The Washington Post just uploaded a nice article on the Obama campaign's efforts to expand the African-American vote.
This article resonates with me a whole lot. I've been spending a lot of my time registering voters in central Virginia and I think the article does a fairly good job of depicting some of the challenges involved not just in registering African-American voters but in registering impoverished voters generally. However, in this diary I want to mostly focus on impoverished African-Americans.
This isn't a post containing a point-by-point rundown of my preferred way to chastise or shame people into registering to vote when they are reluctant to do so.
While I do try to persuade people to register, and will mention what I say in my attempts, I find there are times when the means by which I persuade shade into the disingenuous.
I'm really curious if other people have any of these same sentiments as a result of their experiences.
The most difficult aspect of running a voter registration drive among people who have felt shut outside of the economy and the political system for so long is to get under the many layers of cynicism that have been shellacked on year after year and election after election.
The cynicism I'm talking about is described well in the Post article. I constantly hear things like "they'll just put in who they want to put in" or "all politicans are the same, they won't do shit for me." At these times, I know that I'm in for a bit of a battle for that person's registration.
When I hear people say things like that, my first reaction, even now, is to feel a little bit of disgust. After all, how could they not take advantage of their only direct opportunity to have a say in the political affairs of their country? Its too easy to forget that I am a privileged suburbanite with two loving parents and that I had access to an excellent public school system in my hometown and a fantastic Civics teacher. While I was raised into full citizenship, many people are never given any encouragement at all to have a voice in their communities, which they can see as more arrayed against them then embracing them.
But putting that aside, how do you make someone who has never had much opportunity in life, who has always been looked down on by the rest of society, believe that there is a point to voting? How do you do it honorably, without lying or exaggerating? After all, Barack Obama will probably do little, in all honesty, for most of the specific desperate people--badly disabled, addicts, homeless, long-term unemployed--I sometimes try to register, and I feel uncomfrotable telling them he will. Maybe that makes me a less-than-perfect political activist.
The task is especially hard in Virginia, where young black men can't help put notice that a shockingly high percentage of their peer group are perpetually disenfranchised because they have been convicted of felonies (a category of crimes which in Virginia includes passing a bad check of $200 or accidentally cashing a welfare check after failing to immediately report a new stream of income). Another treat in Virginia when trying to register voters is that the state, for no justifiable reason, requires the full social security number to register while refusing to make the equally effective and less sensitive driver's license number an option.
Fortunately I think the honorable path often overlaps with a tactic that is at least somewhat successful. When I have succeeded it is because I have been empathetically persistent. When I have failed to get a registration from someone who is eligible, I think it has often been because I have seemed more interested in their registration and their vote than in the challenges in their lives.
I have learned that it is good practice, both for registration totals and my own conscience, to strive to treat people who are reluctant to register as fellow citizens. Fellow citizens who I am inviting, while trying not to patronize them, into the political process. I know that I often fail, and that I sometimes come across to people as just a manipulative SOB.
I tell people that their vote, while it probably won't change the election, could very well change the election if its joined with the votes of the tens of thousands of others who have had the same difficult experiences with life and the same dyspeptic view of voting. I have explained my own personal view that no matter who you are, voting is your most immediate connection with the political life of your country and that it is a worthwhile act, purely for its intrinsic value, whether it will bring any personal benefit or not. I say the will of the President is capable of launching misguided wars, and its important that we put a man with sound judgment in such a powerful position. I try to listen to people's stories and craft my message accordingly.
But often, when talking to a drunk, half-toothless beggar, who I am about to turn down when he asks me for a couple dollars, the words sound pretty damn hollow.