The Principle of Not Voting

Now that we’re a week and a half into Kamala Harris’s candidacy for President and on the other side of her first star-studded rally in Atlanta, the comparisons to 2008 Obama are officially underway. The analogy isn’t so much between the biographies of the two politicians as it is between the enthusiasm surrounding their campaigns and the similar contexts of their ascents. The careers of both Obama and Harris have been made fathomable by a palpable sense of democratic crisis. For Obama, it was The Great Recession, which was the worst financial crisis in 70 years, accompanied by the housing crisis. For Harris, it’s the possibility of a second Trump presidency when we’re, not only still enduring the erosion of the rights to abortion and affirmative action that resulted from the first; but also living under a fundamentally more powerful Office of the President as a result of Trump v. United States. In both instances, Obama and Harris were called upon as a kind of Hail Mary to return America to normalcy in the face of uniquely dire straits. They function as embodiments of the expectation that black people do both the suffering for and saving of an American democracy that offers little in return but the right to say that black people suffered for and saved it.

For black people, voting has always been about the performance of a right rather than enjoying the fruits of that right. How many times will we have to endure the justifications that Harris is a good candidate for President precisely because she has no intention of being the “President of Black America,” even as we watch Trump vigorously go on a revenge tour for white America with the full support of the Republican political establishment, Supreme Court justices, and Fox News? Part of the antiblackness embedded in the national ritual of voting (most acutely in presidential elections) is that ending antiblackness can never be on the ballot. A black candidate’s claim to legitimacy is always promising to not do anything in particular for black people, while also acknowledging that black people will be “disproportionately effected” by helpful liberal policies designed to assist working-and-middle-class people more broadly. Nevermind that, within this liberal formulation, black people, in particular, remain at the bottom of every sociopolitical location (i.e. education, income, housing, health, criminal justice.) Nevermind that, within this liberal formulation, Sonya Massey is still not in the land of the living.

Many of us who voted for 2008 Obama did so because we were hopeful that voting for a black candidate could get us out of antiblackness (I feel ridiculous even writing that). Or at least get us into a serious confrontation with it. Needless to say, it didn’t happen. Now, it is our hope that has changed. What exists, instead, is perpetual gaslighting about how much more black people will lose if we don’t vote. Voting is rationalized, not as a potential mechanism by which to end antiblackness, but as an acceptance that antiblackness will never end and could get worse. This is the normalized cruelty of the election cycle.

So, for all of the ethical posturing about why voting is essential to limit the suffering of those vulnerable populations, both globally and domestically, who will undoubtedly be most affected by who sits at the helm of the American empire, there is nothing ethical about the fact that black people are required to sacrifice themselves to stave off the greater of two evils. If both evils agree that the permanence of black suffering is a necessary evil, then what? I get that the Democratic and Republican candidates aren’t the same. I get that there are legitimate policy differences between them. I get that, in the aftermath of Sonya Massey’s murder, one stood on a stage and said he wants federal immunity for police officers and the other didn’t. I get it. But what I’m saying is that it still doesn’t answer the question.

And the problem is that the political establishment (left, liberal, or otherwise) feels no responsibility to answer the question. The popular approach is to ridicule and ostracize those who have principled objections to voting in a world where black suffering is quite literally guaranteed. As if there is some a priori moral obligation to vote regardless of whether or not your state-sanctioned premature death is on the ballot. But the powerful thing about principles is that sticking to them will always prove the point. The burden is not on ethical objectors to adjust their calculus and abandon their material concerns. The burden is on the political culture to prove them wrong.