The Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais revealed that Black people's limited electoral power is not protected, and it never has been.
“I shed my blood for the vote now…Some people get confused…the vote for me has never been the road to liberation, it's only been a means for organizing my people.” Kwame Ture
While writing this piece, I could already hear the reactionaries - many of them Black and subscribers to the Black MISleadership, Petty Bourgeois Class newsletter, many still refusing to emancipate themselves from the Democrat Party plantation and many who act as willing vanguards and public advocates for it - castigating a position that questions the larger futility of Black people voting in the United States as it pertains to the larger question of our collective liberation from the domestic colonialism/imperialism imposed on us by the grander dictatorship and tyranny of racial capitalism.
Electoralists, many of them lacking a class analysis, decry anyone who questions the ultimate power of the vote to deliver liberation as much as someone attempting to disrupt how they make a living - and there’s definitely a reason for that. Yet these dogmatic electoralists never allow for any nuance. There are, of course, results of the vote that have led to undeniable benefits for poor and working class people - yet these benefits have not established a collective vehicle for social mobility, especially for poor and working class people. And even if they did, these benefits may very well allow for a feckless idea to emerge and metastasise, which is, the endpoint is class elevation rather than class struggle in concert with struggles for and with any and all oppressed people. The liberals, especially the white liberal apparatus (WLA - pronounced “willa”) - that collection of neoliberal think tanks, consultants, non profits/civil society organizations, Democrat Party operatives (including their cooniferous kneegroe agents in the Congressional Black Caucus), and other variables of the reactionary equation prove the limitations of the vote (and, as it were, their own limitations) by consistently calling for “resistance” rather than defiance. This is a conscious choice that requires exploration, lest we allow the WLA to dismiss it as merely pedantic.
Resistance is often a passive, internal, or reactive process—a holding back or enduring—while defiance is an active, bold, and values-aligned refusal to comply with authority or pressure. Resistance focuses on survival - including the survival of a U.S. system that isn’t rigged as much rigging is a key component of the system itself, whereas defiance represents a proactive, deliberate choice to act in accordance with principled values despite the risks. Whereas “resistance” evokes an approach of “I don’t want to,” defiance declares, “I won’t do it.” The former is reactionary and contradictory, the latter is revolutionary and uncompromising - which is requisite because you simply cannot confront and vanquish racial capitalism with compromise and capitulation, and I argue this also cannot be done solely by voting. This notion can be vindicated with a single question: did the Haitians, Cabral, Castro/Guevara vote out their oppressors/colonizers? And further, should the zionist ethnostate of Israel even have a chance to vote out Netanyahu, will this lead to the liberation of the Palestinian people? I’d add, while on the issue of “pedantics,” so-called leftists, especially the non profiteers of the professional managerial class, also contribute to the problem by constantly taking part in, and leading, comical rhetorical arguments over “equity” versus “equality.” These kinds of time-pillaging debates wouldn’t even matter if these “movement” leaders, struggling to establish and maintain their position in shaping lexicon, were more concerned with struggling to actually advance collective power that establishes and maintains a proletariat dictatorship.
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 was, absolutely, a major achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights epoch and the sacrifices that led to its passage must never be forgotten. To this end, we must not be reductive or dismissive of the recent Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling on Section 2 of the VRA that effectively allows states to eliminate “minority” opportunity districts and also restricts the ability to challenge redistricting maps that dilute “minority” votes. This follows the high court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder in which the justices suspended the provision requiring states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before they could make changes to election rules, a process known as preclearance. The impacts of last week’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling will be felt for a long time. This much was made clear by Justice Kagan, who included salient language as part of her dissent, “The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.” She added, “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.”
Preventing or obstructing the ability of the masses to select their representatives, as this SCOTUS has just undertaken, is an execrable act, a direct assault on self-determination, and the direct antithesis of the tenets of people(s)-centered human rights. At the same time, there’s a litany of truth in the recent SCOTUS ruling that we have not seen since Roger Tanney was Chief Justice of the high court. Tanney delivered the majority opinion for the infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford case of 1857 in which he declared, that the “Founders” never intended for African Americans to be considered citizens, asserting they were "regarded as beings of an inferior order" with "no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and he specifically named that the “Founders” words in the Declaration of Independence, “all men were created equal,” were never intended to apply to Black people. The legacy of Roger Tanney’s SCOTUS has now just been re-articulated by the high court of Chief Justice John Roberts, from which we can make two salient conclusions: 1. Black and other colonized and oppressed people will never be seen as equal in a settler-colonial nation that, by design, has never even seen them as human; and 2. The limitations of the vote as an instrument of collective liberation for Black and all poor and oppressed peoples. What we, the masses, do with these conclusions is entirely up to us and will determine if the recent SCOTUS ruling and all that it proves and exposes will be “resisted” or defied. For I would argue not much has changed since Tanney’s ruling because Black people in this nation have remained being treated as property - whether it's property of the State vis-à-vis mass incarceration, or, both willingly and unwillingly, property of racial capitalism as demonstrated by the fact that one of the justices who just voted to further gut and atrophy the VRA is the cooniferous Clarence Thomas.
Simply replacing who is in power of a white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist system has and will never enjoin the power of said system to oppress, suppress, subjugate and, when the system deems it necessary, eliminate an element(s) of the masses it chooses to. Replacing Bush with Obama did nothing to change or transform the system, and the same could be said about replacing Trump with Biden. All four of these neoliberal charlatans are war criminals, corporate cronies, and willing vanguards of the capitalist dictatorship. These four administrations, in themselves, demonstrate why voting must not stand in for, nor stand in the way of, actual organizing and principled struggle for transformation of the system that includes establishing an entirely different idea of what constitutes “democracy.”
