With voting for the United States’ presidential election underway, social media, television, and in-person campaigns are in full swing, attempting to instill the incontrovertible need to vote upon the American people. As with every election, these calls to action are not geared towards those who would have voted even without being pressed to do so, but to those who are either disinterested in voting or sitting on the fence.
We hear the same message in the lead up to every single election, that Americans’ voices, and thus their votes, matter. However, despite the fact that every four years there are still people who are disinterested in voting or non-committal, the angle of inquiry is always centered around the voters, and not around the candidates.
The establishments of both of the principal political parties keep fielding candidates who inspire strategic voting, where citizens vote for one candidate just to ensure that another candidate does not win, either because their person of choice does not stand a chance of winning, is not on the ballot, or, as is most often the case, does not and cannot exist within the current rigid political structure.
Much of the brunt for non-voters is often reserved for Black Americans, a community that is falsely perceived to have low voter turnout. In fact, some often reduce the reason for the trials and tribulations of being Black in America to the idea that they don’t vote enough. However, low voter turnout among Black Americans is an easily disprovable stereotype.
If there is a shred of truth to that argument, it lies in the fact that Black Americans are systematically disincentivized from voting through voter suppression or entirely prevented from doing so through a discriminatory and racist criminal justice system. In truth, Black Americans have a voter turnout rate that is quite comparable to that of their White counterparts, even in spite of a comparatively higher number of hurdles and preventative measures placed in their way.
Nevertheless, even if one were to assume that voter turnout is in fact low among Black Americans, perhaps a more pertinent question to ask is: would you blame them?
Black Americans form a disproportionate percentage of prison populations, and are more likely to be incarcerated—or given longer sentences—for the same crimes as their white counterparts. Convicted felons lose their right to vote while they are incarcerated in all but two states. In some of these states, they are barred from voting permanently or indefinitely; in the 2000 election, for example, 31% of Black men in Florida were prevented from voting on account of this policy. In other states, they face an inordinately uphill task to regain this right upon release; in some cases, they are forced to complete a long waiting period or obtain a governor’s pardon. Hence, the prevalence of systemic racism within the criminal justice system has effectively barred many Black Americans from exercising their right to vote.
Even those Black Americans who can vote are subjected to intense voter suppression in areas where they form a high proportion of the local population. For instance, in certain precincts of Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore, and Atlanta, where there is a “substantial concentration of Black voters”, election offices are “overtaxed”, “underfunded”, and understaffed. Consequently, they have “struggled to get mail-in ballots out to voters”, while staff shortages have meant that there are too few vote centers and those that do exist have excessively long lines, both of which disincentivize voting. The importance of election offices is underscored by the fact that the Black Americans have historically tended to prefer voting in-person, as their communities feel that they “can’t reliably trust their mail and are not getting good mail service”.
Furthermore, in 2013, the Supreme Court repealed a section of the Voting Rights Act that protected against “racially discriminatory voting policies” and essentially allowed states “greater reign to enact new laws that have made it harder for many to cast a ballot, including restricting early voting, [and] reducing polling places.” At the same time, it has been shown to introduce more stringent requirements for voter ID, and studies have shown that Black voters are “less likely” to own “proper photo ID identification to cast a ballot”, because they “cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents that are a prerequisite to obtaining government-issued photo ID card”.
If by some miracle they are able or even willing to vote after this level of disenfranchisement, then they are essentially forced to choose between the Democrats and the Republicans, both of whom have actively worked to entrench systemic racism over multiple decades. For instance, under President Bill Clinton in 1994, a crime bill that increased funding for federal prisons and took a “tough-on-crime” approach led to the mass incarceration of Black Americans, who First Lady Hillary Clinton referred to as “super predators”.
Harry Truman, who ruled from 1945 to 1953, was supposedly an “ally” of the Ku Klux Klan. Furthermore, although Lyndon Johnson, who was in office from 1963 to 1969, is celebrated for passing the Civil Rights Act, he was previously a fervent opponent of such policies in the Senate and was only pushed to pass the act due to widespread protests.
Similarly, it is telling that Republican politicians and supporters often harken back to the Confederate era with an apparent fondness, and are reluctant to disavow the racist figures of that time. It is not a coincidence that the party of choice for Confederate flag wielding White Supremacists and neo-Nazis is the Republican party. Through the 20th century, Republicans devised what is now known as the ‘Southern Strategy’ to capture the votes of conservative, evangelical, White Americans who had become disillusioned with the Democrats’ decisions to dismantle Jim Crow laws and institute the Civil Rights Act, and in doing so deepened and widened racial tensions in the country along party lines. Fast forward 60 years and Donald Trump and his minions are now feasting on the fissures Richard Nixon and co. expanded by doing away with racial sensitivity training for federal employees and describing those demanding racial equality as ‘radicals’ and White supremacists as “very fine people”.
On the other end of this supposed ‘spectrum’ lies Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who co-sponsored the 1994 crime bill and proudly and wistfully harkens to a bygone political era in which he worked ‘civilly’ with segregationist Senators like James O. Eastland–who owned a cotton plantation, viewed African-Americans as an “inferior race”, and said that racial integration would precipitate “mongrelization”–and Herman Talmadge, who worked tirelessly to stymie civil rights movements. Yet, when confronted with these truths, he swipes back with an almost Trumpian retort of “There’s not a racist bone in my body”. It can be argued that Black Americans are valued as nothing more than a vote to Biden, and never was this more clear than when he said that any Black American who votes for Trump “ain’t Black”. For a White politician to determine the threshold of what determines Blackness by who they vote for is both tone-deaf and indicative of how the Democrats and the Republicans represent two sides of the same coin.
It has been shown that Black Americans are not wedded to either party, but rather to issues. More often than not, they feel as though neither party’s candidate recognizes, understands, or is committed to addressing the issues and concerns that are present in their communities. This is illustrated by the fact that Black voter turnout was just one percentage point lower than that of White Americans in the 2008 election, and actually 2% higher during the 2012 election. During both elections, Barack Obama ran on the Democratic ticket, giving the Black American community some hope of change. In contrast, in the very next election, in 2016, when forced to choose between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Black voter turnout dropped from 66.6% to 59.6%.
As November 3 approaches and the calls for Americans to exercise their right to vote grow ever louder, perhaps those who are making these vociferous pleas should stop to consider what incentive some Americans have to do so when both parties have historically been essentially indistinguishably racist.
Black Americans Don’t Have Low Voter Turnout, But Could You Blame Them if They Did?
Black Americans are systematically disincentivized from voting through voter suppression or entirely prevented from doing so through a discriminatory and racist criminal justice system.
November 2, 2020
IMAGE SOURCE: MICHAEL HOLAHAN / AUGUSTA CHRONICLEEven those Black Americans who can vote are subjected to intense voter suppression in areas where they form a high proportion of the local population.