It’s time to take the blinders off

Voting is your right.

Conventional wisdom suggests that things rarely stay the same – they either get better or they get worse. While there are many facts that will determine whether conditions will improve in communities of color across the U.S. or continue to decay, people of color should always remember that nothing has ever come easy for people of African descent in the United States.

It took more than a century for this nation to even recognize that we are fully humans and classify us as such when quantifying the population. It took quite some time for the news that President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation to make its way to some parts of Texas and the Deep South. And it took a century after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation for the United States Congress to get around to passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Even now, there is a vigorous movement under way to take those rights away from anyone in America who isn’t white, male and part of the notoriously wealthy one percent.

Yes, we are once again in the throes of having a few take us back centuries to when people of color, women and the poor had little or no rights.

That alone ought to be enough of an incentive for all of us who know anything about the history of this nation to be concerned about the upcoming election in November.

We should take great inspiration from the example of those who fought for their freedom against the greatest of all odds like our enslaved ancestors on La Amistad and those in the River Parishes in 1811.

This is a clarion call.

We should be ever mindful of Dr. Neely Fuller and the late Dr. Frances Cress Wesling’s observation that the system of racism/white supremacy is fueled by white fear of genetic annihilation.

If people of color and other historically oppressed groups are serious about their freedom to exist, freedom to choose, you must exercise your right to vote before that right is taken away.

This article originally published in the July 22, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.