Graphic from the Write In Teressa Raiford Facebook Page
Content Warning: racism, police brutality, sexual assault
In Portland, Oregon, a grassroots write-in voting campaign has sprung up in support of community organizer and abolitionist Teressa Raiford. She ranked third in the city's mayoral primary back in May, which effectively disqualified her from the ballot come November. Less than a month after this “defeat”, Portlanders watched as the Portland Police Bureau continued to brutalize its people who were protesting against police violence under mayor and police commissioner Ted Wheeler (who is up for re-election and leads in the polls). Through experiential enlightenment and social media literacy, the city's cultural consciousness has dramatically shifted since the primary. Voters are now recognizing that they made a mistake by funneling their votes into the campaigns of two white, neo-liberals––Wheeler and Sarah Ianarrone.
With ease, we can shuffle through names of racist white men of yesteryear whose write-in campaigning has succeeded. This doesn’t particularly interest me, but for posterity, we must note its efficacy. Representation expands as we aim our focus toward lesser-known public offices, but we must also be keenly aware, as Dr. Cornel West explained to Anderson Cooper, that, “We've tried Black faces in high places. Too often our Black politicians… become too accommodated to the capitalist economy… the militarized nation-state… the market-driven culture”. This is true of any marginalized person who is given unchecked access to power. Identity politics can be useful in assessing one's own lived experiences and using them to dismantle systems of oppression, but we see again and again that giving power to historically-disenfranchised groups under capitalism does not guarantee the liberation of the proletariat.
The democratic approach to combatting civil unrest and fostering ideological evolution is, simply, the right to vote. We know that modes of voter suppression such as citizenship status, incarceration, and bureaucratic barriers––not enough polling stations, long wait times, lack of mail-in options during a global pandemic––validates that voting is a privilege. Until we abolish the flawed American governmental system, we must divert a fraction of our optimism into researching and endorsing elected officials.
A significant portion of Americans wishes that they could find an agreeable write-in candidate to supplant the old, white, rapists in the upcoming presidential election. We cannot mobilize our dissent against the highest office in the country in such a short amount of time. With the enduring George Floyd protests that have persisted nationally for nearly two months, individuals are turning on their own city governments––some for the first time ever. This is an exciting advantage because civilians are witnessing how easy it is to pressure officials into making amendments by way of reallocating city budgets and enacting police reforms (though abolition is the only solution to state-sanctioned violence). It's an election year and the stakes are high. Mayors who are up for re-election are watching as their approval ratings dwindle in real-time. The people are fed up.
We're learning, more and more, that the red and blue wings belong to the same ugly bird. Instead of working within the system, we must literally think outside of the boxes on our ballots. At our best, we Americans have the agency to question authority and demand change. When the system fails us, who else can we turn to but each other?
This post first appeared on EcoMerge Project - Regenerative Economics - Portla, please read the originial post: here
