"Black Women Will Save the World"

A Voting Praxis

In April Ryan’s recent book, Black Women Will Save the World: An Anthem, she highlights the myriad ways Black women have historically and contemporarily been tasked with saving ourselves and everyone else. Tracking her own commitments to the Black community and justice as a lifelong journalist, she traces Black women’s commitment to justice and each other and our unwavering and unshakable determination to seek justice under all circumstances and against all odds. In the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells, we refuse to relinquish our civil rights or our voting rights, but despite manipulative rhetoric that suggests we “owe” our votes to our forebears because of their sacrifices, I believe we owe it to ourselves and to our children—and to our children’s children, who shouldn’t have to repeat the struggles of the past. The retrograde retroactive rewind of reproductive rights and voter suppression tactics are but two examples of attempts at taking us back—Black women, however, are future focused. Our capacity to dream and imagine a world more just and whole than the one we live in gives us the hope of our imagination and determination.

Our relationship with America is fraught with the messiness of a forced marriage—entangled because of no notion of our own, we fell in love with her possibilities, saw past her past mistakes, and insist that she live up to her promises. Our relationship to the United States, especially the South, is more than complicated because we sometimes struggle explaining to outsiders looking in how we can love something so hard that doesn’t love us back. Too often, like in any abusive relationship, we stay despite the problems. We are committed to making it work. We have invested too much time, too much heart, too many dreams.

My patriotism, if you can call it that, is not wedded to entitlement, ownership or pride. I am often embarrassed of the U.S., whose history and bigotry is so shameful it is either hidden, lied about, or forbidden to be taught in schools. While I am usually ambivalent about my nationality, voting and participating in an active democracy is how I love America--because despite the bullshit, I want it to work, I think our relationship, as challenging as it sometimes is, is worth saving.

I am committed to voting because my grandmother, who voted for the first time for the first Black president, always insisted I vote. Her own refusal and lack of participation was not disinterest, it was intentional manipulation and misinformation. Born in 1932, she came of age during a time when Black people were punished for even trying. She was made to believe that she wasn’t smart enough to vote and she assumed that to register she would be asked questions she could not answer, be humiliated in front of white people for not guessing how many jellybeans were in a jar, or be turned away for not correctly explaining sections of the Constitution. Those deterrents to voting, alongside others, haunted her until in 2008, when coaxed by my mother’s encouragement and recruitment, she finally registered to vote and went to the polls.

And despite the fact that Black women are often ignored and assumed  automatic Democrats, we are informed voters who vote in the interests of our communities, often choosing the lesser of two evils, but also galvanizing our efforts and energy toward representatives we will then critique and hold accountable. Even though Black women’s votes are often devalued while Black men’s votes are courted, we refuse to play around with the possibility of fascism, we know that there is too much at stake for us to not try and fight. Trying and fighting is unequivocally tethered to our vote.

Black women have been the literal conscience and scapegoat of America. We are relied upon to do the right thing, and then blamed when things still fall apart. But we are undeterred. If we are the conscience and scapegoat--we are also the pulse, the prophet and the teacher.

Our threshold for empathy and generosity is informed by what Alice Walker refers to as double vision—the ability to “see [your] own world and its close community while intimately knowing and understanding the people who make up the larger world that surrounds and suppresses [your] own.” This remarkable capacity to forgive, to assist, to believe, to build and rebuild, to imagine and re-imagine and to remember, to always remember, means that we are often undeterred by setbacks and focused on outcomes.

We are seasoned magicians. We are innovative, industrious and intentional. Our activism begins and ends at home. It is and has always been Black women who move movements, who activate activism, who shapeshift and show up, making a way out of no way. I am, as ever, counting on the resilience and tenacity of Black women activists and aunties, community workers and care givers, curators and coalition builders, mothers and matriarchs, educators and elevators, leaders and liaisons, visionaries and vanguards, revolutionaries and reformists, politicians and preachers to save us, sometimes from ourselves. And if, as Ryan suggests, our intergenerational fight for democracy and visibility are ever-present, we have to be present and focused.

Disillusionment and disengagement is a distraction, a psychological poll tax, a literacy test in new clothes to intimidate, suppress and exhaust us from our own salvation. I believe in miracles, magic and black women, because despite the continued efforts to suppress and depress Black women’s voting/voice, our response to the restriction is not complacency, we are more determined and focused than ever. There is no neutrality when our democracy is on the line-- and on the ballot.

Truth is, while Black women shouldn’t have to save America, I hope like hell we do, until she is strong enough to save her damn self.