A Brother's Gonna Work It Out

Follow me for a second: you walk into the polling place, present your ID, and stroll over to the voting booth. You look over the options, you select which bond issues you support or don't support, you wonder briefly if this is one of those Diebold machines you read about, and then you get to the screen where you are going to select a presidential candidate. You're a smart person, you've paid attention to the issues, and you're just about to vote for the candidate whom you feel is best qualified for the job, or at least the best qualified among the usual pathetic pool of applicants, and then you stop. When reaching for the screen, you have caught sight of your hand, the back of it, specifically. Wait a second, the skin on your hand is a shade of brown, and not a tanned brown, or a latino brown, or a blotchy liver-spotted brown. It's the color of skin that a certain subsection of the populace has, those who are casually termed "black people."

Oh shit. It's time to rethink things. You're black. You pull your hand away from the voting screen. You've just realized that you're not a person, you're a Black Voter. That means that your vote isn't a normal vote, it's a very special vote, fraught with all sorts of heady cultural horsefeathers. And then, right before your eyes, the other options on the screen fade away, and the only candidates you can see are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. The issues of the day fade from your mind, and all you can think is, "Gee, Hillary spoke in a fake southern patois during that one stop on her campaign, that was pretty great. Obama has the same skin-color, within the strictures of Jim Crow law, as I do, but is he black enough? John Edwards said he would help poor people, and Kanye and I care a lot about poor people's issues ever since every face on the television during the Katrina footage was as dark as mine. WWAlSharptonD?!"

Whoa! That's quite distressing!

If this happens to you, the Fiery Sword recommends that you quickly remind yourself and the Washington Post that there is a dream extant, dreamt often and dreamt before, that one day a man's worth will be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. At which point you are free, once again, to vote your conscience, and not your melanin. This pre-election public service announcement has been brought to you by respect for ones' self and one's fellow human beings.