A Guide to Understanding the Black Vote
The time is fast approaching once again for yet another Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes! For many Americans, this means focusing on one thing and one thing only: The Black Vote! Will enough of the Blacks go to the polls? How many of them will go MAGA? Why would any of them do that?
I will answer these questions and more in this very brief Guide to Understanding the Black Vote!
But before we get into it, we should probably acknowledge the inherent racism of the premise. The last Democratic presidential nominee to win the white vote was Lyndon Johnson. Imagine 60 years of mass-media post-election think pieces blaming whites for yet again not showing up for the Democrats. Imagine an endless line of talking heads all asking how many whites will go MAGA next time? The answer, or course, is a majority, and leaders in the white community really need to do something about it!
Anyway, since we’re going to accept this racist premise, is the Black vote any different than the white vote? It is, and in far too many ways to go through here, so I’ll just cover the big ones.
First of all, white people legislate Black rights. The reverse has never and will never be true. This is especially clear when it comes to our right to vote, which is why even after fighting for the 14th Amendment, we had to fight for a 15th Amendment and the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Voting Rights Act and Supreme Court cases like Gomillion v. Lightfoot, Baker v. Carr and Cooper v. Harris.
Another difference is that Black votes count less than white votes. I know we’re supposed to be equal in the voting booth — one person, one vote and all — but that’s just flatly not how it works. For example, the U.S. Census, in case you didn’t know, is used to determine how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives. And it famously undercounts Black people. It may seem subtle, but it dilutes our vote.
Did you know Wyoming is the reddest state? Did you know the Black population of California alone is almost four times the size of Wyoming’s entire population? Yeah, and both states get exactly two U.S. Senators, diminishing our vote even more. Then there are the racist electoral maps, which practically cover the entire country. In fact, in a ruling that displaced 200,000 Black voters in Charleston County, S.C., a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court gave the thumbs up to future racial gerrymandering. More on the way!
Last, but not least, is the Electoral College! This anti-democratic mechanism was designed to dilute democracy in exchange for giving enslavers more political power. In 48 of the 50 states, this all-or-nothing process erases any vote that goes against the majority.
Because Black votes are diluted, displaced and/or dismissed at every step of the process, presidents have been appointed against the will of the people. Those presidents then selected a majority of un-fireable Supreme Court Justices, confirmed by the anti-democratic Senate, who have been steadily stripping the rights from all Americans ever since. The effort to prohibit Black people from participating in democracy is resulting in the end of democracy for all. And despite whatever think pieces, talking heads, and party-line Dem aunties might say, no amount of diluted, displaced and/or dismissed Black votes can do anything about it.
I thought about this a lot when I voted in the primary last month. I live in Portland, where there aren’t long lines, there are plenty of polling places, I’m allowed to drink water while waiting, and the experience is relatively free of the white supremacist indignities forced upon Black voters in other places. But when they handed me my ballot, I felt a sinking feeling. Every single candidate was running unopposed. The only actual choice was a yes or no on the school budget.
Then it got worse. There were only two petitioners in the lobby. One was gathering signatures for some anti-worker bullshit attempting to exempt Portland businesses from paying emergency wages. The other was for a straight-up racist voter ID law.
So, why vote at all?
I know many white people think of voting as the sum total of their civic responsibilities, but that’s not what it’s like for us. We volunteer, donate, organize, lobby, create our own institutions and so many other things just to survive in this country. To think of voting as anything but the bare minimum is the whitest of privileges, and the cost of maintaining that privilege will be the country.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
