Your Vote IS NOT Your Voice

DaQuan Lawrence
4 min readJul 19, 2019

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Isn’t jazz enough? Ain’t rapping and singing enough? Isn’t music enough?

Ain’t entertainment enough? Isn’t voting enough? Ain’t integration enough?

No soft and easy questions, we from underdeveloped places called “the hood”, so my answers gotta be tough.

We been votin and nothin changing except they poker faces, so I’ma call the bluff.

Your voice is your voice and voting is voting. Better get it in yo’ soul. No more fluff & stuff. Bait & switch. Smokescreens. Tokenism. Divide & conquer. We in control.

Your vote is NOT your voice. Politicians are hypocrites, they don’t listen to the citizens, and never gave us a choice.

Voting is an outcome of using your voice. God blessed you with your voice. And voting is 1 of millions of things you can do. To change the world, it starts with you.

Use your true power or cower, but don’t expect changes cuz we votin. The system is fixed, it was never broken.

“Slavery’s over. Why are blacks still cryin the blues?”

Nah, we cryin the trues, but y’all playin games & control what’s on the news, so the world confused

It’s simple to us, here’s the ABC’s:

A) American Apartheid is-real (Israel) like Arabic and ancient Arabia, and voting is an awkward, aloof, and apprehensive anesthetic cuz it doesn’t address context

B) Because Black was codified to mean “the bottom”, even if we V-O-T-E, they still try to tell us who we will and won’t be

C) I said voting don’t address our racial, social, and economic context. But we all live and see this society uses policy to compound a complicated class complex

Reconstruction coerced blacks into underdeveloped communities. Crowed by Jim. Colorism created castes and conflict about complexion that weakened our unity.

Then the “civil rights movement” was distorted into a consumer rights movement for the economic development of this plastic nation, and the outcome is segregated integration.

But we votin now, and “equality”, “inclusion” and “diversity” are the new buzz words that arouse sensation. Run to the ballot and pick your preferred discrimination and marginalization.

They said “we are in the land of the free, but they mean free-trade. But go vote, and ignore how the American campaign finance game is played.

Tell a politician you voted for them and we’ll get a half smile, maybe a wave before they walk away. But if we tell them we donated to their campaigns, they wanna hear what we got to say.

The people give the government power. Power to the people. Power to all people. You use your voice every day. We can’t vote every day, and we can’t wait to vote — that ain’t the way

As a citizen, comparatively speaking, voting is like brushing our teeth before we leave home for work or school. We should all do it cuz we can all benefit. But that’s not ALL we do before leaving home — that cant be it!

Brushing our teeth is one of many things we do. Voting should be too.

Democracy or Dem-0-crazies; Democracy and voting don’t guarantee a satisfactory quality of life. The richest country in the world but American democracy doesn’t consider ‘employment’ or ‘housing’ universal rights

ALL social-economic issues are nonpartisan, so ALL political parties should be held accountable for addressing them.

Political groups and parties are self-serving. They don’t try to meet the needs of constituents, members, and register voters. They not about equity or equality.

They want revenue to support the interests of the political elites of their party.

These groups are dishonest, socially and economically segregated, and organized based on social status/political clout. Wealth and income.

Political parties use and sustain political, social, and economic inequality to exploit everyone.

They give real benefits to the small privileged group, and concessions to the “middle class”: guardians of the system.

Parties leverage these facts, and work to serve the political elite on behalf of corporations.

NOT surprising since political parties were derived from European social conflicts after the development of the secular nation-state and industrial revolution.

Parties formed based on state vs church, urban vs rural, and owner vs worker political-economic interests but this all had forgone conclusions.

No major nor minor political party serves black people en-masse…

If we gonna vote, let’s start an exclusive black political party, work with the few organizations that aspire to serve black people en-masse….

And/or develop and work with political organizations that serve the working, “under”, “lower”, or the “bottom” classes of Americans. We are the majority.

Ancestors DID NOT struggle and die JUST so we could vote every 2–4 years, they wanted us to use our voices and bodies to create. We must decide how we will participate

You can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. Now you see the light. What you doing? Don’t give up the fight.

Get up, stand up.

Stand up for your rights.

Your voice is your voice and voting is voting…

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DaQuan Lawrence

Pan-African. Global human rights advocate inspiring egalitarian (equalist) thought & practice, as well as cultural, social, economic, & political parity.