one side, when it is in fact always about harm reduction. The lack of empathy on display in any given political party for the other would be funny if the consequences weren’t so dire.
In a country where Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith made coy jokes about lynching and still won an election in a state that is 44 percent Black, the question shouldn’t be “How are Black people voting?” It should be “What can we do to change the way white people are voting?” Or better yet, “How do we protect voting access?” For marginalized people, feminism is failing them by being so focused on whether middle-class white women have what they need and want, but not on protecting voting rights for everyone else. This isn’t just a problem for Americans—after all, if candidates and their supporters can’t see people of color inside the United States as human beings worthy of protection and support, then what chance do those outside the country have?
Dehumanization is the first step in justifying voting against the rights of other people. This is true here in the United States and everywhere else. When you have the kind of military power that this country boasts, voting solely on personal interests with no concern for the wider impact is inherently selfish, and in the case of voting for white supremacy, it’s inherently self-loathing, because whatever consequences other communities face will eventually land at your door too.
As much as I didn’t want to vote for another Clinton, I had already reconciled myself to the idea that the least harmful option was the only one available. In the end, it wasn’t the popular vote that mattered so much as it was the electoral college, and that is perhaps the most damning part of any discussion of race and politics. Even though the popular meme is that Black women voters can make all the difference, the reality is that a coalition of marginalized voters is sometimes not enough to create lasting change.
The fact is that the harm-reducing votes of marginalized people will never be enough to outweigh the stupidity of white people who vote for racism at their own expense. Empathy isn’t something that we can expect to teach adults, and as long as white supremacy carries the day in the home and the voting booth for so many white women, the questions about voter turnout are moot in a country where voting rights are under attack. Voter ID laws, attempts to shut down busing voters to polls, and tactics ranging from closing polling centers early to reducing the number of places to get ID in a state are going to undermine voting access for the same groups that helped put Obama and other centrist and progressive leaders in office. From modern-day poll taxes in the form of requiring former felons in Florida to pay all court fines and fees before regaining their voting rights, to registered voters being purged from the rolls, the same old voter-suppression tactics are back in use. Gerrymandering for a segregated school system leads directly to gerrymandering for an anti-choice politician. Just imagine the impact of something like respectability on who has access to the right to vote.
The same views that allowed suffragettes to support white supremacy despite many having been ardent abolitionists are part and parcel of current white feminism ignoring not only the ways that racism impacts elections but also the widening gap between the right to vote and access to voting. The attitudes that we find so abhorrent in suffragettes like Rebecca Latimer Felton, who was the first woman to serve in the United States Senate and is remembered in some circles as a feminist icon despite her support of lynching, underpin carceral feminist logic that ignores one of the main ways that voting rights are being stripped: via discriminatory policing. It’s not just Black lives that matter; Black votes matter too. And Black votes are not the only votes in danger. Any woman with a criminal record can lose access to the right to vote.
According to the Sentencing Project’s May 2018 report there are approximately 110,000 women incarcerated in America at any given time. That’s 1 percent of the total population of women in America. That number has increased significantly since 1980, and with the rise in incarceration rates, many potential voters are being forced out because of laws that make it illegal for