Under the guise of tackling voter fraud, many states adopted measures including strict voter ID requirements and reductions in the number of polling places, especially those with early voting opportunities, to restrict voting ahead of the 2016 election. Most tellingly, several of the states where these early policies were put in place have a long history of racial discrimination in voting, and until recently had to seek federal approval before making any changes in voting laws and procedures. When voting rights advocates pointed out that these measures created barriers for tens of thousands of low-income citizens and citizens of color, the response from the right and the response from much of the left was to ignore both current and historic obstacles to voting for marginalized communities. From right-wing politicians looking to limit voter turnout, that response made sense, but for ostensibly left-leaning politicians to ignore the reasons the Voting Rights Act exists and let it lapse was appalling.
The right to vote is arguably a pillar of American democracy, but countless Americans face barriers to voting. Yet relatively few feminist organizations have made protecting voting rights for all a priority, much less reckoning with the bigotry that allows for so many white women to vote against the interests of all women. Whether it is the women who spoke up to support Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court only to learn that he had also demeaned and disrespected them, or the Republicans who have surged forward to celebrate his appointment, there are dire consequences for women’s rights as a whole because only some women have access to the right to vote.
Any narrative that assumes women can be treated as a united voting bloc with no concern for race, class, or other factors is shortsighted and deeply misguided. The history of feminist politics has shown the dangers of ignoring the work of marginalized women, cis and trans. Frankly, it has been women like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells and so many others who have been leaders across a wide variety of social issues for generations. Their work has done more to improve conditions for all, even though it has been met with minimal recognition or respect from white Americans. Today’s feminist movement cannot ignore voting rights for all, not just because the numbers are needed to support causes championed by white women, but because if feminism’s goal truly is equality for all, that means the future of feminism has to look very different from its past. Feminism has been a powerful political force for decades, but its focus has to expand if critical elections are going to be won.
Feminism that encompasses all the issues that impact women, from poverty to criminal justice reform to living wages to better protections for immigrants to LGBTQIA issues, is feminism that ensures voting rights for all as a foundational issue.
EDUCATION
Growing up, I remember politicians hopping on TV to talk about how they would save the cities from the “menace” of drug traffickers. It was the age of the “super predator” and we were all supposed to be grateful for leaders who prioritized law and order. But I didn’t know any super predators. I knew dopeboys and -girls. The ones who sold drugs, transported them, held them, and sometimes did them. I wasn’t one of them—I was a nerd with a future, and despite the tales told in afterschool specials, no one was interested in recruiting me. I was Books to them, and to me they were the same kids I had known since kindergarten.
I understood that while I had my grandparents and aunts and eventually my mother and stepfather around, they had no one, or at least no one who looked at a traumatic situation and did their best to make it better. The boys who sold drugs were largely either in foster care or in kinship care with relatives who could barely afford their own children, much less caring for other people’s children, even if they were relatives. At that time, the girls usually didn’t sell drugs, though they did transport them, and of course they were involved (often intimately) with the boys and men who were trafficking in green or white. Unlike me, they had no all-seeing grandmother, no grandfather who might pull up at any moment and ask what they were doing.
Instead, they were often the ones responsible for making sure there was food in the fridge or that the gas bill got paid. That responsibility might fall on their shoulders in fifth or tenth grade, or simply have been something that they had always felt was necessary. I have no story about the time I sold drugs, but there are two stories about drug dealers I knew growing up. And how easy it is to need more than you have, and to have no way to get it without resorting to vice. We’ll start with Deon J.
Deon was a nice kid. For the first few years of school together, he was just like me and a dozen other kids in our school. He lived in an apartment on Drexel with his grandmother, his sister, and occasionally his mom. Low income, but hanging on like almost everyone else in the neighborhood. Not enough money for all the cool toys and things kids want, but certainly enough to have clothes that didn’t stick out, and he was clean and seemingly well fed. He struggled in school when it came to reading, he got teased sometimes for being light skinned or for having Payless shoes. All standard stuff for a 99 percent Black school in the 1980s in Chicago. Kozminski was a segregated school, but we didn’t know that, and you can’t miss what you never had, so I can’t say that any of us really knew what we lacked.
Not having two parents in your home was normal; living with another generation or two was also normal. Families largely pulled together, or so it seemed when we were little. But not every kid had the same support system. When I got sick my grandmother put me to bed, and my grandfather or my aunt supplied the ginger ale or crackers. For Deon, somehow his struggles at home were such that when he had chicken pox in third grade, he mostly roamed the neighborhood while we were in school instead of being home in bed. There was a period in fourth and fifth grade when he had more money for shoes and clothes than anyone else, and by the end of sixth grade it was clear that he was not just hanging around the gangs but was on the road to being in one.
His mom wasn’t around much, his grandmother got sick, and he and his sister needed to eat. The rent needed to be paid. The heat needed to stay on. I don’t know exactly when he started selling drugs. I do know that at some point his family needed the money he was bringing in more than they needed to keep him on the straight and narrow. He bragged about his place in the hierarchy of the street. As we got older, most of us went to high school, some went to trade school, college, or the military, but Deon stayed on the street. The streets were what he’d been able to rely on. He could take care of his sister and himself even after his grandmother had passed away and his mom stopped her periodic visits. He embraced the streets because they had embraced him when he needed help. I’d see him in passing when I visited my grandmother, and he looked prosperous if not happy most of the time. His sister went on to high school and to college, while he rotated between the streets and jail. I don’t know who he could have been, but the streets were all that he would ever have, because they killed him before he was thirty. It’s easy to pass judgment on a kid like him, easy to assume that if I made it out so could he, but I had more choices and better resources.
And then there was a girl named LaToya. Same grammar school but she transferred in later; I didn’t know her from kindergarten like I did some of the others. She was funny, charming, and surprisingly kind to my nerdy awkward self in seventh and eighth grade. We weren’t close, exactly, but I knew her cousins and by proxy her in the years after we left grammar school. She was smart, and probably could have gone on to college. But at some point, LaToya held drugs for her boyfriend. Her mom was dying, the rest of the family wasn’t financially stable, and she was a teenager. He paid her and her mother’s bills with drug money while she stored the drugs and moved them for him. He was no angel, but he was better than any of her other options, which included the street and what passes for foster care in Illinois and not much else. She did some time when they both got caught, but she was much younger than he was, and if memory serves me correctly, it was her first offense, which meant that she was able to benefit from a now defunct program that helped ex-convicts get back on their feet when they got out of jail. She was able to get a job, a place to live with her kids, and eventually be a “model citizen.” With a job, a place to live, and as stable an environment as she can create for herself, she can do anything she wants to do now except vote.