What's At Stake On Tuesday

2008-11-04
William Jelani Cobb

"We don't vote."

The old man spoke those words casually, as if he were saying "I'm a Gemini" or "It's warm outside." I know I stared at him blankly for a second even though I tried not to. I ran through the practiced responses to that statement: do you know that there's an initiative to build a new library in this neighborhood and the residents have to vote to approve it? Are you aware of the proposal to increase your property taxes that is on the ballot this year? Now it was his turn to stare at me blankly. Content with his decision to boycott history, he rolled up his car window and pulled out of the driveway. My canvassing partner grumbled about the man's ignorance and I pointed out that some of us would have opposed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Let me give you some background: this exchange took place in my neighborhood urging people to vote. I went to the local wholesale place and bought 300 bottles of water to give to people who will be standing on long lines on election day. Nearly every friend, family member or co-worker I know has contributed time, money or both toward the effort to elect Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. In 2008, it's virtually impossible to find anyone over the age of 55 who didn't march with Martin Luther King. But look closely at the history and you get to recognize that if all the people who now claim to have marched with Dr. King were actually on the front lines of the civil rights movement, we would've ended Jim Crow and won the right to vote in about two days. Years from now it will be impossible to find anyone who'll admit that they refused to go to the polls to vote in this election. But just like those now-invisible folk who looked at King's efforts and decided to sit on the sidelines, there will certainly be some of us who sleep walk past election day.

We know, or ought to know that neighborhoods like mine in Atlanta -- largely black areas inside states that voted Republican in the last election - hold the key to an Obama victory. The hope is that for every white voter who gets inside the booth and finds himself unable to pull the lever (or poke the screen) for a black candidate, there's two black voters who otherwise would not have voted at all. And that was why I felt a fraction of bitterness well in me as the man pulled out of his driveway.

With hundreds of doors to knock on, no campaign worker has time to convince non-voters to go to the polls. Just 72 hours before the polls open, your job is to identify those who are ready to vote, find out if they need a ride to the polls and give them the last-minute information they need about the process. But I still found myself unnerved by the disturbing numbers of black folk who had no intention of going three blocks up the street to vote.

Maybe this is a version of learned helplessness; maybe we've been disappointed so often that we've given up hope. Or perhaps the past eight years have been so demoralizing that some of us have begun to view the skewed visions and violent priorities of the Bush administration as normalcy. We, of all people, should remember that Bush's path to the White House ran through Florida where thousands of black folk were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls. And surely we remember the storm-bloated bodies drifting through the terrible streets of New Orleans and the fact that the President remained on vacation for three days while the city suffered.

I couldn't present an argument that day, but if I could have I would have told him that we are fortunate enough to be alive at the crossroads of our history in this country and in the world. I would have said that Tuesday may be the most important day in our history since the day slavery ended. And if those grand scale arguments left him unmoved, I would've brought up the practical concerns and asked him to look around our neighborhood at the devastation caused by the mortgage crisis, the increasing numbers of boarded up homes that are an open invitation to criminals and drug hustlers, and asked him about the nephew or son who is serving his third tour in Iraq. I would've asked him how much his monthly prescriptions cost and whether he worried about how long he would be able to afford them. Or whether he had noticed the children who look at Obama and see a limitless horizon of possibilities.

More than any election before, we are in the middle of a process that determines where we will go next as a people, as a community, as a country. We have a chance to permanently banish the lie that "black people can't come together." Given more time I would've told the old man that we are way, way past the time for blank stares and lazy boycotts and asked if he wanted to go out like those invisible marchers in Birmingham, ashamed of the truth and lying their way into history.

William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at Spelman College. His third book, now available from NYU Press: To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic 

He can be reached at http://www.jelanicobb.com 

TELL US ABOUT YOUR ELECTION EXPERIENCES AT TWITTER.COM/EBONYJET