Voting Will Not End White Supremacy
Practical Strategies Beyond Electoral Politics by Maria Thomas
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” ― Arundhati Roy
This piece is part of our Spark series: Voting and Equity in the United States
In retrospect, it was a strange daily morning activity for a fifteen year old — being made to shout “Tahyal-Kuwait!” (Salutations to Kuwait!) and “Aash Al-Amir!!” (Long live the King!), in a sea of other kids like me. An assembly of a few hundred school-aged brown girls from South Asia, performing allegiance to the flag of a country that would never allow us or our parents the right to vote. We were strictly labor, or to use Deepak Unnikrishnan’s phrase, ‘temporary people’. When I share stories about what I consider a mostly happy childhood in grade school in Kuwait with colleagues in the US, they are quick to make sympathetic and orientalist sounds; Oh how strange, how unfair… how exclusionary. The irony is rich, because I’ve now been in America for over a decade (longer than I’ve lived anywhere else on earth), I can’t vote here either, and the demands for a performative allegiance are equally strident.
Nation-states have relied on aggressive jingoism for eons — to justify indigenous blood spilled during their founding, and the continued use of the jagged edge of violence to sharpen their own image and identity. Ayesha Siddiqi, one of the most brilliant and caring minds of our generation, frames it this way: every border implies the violence of its maintenance. Thinking with her words, I am struck by how borders serve not just as lines that are lethal to cross over from the outside, but as in the case of redlining, can be, to quote Willard Romney’s famous father, “a high-income white noose” around Black neighborhoods, strangling the lives and livelihoods of those within their wretched circumscription.
I am perhaps more obsessed with borders than most people, because of the particular violences exacted on my life and on those that I love, by their supposed transgressions. It is this lens that I bring to this discussion of voting. Who gets to vote and what histories shape this? Entangled in this, of course, is the question of demos, and what political theorists call the ‘boundary problem’ — who is allowed to fully participate in political and civic life.
The Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future
Historically, the Founding Fathers responded to the ‘boundary problem’ by withholding human, civic, and voting rights from those indigenous to this land, and those forcibly trafficked here — enshrining White Supremacist ideology in law. Centuries of struggle and sacrifice by Indigenous peoples and Black Americans led to hard-won civil rights. But alongside racial progress, racist progress lurches ahead, as shown by the renewed efforts by Stephen Miller, Mark Krikorian, and others, to create a White ethno-state, using rhetoric that echoes narratives used to justify genocide and slavery in the past.
By 2040 or so, 70% of Americans will live in 15 states — meaning 30% will choose 70 senators, and the 30% will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70%. The current median net worth of a US senator is $3.2 million but over 50 million US households (43% of households) can’t afford a bare monthly budget for housing, food, and other basic needs. If this is a representative democracy, one has to ask — of whom, exactly? Is the government “for the people” when it deepens inequities by being beholden to corporate power and passing laws that reify that power structure, at the expense of those who suffer most under it?
It takes a lot of engineering to maintain artificial majorities and non-representative systems. It requires the brutal expulsion of PoC from the US through raids and deportations; militarized responses to PoC who cross into the country, the forcible caging of children and families; the legalized disenfranchisement of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people (who are disproportionately BIPOC, poor, disabled, and queer) and immigrants; and the creation of systemic barriers (polling place closures, voter roll purges, discriminatory ID laws, etc.) to voting for poor, working class, PoC, disabled, and trans folks.
Given such extensive rigging, the loud and almost evangelistic faith placed in a system that intentionally erases the voices of millions of marginalized people is confusing at best and insulting at worst. Because unless you are simultaneously agitating to ensure the enfranchisement of those voices, you are broadcasting that those voices don’t figure in your concept of democracy.
So, vote AND also organize against voter suppression and gerrymandering, and fight to grant voting rights to the disenfranchised.
It is also important to be clear-eyed about the fact that while voting may help temporarily mitigate certain evils from being escalated, it is not the solution for ending White Supremacy, xenophobia, climate catastrophe, imperialism, and all the other scourges that will drive us to an early grave. History shows us both parties contribute to these things. But many liberals somehow do not acknowledge bombs dropped by Democrats or other violence enacted under their watch.
