Introduction
It’s difficult to calculate how harm is reduced when comparing things such as deportation of Indigenous people, damage by drone strikes, sexual violence, etc.
Though there are some political distinctions between the two prominent parties in the so-called U.S., they all pledge their allegiance to the same flag. Red or blue, they’re both still stripes on a rag waving over stolen lands…
What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.
Harm reduction was established in the 1980s as a public health strategy for dealing with substance use issues. But “harm reduction” in the context of voting means something entirely different.
If voting is the democratic participation in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps us at the mercy of our oppressors.
Under colonial rule, voting is a strategy of defeat and victimhood that prolongs suffering.
Harm reduction may be sincere, but hard won reform gains can be easily reversed by the stroke of a politician’s pen.1
Voting as harm reduction instils a false sense of solidarity among those most vulernable.
Harm reductionist liberals are often found denouncing more militant direction actions as acts that “only harm our movement” and thereby pacifying movements.
The Native Vote: A Strategy of Colonial Domination
Assimilation: The Strategy of Enfranchisement
You can’t decolonize the ballot
Rejecting settler colonial authority, aka not voting.
References
- Reference one
Footnotes
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Note one ↩