why I must vote: reflections on Montgomery, Selma, and the winding path to justice

I’ve had the opportunity to go to Alabama with a group of other students from my university. We got to a town outside of Birmingham last night, where we are staying in a church. This morning we drove to Montgomery to see the Southern Poverty Law Center and their Civil Rights Memorial.

The memorial, designed by Maya Lin, consists of a curved wall with a quote from a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., a paraphrase from Amos 5:24:"...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." In front of the wall is a large inverted cone, the surface flat but off-center, as if it's leaning under the weight of the circular timeline on its surface. The timeline begins with the death of Emmett Till in 1955 and circles around to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, listing a number of others who died in the movement. There is a 2-foot gap between King and Till's names, a space for everyone not mentioned, a space for us who look on, inviting us to choose: "how will you be remembered?"

The Civil Rights Memorial

That afternoon we drove on to Selma, the historic site of what is now known as "Bloody Sunday." In 1965, a large group marched through Selma to fight for the Black vote. When they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met with a militarized police force, which brutally attacked the protesters.

A picture of a group of protesters in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, lead by Martin Luther King, Jr.

On the bus ride back to the church, we were given time to reflect in response to a few prompts preparing for our evening discussion. The following two prompts stuck out to me:

Take a moment to “check your privilege.” Think about how not in 2015 most people can vote but many don’t. Why is that? With presidential elections coming up soon do you think you will vote? Has learning about Bloody Sunday altered your decision on voting in any way? 

What is #BlackLivesMatter to you?

Maybe this is bad, but I don’t care that much about voting. Like, I know in many ways, cognitively, that I should. But the prospect itself doesn’t land on me with any weight or leave me with any sense of urgency, but rather just brushes by me, leaving me not with the impression of a great right or responsibility but rather with a soft “meh.”

Right now, my slowly-emerging politics are mainly concerned with challenging the way people think, challenging what is accepted, pushing up lesser-heard narratives and pointing out their nuances when people oversimplify them. I know how to complicate things, to ask questions, not to provide answers. Not to provide solutions. Not to change policy. Not to vote. I often just figure that if people’s hearts and minds are changed, policy eventually will too, a kind of “trickle up” theory of politics.

And I do, in so many ways, believe in that. But I also know that my privilege has left me without the need to worry about policy or political representation. My privilege has left without the need to vote, because change doesn’t need to happen for me. If the world remained exactly how it is, I could go on to lead a successful and fulfilled life, mostly unaware and unconcerned about the fact that my success would come at the expense of others, would be built on the backs of others who have been tracked into the massive system of labor designed to make it look like I worked my way to where I am.

But I’ve already learned too much. Maybe it’d be possible for me to forget or to unlearn, maybe if stopped following half of the people that pop up on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, maybe if I moved to an all-white area and taught all-white students and used a curriculum written by all-white people that sends the message that racism is in the past and everything is, finally, as it should be. Maybe then I could forget that it’s not. And sometimes, I think it’d make things a whole lot easier.

But I don’t want to forget, and at this point, I don’t know if forgetting is possible. Maybe living in denial would be possible, but not outright erasure. Today I stood on the bridge in Selma where people gave their bodies for the right to vote, stood in front of the Civil Rights Memorial, in front of the gap in the lopsided, circular timeline that wobbles and rolls and circles round and round “until justice rolls down like waters,” and it left me with the choice of stepping into that gap in the timeline that bends towards justice or of opting for one more steady, one where change is an annoying occasional jolt to what I’ve accepted as normal rather than a leap towards an elusive future I am working towards because I refuse to accept the world we’ve been given. I stand there, a body marked with a free pass out of this uncertain loop barreling forward, and I feel—even though the choice is my own—I feel no choice in stepping in and rolling onward, hoping that the 120 pounds that my slight frame adds to this motion can help to build some momentum, help to continue the movement towards a world that embodies mysterious words like glory, love, and justice.

The group from my university in front of the Civil Rights Memorial

So, as I go forward, I know I must vote. Because as much as this act may hit me with no more force than a puff of smoke and as much as my participation may hit others even less, I know it’s not just for me. If voting doesn’t increase my own security or representation—as if I need more of either—if voting isn’t for me, then it must be for people like Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boya, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., all those who have been killed by injustice and resurrected through retellings of history, through marches, through hashtags, through this movement that demands that I act like their lives and their deaths matter, that their destroyed bodies matter, and that—even though they carry little weight—my vote and my body and the things I do with them do, in fact, matter.