My Student Asked Me If I Would Vote...

This week, behind a mask and with full confidence in his voice – one of my students asked me if I planned to vote.

As educators, we are discouraged from engaging in political conversations with our students. It has long been deemed inappropriate for us to express our stance on either politics or politicians.

Before I could offer him a safe, yet representative response – he followed with this statement: “if my family could vote, we definitely would vote.”

Forty-eight hours removed from surgery and still very much under heavy medication – I voted on the first day of Early Voting. Still unable to comfortably drive, my mother helped me in and out of the car last Tuesday morning, so that we could cast our votes together.

My student was still searching my eyes for a response. The other adult in the room interjected and expressed her uncertainness about both candidates. “I’m still just not sure I will vote,” she offered.

“I already voted,” I finally volunteered to my student, fully aware that like all teenagers – his next question was likely going to be who did you vote for Miss?

Before he could continue I shared with him my reasons for voting.

As a Black Woman in America - a taxpaying, English-speaking, law-abiding, educator and businesswoman in a decent spot on the 35,385th row of the middle class – NEITHER of the presidential candidates will improve my quality of life. I will still pay in excess of $400 monthly for health insurance that will still net me a $2,500 bill if I need to make another midnight run to the emergency room. As a teacher, I will still pay into a retirement system that will still severely tax my retirement when I can finally use it in another 30 years. I am even farther away from qualifying for government assistance now than I was when I needed college monies as the daughter of a single-parent educator.

Nothing will change in my day-to-day life in America should Donald Trump remain president or if Joe Biden takes over. My life didn’t personally change during Barack Obama’s eight years in office. I did, however, take comfort in President Obama’s ability to address the nation in a comforting tone. I wasn’t as nervous about my reception as an American when I traveled outside of the states. I never held my breath in fear that he would spew racist sentiments in his speeches. I was proud of him; his wife and his family.

“I like traveling outside of this country at least once per year,” I explained to my student. Perhaps my freedom to leave on vacation when I choose will be a bit more protected if Joe Biden presides over the United States. Perhaps many of our adversaries will return to ally status if we have a President who knows how to speak to other foreign leaders with decency and respect.

People who look like me haven’t always had the right to vote. Women haven’t always had the right to vote.

“I didn’t make it a point to vote because I am so desperate for someone to fix my life,” I explained to my student and the others who began to listen.

I watch stories of families separated at the border with tears in my eyes, knowing very well that families that resemble my family are shot down in fierce waters and killed at other borders that don’t quite make mainstream news. All of it is wrong – televised or not. 

Neither Biden nor Trump will put an immediate stop to it.

The act of voting is not about eliminating wrongdoing in a country that has prospered off of wrongdoing. I don’t vote because I believe a politician to be poised to save me. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have that kind of faith in man.

Each day I ready myself for another story of an unarmed black person being gunned down by police. It’s a trauma that I’ve learned to cope with like so many Black people. I’ve never been arrested or in any legal trouble, yet I watch tirelessly as politician after politician reduce the “Black Community” to only caring about criminal justice reform. Yes, that is an incredibly important issue – but we are beyond surface level in our knowledge and political issues just as we are waist deep in our empathetic efforts.

“I voted for the candidate who makes an attempt to acknowledge these things to be reality in America,” I explained.

I voted for the person who picked a running mate, who, although she has a different vantage point of ‘Black in America’ from mine – has an articulate and meaningful understanding of Black Perspective in this country.

Voting for me is personal and dutiful.

Although it is not my goal to be an educator for much longer, I take with me to the polls the thought of the journey of migration to this country for many of my students’ families. In an ever-changing Texas, where students who look like me continue to disappear – where is justification for my position as a teacher (my job) if the 70 percent or so on my roster over 11 years and their respective families were denied entry into this country?

I looked at my colleague – a woman I adore and for whom I hold the utmost respect and told her she better vote. We both laughed. I squinted my eyes, perched my lips under the mask and tilted my neck. “You better vote,” I told her again.

Both of us, black and educated and in a profession that is not by design functioning to benefit children who look like us agree that voting for one candidate or the other won’t change our lives on November 3, 2020. We even reduced our personal conversation to the cliché of voting for the lesser of two evils.

In what could’ve proceeded as an awkward moment among black women, my colleague – my friend in fact, allowed me to continue on an ancestral talk, a privilege walk and even spew my analytical English teacher banter about so many potential voters being suppressed voters and not even knowing it.

Ice Cube says all black people should be Independent. Ice Cube is rich - most black people are not rich. We are by figurative placement in this county independent and completely free from the hearts and minds of the powers that be when decisions are made for a country that we very much helped to build and continue to help thrive. I say that as neither a Democrat, a Republican, nor an Independent, but as a deliberate human being.

Not voting is simply not making a worthwhile statement. It is pedestrian, reckless and trite. It’s like making a Facebook post simply to rile people without having a meaningful objective.

My voice matters. I am a Black Woman and I will always exercise my right to vote. While I choose not to publicly deduce and mock those who insist on not voting - I will never understand such a decision. Vote! - Even if it’s only to piss them off.

I’m so glad my student asked me if I would vote.

Whenever his opportunity to vote arrives, I hope he approaches the polls with a mindset of both empathy and responsibility – not just one of personal gain.