dead oppossum on Nostr: i'm not saying you should vote, i'm saying decide for yourself whether you should ...

i'm not saying you should vote, i'm saying decide for yourself whether you should vote, like actually think about it, fuck your slogans, don't tell me what to do

like whether or not a person votes has no relation to whether i'm involved in organizing or anything else, one can vote and burn down a police station, there is no contradiction

I also fuck with Kwame Ture and his thing is that voter registration is a means of mobilizing people and community engagement, the voter registration drives he did in the deep south laid the foundations of the Black Panther party there, the act of voting or the outcome of the election is not the ultimate end, it's something you can do to engage with the community and build organizational capability

it's pretty clear most white US anarchists/leftists do not have this frame of reference, they haven't studied the civil rights movement, they don't situate their politics in these historic liberation struggles, despite the fact white leftists were heavily involved with these movements in their day, because their politics are largely ahistorical and abstract, and defined solely by a reaction against contemporary DNC liberalism -- so it does not occur to them how weird it is to tell people not to vote, especially for people in the US South, where there's a long history of activists being brutally murdered for registering black people to vote, where mass voter disenfranchisement is still a big thing, where the entire republican regime is almost whole dependent on gerrymandering and systematic voter disenfranchisement.

To be fair there's lots of black folks who consciously choose to not vote, for reasons as well thought out as anyone else. But it's telling how rare this historic reality is even addressed. A big part of is imo is US leftists do not identify their own liberation as proletarians with the struggle of the black colony.