noneyons wrote:
its not about someone losing for us to win. its about political leverage which we don't have because we don't demand it. |
And us demanding it has nothing to do with how many latinos there are.
Case in point...the unfair crack/cocoaine laws. Because of our lack of interest in voting for local political seats (council, school board, state congress/senate, alderman, district attorney, controller, etc. etc.) we ended up with a set of sentencing laws that made huge swaths of our community felons who can never vote again. Why? Because the people who win the local seats become the people on the national stage (as senators, judges, governors, and presidential candidates).
We can't gain political leverage when most of our community can't vote or doesn't want to even though they have the ability. I recognize the influence of institutional racism and historical consequences of slavery but truth be told,
we have done a lot of this to ourselves through the simple act of not voting when and where it matters. Voting on the local level is what makes change happen...it's the reason why Koreans do so well when they immigrate over here...its the reason why southeast asians are gaining traction where I live...and it's the reason why a lot of latino communities have prospered.