ethiopienne:

Beyoncé’s post, like Winfrey’s speech, neatly summarizes the condescending nature of most messaging to black voters. Rather than incentivizing people by naming tangible benefits of voting, celebrities and pundits alike all too often tap into a seemingly bottomless fountain of racial shame. They question black voters’ sense of community and self-respect. They evoke painful imagery: slavery, lynchings, police violence. After such reminders to black citizens, public figures often end with some version of the same platitude cum rallying cry: We’re all equal at the polls. Now we share the same right, and you owe it to your forerunners to exercise it. It’s a simple, linear trajectory: up from slavery and out into the polls. Citizenship, realized.

But the long legacy of white-supremacist violence against black people in America does not begin or end at the polls. The idea that legions of black people offered their lives as a sacrifice just so that future generations could vote on one day is reductive. Black people in America and beyond have faced cruel, unrelenting terrors in pursuit of justice and humanity. Reducing their efforts—sloganizing their deaths—robs them of the full breadth of their motivations; it fashions their lives into dispensable tokens of social progress. Zeroing in on voting also glosses over the coordinated campaigns black people have historically organized to ensure any number of social needs, among them housing rights, education, and protection from violence. It dilutes centuries of black social movements into one easily quantifiable moment.

(via thefifthemerald)