Why the Touted Most American Americans Don’t Want Me, a Black Man, to Vote
OREGON
You knew some vote-or-die, do-it-to-honor-the-sacrifices-of-the-ancestors, you-can’t-complain-if-you-don’t-participate Black folks. But you also knew scores who didn’t trouble themselves with participating at all. Into your 30s you felt somewhere between those philosophical poles, among those who, each election cycle, needed convincing that their vote mattered a good gotdamn.
Why? Despite your mother, grandfather, and great-grandparents all migrating from the Cradle of the Confederacy to your birthplace of Oregon by 1960, none ever told of being bitten by attack dogs or knocked on their back by the surge of a fire hose; of suffering the degradation of a Whites Only water fountain; of a Klansupported governor or the specter of hanging as “strange fruit.” Maybe to protect you. Maybe to forget. Maybe in favor of inculcating you with something stronger than a civic duty—a religious one—none of those elders mentioned having braved vitriol or violence outside a polling station, facing a poll tax or literacy test, seeing their vote rendered inconsequential in a gerrymandered district. Your great-grandparents and grandfather were active citizens but never schooled you on the state’s political milieu or impressed upon you the obligation of voting ASAP.
By the time you could cast your first ballot—1996—you were a crack-dealing college student, and voting for Clinton, or one of the local candidates you couldn’t be bothered to learn about, felt somewhere between a risk of your freedom and an assured waste of time. It was an easy-ass, foolish-ass decision. You never talked politics with your live-in girlfriend or homeboys. And nobody discussed them in the barbershop, the parks, the open gyms.
The next year, you ended up in prison and heard the rumor that you’d never be able to vote. But since you hadn’t voted nohow, that fate was low on your list of consternations.
Your parole officer cut you off paperwork early, so you risked registering and, at 25 years old, cast your very first ballot for president in 2000. You voted for Al Gore because Black people who cared about other Black people voted Democrat, and because you recalled Jesse Jackson running for president when you were a kid. You walked tall out of the polling station, a pride dimmed by Gore conceding to Bush after the recount fiasco.
NEW YORK
You moved to New York and cast a vote for John Kerry. Kerry’s loss moved you little, and yet you pondered whether you could lay the blame for your apathy elsewhere, if your ignorance of the stakes had a worthy scapegoat.
But, of course, you happy-footed to a Brooklyn polling station in 2008 to cast a ballot for Barack Hussein Obama, the first time your lone vote felt part of the will of a powerful multitude. Election night in Harlem, you beheld a legit borough-wide block party for Obama’s win. For days, you floated around the city thinking, So, this is what it feels like.
In 2016, you gaped at the polls as a huckster with a retro racist campaign slogan beat Hillary Clinton. The next morning, several college freshmen drifted into your writing workshop teary-eyed, so you forsook your lesson plan and spent the whole class commiserating.
Trump’s election dragged your attention to politics. Spurred you closer to the Black folks who view voting as a commandment. Like never before, you felt your Blackness in the hot gaze of white folks. You surveilled them on the street, on the train, in the grocery store—every white man in a red cap and/or flag-themed gear bore the mark of the beast—and swore their smirks were a taunt: We won, AGAIN! You caught the waiters at your favorite diner joking about Trump’s win and vowed never to eat there again. You judged all Trump voters some parts of a bigot, deemed their retorts weak excuses. Meanwhile, Mr. Ill-repute supplied proof: “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”
MAGAs, yes, but to locate them in their lineage, you conceived of them as the Most American Americans.
The Most American Americans were the ones who’d protested being “replaced,” have believed they own the rightfulest claim to suffrage and the privilege of ruling. The Most American Americans were never held in bondage but did the enslaving. Or did the insuring or banking that supported the enslaving. Or bought the commodities harvested by the enslaved. The Most American Americans have never had their humanity questioned or been deemed “savages,” as have your people, and you. On the contrary, the Most American Americans attested themselves the civilizers of savages.
You began to see in their rhetoric and laws and limitless schemes the conflation of citizenship with the imperial idea of a civilized person. Their notion of who’s civilized against who, across American history, they’ve maligned as uncivilized—chief among them your people and Native Americans. You couldn’t help but see that their noncitizenis synonymous with less-human.
CHICAGO
You moved to Chicago with your partner and teenage son during the pandemic. You called it progress that politics became a common subject in your home. Called it growth that, son in tow, you trooped to a Hyde Park polling station and stood in a diverse line full of masked people to cast a ballot for Joe Biden. Truthbetold, though, your choice was as much a vote opposing the bare-faced bigot.
You witnessed the climax of a machinated saga to decertify the results: thousands of white people besieging the Capitol. Wielding American flags, wrong-side-up American flags, Confederate flags, “An Appeal to Heaven” flags. Wearing MAGA hats and hoodies that read CAMP AUSCHWITZ and MAGA CIVIL WAR JAN 6, 2021. Watched scenes of terrified congressional members crouching on the floor of a barricaded House in gas masks, of insurgents shattering windows and breaking doors and pummeling cops, of one of them kicking up his boot on Pelosi’s desk.
This article appeared in the Sept 2024 issue of Esquire
subscribe
A horror, for sure, but you also saw it as glaring proof of America’s primeval and incontrovertible belief in the whole humanness of white people. No few of your Black friends asked, What if that were us? Were you to imagine an armed mob of Black people storming the Capitol, proclaiming the election a fraud and demanding their candidate in office, that scenario would include platoons of the National Guard, nonstop barrages, carnage on par with war, and not a bit of equivocating on their behalf by the media.
Believing no group but a mass of white people could’ve attempted the events of January 6—and least of all Black folks—was a Stone Mountain monument for how much less your people mattered to this country than the will of even the most prejudiced white people, as well as an exemplar of America’s insistence on ensuring their safety and security. Infamous racist Roger Taney wrote ages ago that your people were “so far inferior they had no rights the white man was bound to respect.” January 6, 2021, served as its contemporary addendum: Any right granted by the Most American white men can be abridged, seized, nulled—and that includes your vote.
ARIZONA
You moved to Phoenix the same year as the coup attempt and learned the great state of Arizona had a history of enacting literacy tests upon Latino and Native American voters, that it disenfranchised Native Americans wholesale until 1948. That it spent decades purging voter rolls and establishing barriers to prevent re-enfranchisement. That after the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that it couldn’t require documentary proof of citizenship for people to vote in national elections, it created a dual registration system.
Biden purpled Arizona, but it hasn’t stopped you from experiencing the ethos of a state that once sanctioned segregated schools and an anti-miscegenation law. Didn’t forestall a man calling your son a “nigger” as he walked home from school, nor a classmate from showing your son a picture of a monkey on their phone and calling it George Floyd’s kin. It ain’t stopped you from noticing a helluva lot of bumpers decaled with stickers of flags carried during the insurrection. Arizona responded to its slim Democratic breakthrough by passing House Bill 2492, legislation that, among other oppressions, enshrined the prerogative of election officials to reject voter registration forms for mistakes that didn’t affect whether they were eligible to vote.
You could go crazy tracking their endless machinations. But after all, here you are—poised to cast a vote in your fourth state. It matters nada how you were nurtured into your civic duty, makes no difference that you will vote anti an imminent autocrat as much as pro his opponent. Because for the first time, it feels imperative: vote-orperish, do-it-for-your-forebears, and don’t-dare-complain, or else the world falls deeper, deepest to the illest-intentioned Most American Americans.
You Might Also Like
