Before You Bring Up The Black Vote

Whenever there’s a human rights fight, Black American people become a talking point. We are the subject of slander, derision, and thinly veiled threats.

If we don’t support so-and-so, their enemies will do horrible things to us.

If we were smart, or capable of unpacking historical context—which, the implication is, we’re not—we’d know that we’re obliged to uphold so-and-so.

However we view a conflict, we owed the other side our fealty. Black support, it’s understood, is a commodity. Despite that Black people are undesired. One would think this would spark some reflection, some reckoning. Because you can’t have it both ways. We can’t both be hyperbolizing our experience of oppression and injustice, exaggerating the brutality we experience in pursuing our civil rights, AND be the standard-bearer needed to legitimize the position of others. But suddenly when our support is needed, someone was there, transactionally allying with us, whether we remember it or not.

I have watched this happen almost every time a group has been making a public plea, and it crosses ethnicities and religions. The hypervisiblity of the Black American struggle for liberation, any demands or progress we’ve made—without regard for where we still are, the insurmountable cost, and how complicit the rest of the world is in our continued oppression—is leveraged, if possible. In a suddenly visible and acknowledged power imbalance, the world flocks not to the power majority with demands, but to the people the power majority cannot eradicate.

The outcome? Everyone wants the Black vote, but—and perhaps therefore—no one wants to liberate the Black folk. If they freed us, how would they weaponize/litmus us? Because that’s the thing about the Black vote. It only exists as long as we’re racially defined, as long as we’re subject to white supremacy’s stratification. How do you move someone on the chess board if you can’t press one bruise and wound 13% of the national population? If we’re liberated, we’re of little use. We’re difficult to compartmentalize and wrangle. There’s no guarantee without a unifying threat to make sure our primary focus in all things political is trying to divine who wants us dead less.

I’ve been writing this for weeks, and the part I keep coming back to is the audacity. Someone is always telling me, reminding me that they helped like I’m not still in peril. Someone is always trying to leverage fifty, sixty year old victories, like the whitelash over them hasn’t been killing us. History gets really bullet point-y, lest the full story be more damning than supportive.

No hair-flip this time, I’m so tired, I’d collapse.