So, yes, vote AND hold elected leaders and policy makers of ALL parties accountable. And do not silence or censure the valid critiques and direct action tactics of those who bravely attempt to hold those in power accountable — a task which includes fighting the influence of corporate and dark money in politics.
Currently, the ethos of this nation is shaped by those who stand to profit from the bottomless immiseration caused by the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, PhRMA, the fossil fuel industry, and the gun lobby. These death-making lobbies are why those who flee the bombs we drop, the coups we stage, or the climate crises we fuel, are then criminalized for crossing the border and caged for further profit.
The situation is dire; the scientific consensus, chilling: If we do not drastically course-correct in the next two years, and escape this corporate stranglehold, our planet will not survive beyond a couple of decades. We cannot vote our way out of this, BUT all of us, acting now, in all the ways we can, makes another world possible.
Other practical strategies beyond electoral politics:
If you are neutral in situations of injustice,
you have chosen the side of the oppressor.-Desmond Tutu
1. Understand that ‘Objectivity’ and ‘Neutrality’ are a death-knell for those under attack.
Regardless of the area you work in, interrogate the idea of ‘neutrality’ in immoral times.
If you’re a journalist, read this; if you’re a public health researcher, read this. If you’re neither, read both and draw extrapolations to your own field.
2. Mutual Aid and Radical Care
Check in on folks in your own circles who are struggling and feeling the brunt of what is going on socio-politically. Provide material support to them. Build communities of care. Mutual aid is more critical than ever as the social safety net gets shredded. Support the efforts of groups like MADR or get engaged in mutual aid efforts where you live.
3. $$$$
Donate to grassroots groups and organizers that do critical work in communities. Join collectives who are deeply engaged in this work. Set aside a percentage of your income to support especially smaller, vital organizations, every month. If you do not have the means to do so, consider volunteering time and skills.
4. Understand the current stakes, and the necessity of anti-fascist action.
Commit to the ongoing political education of yourself and your community.
Do not scapegoat, gaslight, and vilify those who are legitimately fighting fascism. When you do, you are creating the conditions for state-sanctioned violent repression and abuse against resistors of fascism, and equating drastically different sides.
5. Ask yourself, every day, what risks you are willing to take in the service of your values.
Howard Zinn reminds us “Historically, the most terrible things — war, genocide, and slavery — have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
Self-preservation is a strong instinct, but we must understand how this can play out in monstrous ways, as in the case of Kristallnacht when it was neighbors that pointed to the outhouse.
Now is the time to stand with, speak up, and take action to protect each other, and not only ourselves. If we cannot be brave now, how can we hope to be brave when the stakes and risks increase, and the infernos rise ever higher?
Although my life has been trisected mostly across three countries, none of which allowed me the right to vote, I still hurt with, rejoice with, and fight alongside all those I am in community with, which is why I find such comfort and strength in Huey P. Newton’s concept of intercommunalism. It is why I keep returning to the words of Dean Spade that remind me how hope lies in how we show up for each other. Voting alone will not save us, but I have faith in the world-shaping power of grassroots organizing and I am grateful beyond words for all the organizers, caregivers, cultural workers, and communities of struggle who show up every single day for all of us. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for showing up when it is hard, when others are fatalistic, when you’re mocked for the intensity of your feeling, and when your fierce and loving belief in placing people above profits is derided as being unreasonable and naive — know that you are the best, brightest, kindest, and bravest thing about this world. I love you and you deserve all the world’s joy.
No country may have quite claimed me, but in the words of one of my favorite poets, Agha Shahid Ali, “I have not learned the way of the nomad — to walk between raindrops without getting wet.” The rain that falls on you falls on me too, and our liberation is and always has been bound together. We hold each other up, and we keep fighting.
Maria Thomas is the director of community benefit and community health needs assessment and child advocacy director at University of Michigan Health System and a member of the Diversity Scholars Network at the National Center for Institutional Diversity. Her work over the last decade and a half has spanned health care systems, grassroots nonprofits, global health organizations, and arts/theatre organizations — all in the service of building stronger, freer communities.
