully the power of voting and the right to vote, we have to turn away from dominating potential voters and understand how we maim the electoral process with the lack of interaction with its many forms and problems.
To those of you who will vote on November 8th, 2016, I am happy for you, but please know how much of a privilege it is to cast your ballot.
To those who will sit out from the election on this day, you are heard.
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