My First Ballot

There are those days that you envision years in the future, knowing that it will happen, yet it always feels so distant.

Well, yesterday, one of those moments arrived: my name, on an absentee ballot, telling me to mail in my vote.

I spent just a good five minutes staring at this piece of paper, trying to process the fact that I will have a vote on Super Tuesday this year (March 3rd), the date of California’s presidential primary election. A whirlwind of emotions was surrounding me as I slowly went through the ballot, all culminating in my immense sense of gratitude to be able to participate in a democracy, in this democracy.

People long before my parents were born and even after they were born were imprisoned and killed for trying to get someone like me the right to vote. They didn’t know who they were fighting for, but they knew that I deserved the chance to be able to exercise my right to vote just like any other white American. The way with which we frame having the rights we have often neglects, as Nikole Hannah-Jones noted in the first essay of the 1619 Project, that Black Americans were the only group in this nation’s history who believed truthfully in all the words of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson didn’t want Black people to vote, James Madison didn’t want women to vote, and for much of our nation’s first few decades, our founders didn’t want anyone who…