The American story is seen as, at best, aspirational.
At worst, I think some people really believe that it's a lie.
The US is a fundamentally unequal society.
The promise of justice and liberty for all has not been fulfilled.
This idea of elections and voting, and just fundamentally democracy,
having a racial dimension to it, it was baked in from the beginning.
The Constitution provided rights for – at the time – were property owning white men.
So, these were men who had wealth, so poor whites, of course those who were enslaved,
did not have the right to vote.
We fast forward to the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment,
even the 19th Amendment, all of which expanded voting,
but in practice it's not until we get to the voting rights act that we've seen enforcement,
and we see that States are enacting laws, in the federal government as well, to stop people
from putting things in place like poll taxes and literacy tests and grandfather clauses.
People in the in the communities where we were volunteering, they had physical
access to the site: it was near to them but the site was not prepared for them to vote.
Misinformation, a lot of long lines, people getting tired, people having other things to do,
people having to go to work.
That just makes that access not be equal for everyone.
We currently have in the United States about 6.1 million Americans who have been disenfranchised
because they have a felony conviction, and when we look at the fact that the majority
of people who are incarcerated in this country are people of colour, specifically black men,
and that is who is losing the right to vote, you can't help but see that this idea of race being
under considered is is not true, it's actually considered very much and baked into the system.
What we've seen is that people will regain the right to vote
after they have served their time, they are now re-entered into society,
they should be eligible to vote, but we see that other barriers are put up for them.
I do think that campaigns that tap into that rhetoric of law and order are signalling
to their base that, 'we are going to continue to control people of colour'.
This idea that the people are somehow broken and they're a problem
and we either need to make them better,
or we need to have policies that hold them down.
'Due to defunding of the police department, we're sorry but no one is here to take your call'.
And so that's where you get the law in order
and so, yes, I do think police do not make communities more safe
and that is something that I feel both sides really struggle to come to terms with.
There is a history to show that black and brown people tend to vote Democrat,
but that used to be flipped and it's possible that it could that it could flip again.
The voting public in the United States is at an inflection point
and so history may not actually give us an understanding of what we can expect in the future.
We understand and I understand that change is often incremental,
but that doesn't mean that we can't push for radical change, it doesn't mean that
that we shouldn't have a more bold vision of eliminating racial inequality.
So, the question is do people want to be privileged more than they want to survive?
I think about James Baldwin, who said:
'Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced'.