Yes, the people should make their case in the voting booths, even if it proves, as it has time and time again, the entire premise of the settler colonial experiment that is “America” - a white supremacist hegemony in full and perpetual fealty to racial capitalism. But the larger goal and methodology must be a case that is made to the people, the case that the bourgeois of “America” has been playing the masses for two and a half centuries and nothing will change or be transformed until this class of oligarchs is toppled, vanquished, dispatched of, and otherwise usurped. And the larger case is that we have never actually lived in a “democracy” in the first place. It’s like the scene in the movie The Matrix when Morpheus shows Neo that he has been living in a “dream world” and a lie his entire life. As Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. points out in his book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own, “These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our lives.” Glaude Jr. is naming the Matrix Effect that sustains the greater lie that is “America” - this effect cannot be confronted or altered through the vote alone.
To this end, SCOTUS may have, once again, served the role of our collective Morpheus with its recent ruling - and, as painful as it is for many people, we should consider even thanking the high court for elucidating what far too many of the masses have been unable or unwilling to see and embrace. Again, not since Roger Tanney’s Supreme Court, which essentially told Dred Scott the he and all other Black people were never intended to be viewed as citizens, or even humans for that matter, have we observed a more honest pronouncement of the primordial ethos that established the United States of America - a nation that is less, of, by, and for the people, and more of, by, and for white “supremacy” ideology in service to the maintenance of the perpetuity of kinetic racial capitalism. Tanney’s high court like that of Roberts
The reactionaries, in the context of the vote, like to speak about duty and appealing to the conscience of the country and its “greater angels,” or some BS like that anyway. Kwame Ture turned this idea on its head when, while critiquing Dr. King, he said, “His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” Voting can be viewed as an act of nonviolence - depending, of course, on who and what you’re voting for. It can also be viewed as an appeal to the conscience of this settler-colonial nation. But you can’t appeal to or plead with the conscience of white “supremacy” and racial capitalism - neither contains one.
Even the white supremacists who “founded” this settler colonial nation chose not to appeal to King George. And the Declaration of Independence (DOI), where they make their case for the futility of making appeals, for all of its hypocrisy, also forms a paradox in that it’s also instructive as it pertains to how to approach blunt and intransigent ideologies like white “supremacy” and racial capitalism, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…” The DOI continues, “and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do…” The masses must apply these words and reciprocate them in service to the people rather than in service to the lie that is “America.” Because when Assata Shakur proclaimed that, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom, it is our duty to win…” she didn’t say a damn thing about voting.
Glaude Jr. argues, “The willingness of so many of our fellows to toss aside any semblance of commitment to democracy - to embrace cruel and hateful policies - exposes the idea of America as an outright lie.” He adds, “Even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the country seemed no closer to becoming a genuinely multifaceted democracy. White people would not let that happen. They held firmly on to the lie.” This much is evidenced by the fact that the only Black person who white “America” could stomach acting as the Chief Executive of their settler colonial nation was Barack Obama, an exemplar of the Black MISleadership class - and even he was too much for them to stomach, as evidenced by the ascension of his successor. The recent SCOTUS decision, to Glaude Jr.’s points, is a proclamation that the bourgeois and their vanguards are done taking part in and tired of all the work necessary to mask the lie that is America or allow it to exist incognito. By all but eradicating the VRA, SCOTUS has made this clear. As such, perhaps it's less about thanking SCOTUS for its recent decision, which is absolutely harmful, and more about showing gratitude for what the decision reveals about the high court and, by extension, the house of cards that is the U.S. and its sham democracy that was built on a foundation of maximum mendacity.
In 1963, James Baldwin first met the man who would become Kwame Ture on the campus of Howard University, where he was invited to speak as part of a symposium that was organized by the student group the Nonviolent Action Group. Following the symposium, Baldwin agreed to meet with a group of students that included Ture. As Glaude Jr. tells it, “Baldwin made the Howard students promise him that they would never believe the lies this country told about them, because he knew the lie would do irreparable harm to their souls, as it has done to the country.” In this context, I would posit that when something has become so rotten and irreparable, is it myopic to believe that voting in itself is a prescription, or does voting continue to uphold the lie? What are we even voting for rather than against?
The vote, in itself, will never act as an antidote for a disease as potent as the American lie - this has been proven time and time again. The lies we tell ourselves, the lies we allow ourselves to believe when the truth sits right in front of us, are worse than the ones being told about “America” and its styrofoam “democracy.” Continuing to believe and take part in a system that was designed to continue your oppression, no matter who is in power, is to allow ourselves to become slaves on a plantation of lies, which, in turn, continues to legitimize the dictatorship and tyranny of racial capitalism. If we continue to believe the lies, then they will all continue to live as the truth.
I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that people should not vote. Go ahead and vote, no one and nothing should stop you from doing so pursuant to the laws of self-determination that are superior to the arbitrary and capricious “laws” of this settler colonial nation. But also understand, as Ture reminds us, “You vote once in four years and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, and making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day." As such, to those who are mourning a VRA that is on life support as its pulse and heart rate continue to slow and become ever more proximate to flatline, we must now see that the now defunct law was always a compromise, a law that had to be consistently re-certified every now and then to continue the lie that is “America.” SCOTUS’s recent ruling has ended the lie and offered us the truth and the question for us, the masses, is, to reference the Matrix, will we take the blue pill and continue sleeping or will we take the red pill that forces us to see the reality of bourgeois propaganda and our collective duty to deracinate it?
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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