I won't vote in US elections anymore – I don't want to be part of a racist system

After 20 years of casting a ballot in every US election, I’m now done with the electoral system. For many Americans, it’s not difficult to find a reason to stay home, be it inertia or unappealing candidates. But I’m not voting because I cannot participate in the electoral system of a government that doesn’t care if black people live or die.

I cannot continue to ignore the historical and present-day reality: black people do not have basic human rights in the United States. Even after fighting for citizenship and political autonomy for our entire existence in this country, we still do not have the basic protection of life and limb from the US government. Police shootings and suspicious deaths of black people in state custody make this frighteningly clear. 

As black Americans, we’ve grown up with the mantra that our ancestors died for the right to vote, so we should never take voting for granted. This was especially true for black Americans like me, who grew up in Southern states where white-dominated legislatures denied their black neighbors access to the ballot for nearly a century. We were told by our elders that we were letting our ancestors down when we didn’t show up to vote. Election workers habitually fall back on this truism when they are trying to convince black people to register and come out to vote during election season. As an electoral worker in Virginia during the historic 2008 presidential contest, I and my colleagues often padded our spiel to potential black voters by invoking the legacy of the struggle for the ballot.

But that narrative didn’t take into account the broader history of how the fight for voting rights fit into the greater civil rights movement. The fight for suffrage was only one of the many strategies that black activists used to advance political autonomy and human rights. The struggle for voting from 1865–1965 was merely a means to an end, not the end itself. Few Americans today know that black politicians served in Southern state legislatures and controlled entire local governments in the first decade and a half after the US Civil War, during the period historians have dubbed Reconstruction. These black leaders didn’t just vote – they sought public office and exercised genuine political power that brought a brief period of autonomy to Southern black communities. White supremacist leaders violently reasserted control of Southern state legislatures after 1877, a series of coups d’etat made possible by the federal government’spolitical abandonment of their commitment to black civil and political rights. Through it all, our Reconstruction-era ancestors fought for the right to control their own political and economic destinies as free people, not simply to cast a ballot in an unfair election.

Yet these same Democrats can’t be bothered to defend black humanity when we are under attack from nearly every sector of society the rest of the year. And no, Bernie Sanders, it is not enough to talk about economic justice and jobs when black labor is devalued as inherently worthless. And no, Hillary Clinton, rallying women to your campaign means nothing when you refuse to acknowledge how women in black communities are specifically subjugated as black women in this country, including black transgender women, who are constantly under attack from both transmisogynist vigilantes and the racist penal system. And no, Martin O’Malley, you don’t get trot out empty promises about criminal justice reform when as Baltimore’s mayor and Maryland’s governor you personally oversaw one of the most viciously brutal and anti-black penal systems in this country.They most certainly didn’t spill blood so that their descendants could be manipulated by corporate-owned, white-dominated political parties. Democratic party leadership sees nothing wrong with trotting out the history of anti-black oppression during election season to get black people to come to the polls. Electoral staff on Democratic campaigns pull out the same talking points about how John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson supported civil rights and how many current Democratic politicians participated in racial justice activism back in the 1960s.

I have no doubt that we’re going to see more empty promises about racial equality from both political parties as we go into 2016 (and continuing GOP attempts to make it harder for marginalized populations to reach the polls). The ongoing brutality against black and brown communities has driven thousands of people of color into grassroots activism. The innovative, revolutionary organizing of movements like Black Lives Matter, Not1More, Fight for $15, Ban the Box and other justice struggles has forced mainstream politicians to acknowledge ongoing racism at all social and economic levels.

But the electoral system’s grudging acknowledgement isn’t enough for me anymore. These days, I choose to focus my time and energy on the work of activists fighting for genuine liberation, instead of a plutocratic electoral system desperate for legitimacy and relevance in a world that is rapidly leaving them behind.