
Vote AND Die? The 50+ Year Conundrum of The Black Vote
November 6, 2019
The year was 2004 and John Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee looking to unseat Republican president, George W. Bush. The pre-Katrina/”George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, but George W. Bush nonetheless. America was deeply engaged in an ongoing conflict in Iraq and George W. was riding off an urgent wave of patriotism sparked by the nation’s response to the tragedies of 9/11. But Bush’s warmongering, 1% favoring, inadequate slip was showing and 2004 was supposed to be the year that a galvanized hip hop generation voting bloc would make him a one-term president. Enter the “Vote or Die” social campaign. Spearheaded by hip hop mogul, Sean “Diddy” Combs, “Vote or Die” was marketed as an aggressive effort to primarily convince younger, culturally fluid voters to head to the polls. Although the campaign did not explicitly endorse John Kerry, the impetus of “Vote Or Die” was clearly to replace a conservative politician with a liberal one. Despite its best efforts to appear nonpartisan, the “Vote Or Die” movement was powered by liberal Hollywood elites with one of the most visible Black men in America leading the charge. We know how the story ended. John Kerry did not have the charisma, political acumen or cultural capital to defeat the incumbent. Bush was re-elected. Poverty, death and inequality persisted. America carried on as business as usual.
It could be argued that the momentum started from “Vote Or Die” ultimately had its payoff in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected America’s first Black president. The coalescing of voters for Obama was for all intent and purpose, a more sophisticated version of the “Vote Or Die” strategy. Obama was able to take advantage of a developed social media era that was not available to Kerry as well as the political pendulum that comes in eight year increments when the nation desires a change in party regime. Obama’s ascendance was symbolic & celebratory & had varying levels of substantive impact on Black Americans. But by the time he left office, another social campaign called #BlackLivesMatter had been born out of a necessity to validate Black lives lost by way of state sanctioned violence all across the country. And though Obama benefited from an incredibly diverse voter constituency, Black Americans specifically voted for him in numbers upwards of 90% for both of his terms. We cheered him on while eulogizing a generation of Black men, women & children killed by American police. We voted and died and kept dying.
- It is always difficult to argue the significance of the Black vote or of Black folks voting, if for no other reason than historical implications. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is not some antiquated measure of progress that came to be in the stone age. It is a 54 year old legislative act that has hardly been around long enough to be a grandparent in human form. A political moment that did the work of eliminating non-sensible voting restrictions against Black voters just over a half century ago. By the time it came to be, Black Americans had largely shifted political allegiance to the Democratic Party, which set an unspoken precedent for how our votes should be casted. We marched, we rallied, we signal boosted, we advocated for the value & power of our vote and America found a multitude of ways to kill us anyway despite our new found ability to vote in our “best interests”.
The game of procuring the Black vote is not a new one and both major parties enact their own version of it. There’s the inevitable church visit. The photo ops at Black community events. The talking points about reducing crime & strengthening education & increasing the availability of “good jobs”. Republicans rely on the rhetoric of failed Democratic policies as a (usually unsuccessful) way of wooing Black voters and Democrats rely on a “fear of the other side” ideology as a method of retaining the Black vote. Specificity around policy that will directly benefit Black voters is often blanketed underneath vague, one-size-fits-all valuations of Black interests. Neither party ever shoulders genuine responsibility for the betterment of Black citizenship, it’s just that one side has more Black representatives to assist with selling a message. Or in other words, one side is more likely to show up at the funeral and tell us what we should do to stop dying and the other is more likely to sit back and revel in their “I told y’all so’s”
I live in a state that bottoms out in virtually every quality of life category one can name. My voting options are less based on who is going to taking my people to an equitable place and more on who is likely to rescue our community from deteriorating if/when they find time in their schedule to do so. The binary is ever present and the line between lesser evils glows brightly as PWI football stadium lights. And none of us can ever seem to die enough to solicit better outcomes from the ballot box.
