Meanwhile for voters of color, especially Black women, who are often expected in American politics to save everyone else, there isn’t even the pretense that their votes can actually be cast in their own best interests, or that they might have different ideas of what their interests are than what candidates insist they should be. There are no politicians running in any election who prioritize the concerns and needs of the poorest and most vulnerable. Lip service is paid to the idea, of course, but in execution, American politics and American politicians are largely responsive to money. Space is often given to the idea that what helps those with the most money will help those with the least.Yet we know that there is no such thing as trickle-down wealth, much less an effective top-down approach to helping the community. Being led by those with the least sounds counterintuitive, but in reality, the old adage about a rising tide lifting all boats is ironically an apt metaphor for what could be happening if white women voted largely like Black women.
This is not to say Black women are automatically better prepared or better versed in politics. In fact, what is most common is that the poorest people are the best versed in what it takes to survive. As a result, their focus is less on fattening the pockets of the rich and is instead on what will keep the lights on and the kids fed, and allow for at least a few small pleasures. There comes a point—when you have never had anything—where you don’t begrudge your neighbors having as much as you, because you know that if you work together, then you can survive hard times together. It’s less about altruism and more about simple math. Keeping up with the Joneses is way down on the priority list when you know that the Joneses are likely to share whatever they have if you need help.
If you don’t have the resources to get through the month on your own, but sharing resources with your friend or neighbor means you both make it, then of course you want everyone to have more. We frame politics and voting as a zero-sum game that must be won by one side, when it is in fact always about harm reduction. The lack of empathy on display in any given political party for the other would be funny if the consequences weren’t so dire.
In a country where Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith made coy jokes about lynching and still won an election in a state that is 44 percent Black, the question shouldn’t be “How are Black people voting?” It should be “What can we do to change the way white people are voting?” Or better yet, “How do we protect voting access?” For marginalized people, feminism is failing them by being so focused on whether middle-class white women have what they need and want, but not on protecting voting rights for everyone else. This isn’t just a problem for Americans—after all, if candidates and their supporters can’t see people of color inside the United States as human beings worthy of protection and support, then what chance do those outside the country have?
Dehumanization is the first step in justifying voting against the rights of other people. This is true here in the United States and everywhere else. When you have the kind of military power that this country boasts, voting solely on personal interests with no concern for the wider impact is inherently selfish, and in the case of voting for white supremacy, it’s inherently self-loathing, because whatever consequences other communities face will eventually land at your door too.
As much as I didn’t want to vote for another Clinton, I had already reconciled myself to the idea that the least harmful option was the only one available. In the end, it wasn’t the popular vote that mattered so much as it was the electoral college, and that is perhaps the most damning part of any discussion of race and politics. Even though the popular meme is that Black women voters can make all the difference, the reality is that a coalition of marginalized voters is sometimes not enough to create lasting change.
The fact is that the harm-reducing votes of marginalized people will never be enough to outweigh the stupidity of white people who vote for racism at their own expense. Empathy isn’t something that we can expect to teach adults, and as long as white supremacy carries the day in the home and the voting booth for so many white women, the questions about voter turnout are moot in a country where voting rights are under attack. Voter ID laws, attempts to shut down busing voters to polls, and tactics ranging from closing polling centers early to reducing the number of places to get ID in a state are going to undermine voting access for the same groups that helped put Obama and other centrist and progressive leaders in office. From modern-day poll taxes in the form of requiring former felons in Florida to pay all court fines and fees before regaining their voting rights, to registered voters being purged from the rolls, the same old voter-suppression tactics are back in use. Gerrymandering for a segregated school system leads directly to gerrymandering for an anti-choice politician. Just imagine the impact of something like respectability on who has access to the right to vote.
The same views that allowed suffragettes to support white supremacy despite many having been ardent abolitionists are part and parcel of current white feminism ignoring not only the ways that racism impacts elections but also the widening gap between the right to vote and access to voting. The attitudes that we find so abhorrent in suffragettes like Rebecca Latimer Felton, who was the first woman to serve in the United States Senate and is remembered in some circles as a feminist icon despite her support of lynching, underpin carceral feminist logic that ignores one of the main ways that voting rights are being stripped: via discriminatory policing. It’s not just Black lives that matter; Black votes matter too. And Black votes are not the only votes in danger. Any woman with a criminal record can lose access to the right to vote.
According to the Sentencing Project’s May 2018 report there are approximately 110,000 women incarcerated in America at any given time. That’s 1 percent of the total population of women in America. That number has increased significantly since 1980, and with the rise in incarceration rates, many potential voters are being forced out because of laws that make it illegal for convicted felons to vote. The laws change from state to state, and are not rooted in any modern understanding of the impact of the war on drugs on communities of color, much less the impact of police misconduct and brutality. Those most at risk of losing their right to vote are those for whom voting is the only access they have to any semblance of political power.
Is voting the perfect solution to what ails America? Of course not. But having a vote is having a voice in the way the country is run, and sometimes that voice is the first step for a community toward stability and safety.
Long before the 2016 election, mainstream feminism was ignoring the ways that the right to vote was under attack for marginalized people in the United States. The history of voter suppression is well documented. And even though women technically got the right to vote in 1920, realistically, prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states used poll taxes and literacy tests to stop Black and Indigenous people from voting. It was only after multiple lawsuits subsequent to the passing of the act that such obstacles were removed. Politicians in many states immediately started creating new barriers as replacements when those of the Jim Crow era were removed. To this day, some lawmakers continue to pursue policies that would undermine the right to vote. Even though studies have shown that illegal voting is a myth, for the past several years advocates for tougher restrictions on voting have found more support than opposition.