“God damn it, it’s not over yet. We’re still doing civil rights.” – Hortense Spillers
“You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible, thinking their responsibility is limited to a one-day vote. Politics is every day … every minute.” – Kwame Ture
A peculiar self-inflicted subterfuge is overrunning many people in the U.S. Inaction is being misrepresented as a principled stance against this society’s failure to deliver progress to its people. Frustrated voters stand out among this wave of disillusioned people who are upset that a system that isn’t designed to give them justice has “failed” to do so. Rather than turning that anger toward the system itself, they’re attempting to make resignation and disengagement into something they aren’t. And while it’s true that the brunt of expectations about who needs to do what to make change are disproportionately distributed, there’s something sinister among us. A cold environment of hubris, resentment, and blaming victims has generated conditions ripe for exploitation. We can still reject it all, but to do so, we must recognize the differences in how we choose to resist, what is effective, and confront the fear that is leading some to intellectualize inactivity.
Exit polls may be one of the most damning examples of a confused public. After every election, they’re misinterpreted to make it seem as if they give a complete picture of who voted and how. Media pundits share exit polls, like NBC News’ November 2024 poll, divorced from their contextual data. Though this poll I’m referencing represents an effort conducted in just “10 key states,” it reads like a key for generalizing who voted for whom based on identity. As a Black Southerner, I understand this very well. Over half of the Black population lives in the South, which many assume entirely votes red. Still, elections help reinforce a collective punishment, blaming everyone (including those who don’t vote Republican) as a whole when disasters strike that highlight right-wing terror. It illustrates how U.S. electoral politics can significantly distort public perception, often at the expense of disempowered individuals.
Now, as a fascist government reigns, even those who didn’t vote Republican are lambasted with “fuck around and find out” or “thoughts and tariffs” as dismissive insults just because of where they reside. Undocumented people who cannot vote are being blamed for their deportation. Palestinians and other populations abroad are being blamed for their extermination. It’s as if the public doesn’t realize that even if we were solely looking at elections as a means of determining who deserves to suffer and who doesn’t, it still wouldn’t reflect reality. More people didn’t vote than the number of people who went to the polls for former Vice President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump. We’re talking about 36% of the eligible voting-age population, which says a lot. It reflects just how disenfranchising and marginalizing the entire process is by design.
The strange irony is that now some liberal voters are pushing a narrative that since they voted for Harris, they have the right to detach. It’s also arguable that giving that much weight to voting is already a form of detachment itself. To make matters worse, they’re arguing against people protesting and the escalation that happens outside the realm of party politics. It’s as if they believe that someone would be “tricking” them into going outside and demonstrating. Some have even suggested that the fascist government is trying to get a reaction out of us so that it can declare martial law. The absurdity of such a position lies in the fact that an authoritarian regime doesn’t need the law, an excuse, or provocation to do what it wants to. Yet, the gulf between understanding this and self-inflicted liberal indifference is massive. The ability of repressive forces to move their agenda forward while a chorus of oppressed people attempt to make passivity a politic is a truly regressive gift. It’s insulting to the legacy of the radical work put in by those who came before us.
Revolutionary change is not ordered like a meal or some product online. It is also not voted in by exporting decisions to a representative. It is fought long and hard and won through persistent struggle. It’s the same struggle that we’re supposed to carry forward when we understand the lengths that others went to before us. Those making Black people collateral damage in their victim-blaming schemes aren’t much better than the liberal resignation essentializing Blackness as meaning “we’ve done enough.” Black skin doesn’t mean we inherited activism or a radical resume. If you do the work, you are those things, but not just because you fit the description of an identity. Plenty of the people we’re fighting against right now represent the diversification of empire and fascism, since our adversaries are not only white men.
I’ve argued before that the liberal disposition as it relates to voting and Black history here is tied up in allowing the state to co-opt Black struggle through selective remembrance. The Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers makes that crucial point relating to commemorative spaces, too, saying:
If you do the commemoration, it’s like I have become a statue now. You know, I’m … statuesque. And to me, that’s a kind of death. It’s a stop sign. And I’m not interested in a stop sign. So to me, the commemorative is the permission to stop and to say, I’m finished. I’ve reached a mountain top. I am now as refined as I will ever be. I’m not going to have any more ideas about that. So to me, that’s dangerous … and it is a way, I think, of containment.”
We certainly have not finished fighting. However, it would be wrong to point all of this out and not address the failure of the denominations of leftists who largely offer no viable alternative. Time spent constantly reacting to bad news should have been spent building sustained programmatic work and organizations outside of statist frameworks. Many such attempts are particularly scattered and weak. So it’s not as surprising that people who are busy blaming and masking their fear as some justified apathy resent radicalism in many instances. It doesn’t always just represent work they’re unwilling to do; oftentimes, it represents work they can’t visualize. We have a crisis in collectivity driven by the self-centeredness that leads much of the public to delude themselves into thinking that stopping someone trying to harm us all is nothing more than “a distraction.”
Perhaps everyone is just waiting on someone else to start something that they could ignite themselves. Who among us is willing to risk life, freedom, and much more in an attempt to be a spark?
There isn’t necessarily a shortage of self-professed revolutionaries and radicals in the U.S. Despite this, no revolution is here. We certainly have insights from revolutionary periods that preceded us, but not many actual revolutionists among us. Perhaps everyone is just waiting on someone else to start something that they could ignite themselves. Who among us is willing to risk life, freedom, and much more in an attempt to be a spark? Far too many among us want to be the management, influences, or self-appointed vanguard, thinking they’re supposed to direct the revolutionary actions of others. It’s silly to see in a place where the left has been beaten into a place of posturing and rhetoric.
This is not a movie where we’re waiting for a happy ending. If you want someone to be brought to justice, then take it to them yourselves. If you want someone to stop killing others, then force them to stop killing others. If you want to see your community protected, then build the infrastructure to do it. Make time and space to connect with others who are doing the same and facilitate networks that can sustain a counterforce against the oppressive state of things. That’s how we can not only build something comparable to what came before, but supersede and transcend. We must drive progress ourselves because movements that have preceded us have done so. That’s our duty and obligation, not an entitlement enabling us to retire based on the work of others that got us here.
Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
