Expert: It’s Time to Stop Telling Black Folks to ‘Just Vote’

With less than 85 days until the midterm elections, Black voters across the country are getting ready to head to the polls. But with voting rights under attack, redistricting battles reshaping political representation and racial tensions running high, there’s a bigger question worth asking: Is voting really enough?

Anneshia Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values, thinks it’s time Black folks reconsider what we mean when we talk about political power.

In an exclusive interview with The Root, Hardy pushed back on the idea that Black political participation begins and ends with voting. That way of thinking, she says, leaves too many people feeling defeated when they cast their ballots, only to watch institutions step in and dilute the impact of those votes.

“I would never answer that person by saying people died for your right to vote,” Hardy said. “Our ancestors weren’t fighting so we can blindly participate in systems, regardless of whether those systems serve us or not. They were fighting for self-determination.”

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That distinction matters.

Voting was never the only way Black people built power. Long before Black Americans had access to the ballot box, communities created institutions, newspapers, mutual-aid societies and freedom schools. They organized boycotts, flexed economic power and used art and community organizations to fight systems designed to keep them powerless.

If you look at what’s happening in Black communities right now, Hardy said, that history is repeating itself.

“We are seeing communities doing what Black communities have always done when institutions created a void. We step into it,” she said. “And that is really part of our ancestral lineage.”

That lineage may be especially important as Black Americans navigate the latest fights over voting access, redistricting and civil rights. Hardy argues that instead of waiting for institutions to fix themselves, Black communities need to create spaces of their own where people can understand what is happening, talk about it and figure out what comes next.

And that brings us back to the midterms.

Black voters are not suddenly disengaged because they’re questioning the political system. Hardy says we need to be careful about calling that frustration “apathy.”

“So when somebody says, ‘What’s the point?’ I don’t hear somebody who doesn’t care about democracy anymore,” Hardy said. “I hear somebody who is trying to reconcile what they’ve been told democracy is supposed to do, with what they are actually experiencing.”

Black people are paying attention. They vote, participate and watch what happens afterward. Then they see the rules change or their political gains get undermined, like the Supreme Court decision to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

For Hardy, empowerment has to be a broader conversation.

“We cannot tell Black voters that voting is their power, and then when they exercise their power and institutions intervene in ways that diminish its impact, simply tell them to vote harder,” she said. “That is not empowerment… Eventually, that becomes gaslighting.”

There’s another battle happening, too: the battle over information and narrative.

“One of the ways to keep communities disempowered is to create barriers of information about the power that they have,” Hardy said.

That’s why Hardy argues the goal shouldn’t simply be figuring out how to get Black people “excited” about voting. The better question is how to make people feel powerful in their own communities between elections.

“And yes, voting is a part of that,” Hardy emphasized. “I’m not saying don’t vote now. Voting is a part of that, but it is not the whole thing.”

The rest looks like organizing local neighborhoods, showing up at district hearings and building communications networks, Hardy continued.

“It is time for us to do some political education and close the gap around how power has moved and continues to move in this country and where people get in,” she said.