By Caleb Dunson ’24
Contributing Writer
I request my absentee ballot weeks in advance, block an hour in my calendar to research down-ballot candidates, spend another hour picking the candidates I will support, and then place my ballot in the mail. I tune into election coverage, patiently wait for results to spill in, and watch pundits make sweeping judgments about those results. I wonder how my community will be affected by the election, consider how the country will change after the election, and reflect on how little my vote may have impacted the election’s outcome. I do none of this with enthusiasm. Frustration, apprehension, and obligation drive me. So I vote, begrudgingly –– to say that I did it and to give me the freedom to complain about politics without hearing “well you should’ve voted,” in response.
It feels wrong not to cast my ballot. This in the sense that people fought and died so that I could vote. Black people endured racial terror, police violence, and political suppression to give me a say in the course this country charts. So approaching the task of voting with anything less than sober gratitude makes me feel as though I am disappointing those activists that came before me. But I can’t shake the feeling of alienation I have when I place my ballot in the mail, like I have been asked to engage in an empty performance of democracy for the sake of the country.
I know that my vote doesn’t matter much. The expectation is that I will vote for Democrats because voting for the alternative endangers myself and my loved ones. As I do so, and as Democrats win, I understand that very little will change for me and the people that look like me. I know that I am voting to reduce harm, not to transform my community. I know that my vote has earned me nothing more than platitudes and performative activism. I know that casting my ballot is an empty, pragmatic action, and that I ought to expect little of it.
The (disproportionately white) political spaces at Yale herald the vote because, for them, it is the pinnacle of civic engagement. They attach a cosmic importance to the ballot, a unique power to swing elections and fundamentally change the country. But it doesn’t really matter for them. Their interests will be given deep consideration, regardless of which party wins. So their vote is largely one of preference rather than survival –– it’s a modest expression of a desire to see the country run a particular way. For them, the election is a game of values, but in that game the rights of people oppressed by America –– our rights –– hang in the balance.
And so we have this odd mismatch of interest and power. Black people, facing the life-threatening burden of systemic racism, have a profound stake where American politics goes, but the value of our votes pales in comparison to that of white Americans. This past election, white people made up 72 percent of the electorate. Black people made up a mere 11 percent. So it doesn’t really matter that 83 percent of Black voters voted Democrat, or that Black voters usually support Democrats by wide margins; what matters is that 58 percent of white voters voted Republican, and that white voters continue to teeter back and forth between Liberalism and Conservatism.
The reckoning over politics, then, though it bears deeply on the well-being of Black Americans, is a fundamentally white matter. It is about whether or not white people will decide to care about the rights of Black people and other oppressed Americans. National electoral politics, as presently constructed, are not meant to accommodate the interests of Black people beyond a surface level. So I vote, but with the knowledge that electoral power will not be what wins Black people justice. I encourage other Black people to vote, because some power is better than no power; but I don’t tell them that their ballot will single-handedly improve America. And I don’t judge the Black people who have decided to remove themselves from electoral politics entirely, because those politics never fully represented us.
