Don't Boycott Your Vote!

ATLANTA -- If Georgia holds a referendum on the state flag, many blacks won't participate, civil rights leaders warned Wednesday.
A group including the NAACP, Concerned Black Clergy and labor unions vowed to boycott a statewide vote on returning the Confederate battle cross to prominence on the state flag. Black leaders called it insulting to even ask blacks whether they wanted to see a return to the Georgia flag of 1956-2001, which is dominated by the rebel emblem.
"Would you expect the Jewish community to participate in a campaign to raise the Swastika?" said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

I have two remarks regarding this. One, Rev Lowery's analogy to Jews and the swastika is quite apt, and many Americans ignore this. We tend to not see the systematic oppression of black slaves as equal in horror to the Holocaust, I believe, for two reasons: the Holocaust was about genocide, supported by racism, and took place over a timespan of less than a generation. Slavery in America was about economics, supported by racism, and was institutionalized for generations.

Two, it is unthinkable to suggest that you -- especially the native you, the black you, and the female you -- boycott voting on a subject because it's 'such an insult'. That you deliberately disenfranchise yourself, that you remove your input from determining if a referendum will pass. No, no, no.

The way to swing your political weight is to do the exact opposite: vote. Vote in droves. Make your friends register. Drive your neighbors to the polling place. The idea of a public referendum is to let you speak your piece, and you do that by voting.

Boycotting applies economic pressure to a corporation, and it's a decent tool for the job, since corporations live in their pocketbooks. Governments have pocketbooks, too, we know that, but the constitutionally guaranteed way for the average slob to apply pressure on our government is called voting.

To suggest that black voters in Georgia refrain from voting on this subject is to suggest they shut their mouths and give up control, and give it right back to the idiots who waited so long to hand over that vote in the first place.

If you don't use it, then what's the point in having it?


biblio:
http://augustachronicle.com/stories/022003/met_124-2547.shtml