Your Vote Still Has Power — How to Protect Your Peace and Thrive When Democracy Feels Under Attack

By Denise Tureaud | Black Source Media

If you have been following the news out of New Orleans City Hall lately, you may have felt something familiar settle into your chest. Not quite fear. Not quite anger. Something heavier — that old, tired weight that comes when you watch the system do exactly what you always knew it could do.

In case you missed it: Calvin Duncan won 68 percent of the vote to become Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal District Court. Sixty-eight percent. That is not a close race. That is a mandate from the people. And within months, the Louisiana legislature — led by a senator from West Monroe who does not represent a single New Orleans voter — passed a law that eliminated Duncan’s position before he could sit down at his desk. The law handed that authority to Civil Clerk Chelsey Richard Napoleon, who didn’t ask for any of this and found herself trapped in the middle of a fight Baton Rouge created. The New Orleans City Council then stepped in with its own 5-2 vote, trying to call a new election. Now everybody is suing everybody, and the people of New Orleans are left wondering: did my vote actually matter?

I want to speak directly to that question today. Not as a political analyst. As a Black woman who loves her community and has studied what it takes to keep your spirit intact when the world seems determined to break it.

What Happens to Your Body and Mind When Democracy Feels Like a Lie

First, let’s name what you may be feeling — because naming it is the first step to not being consumed by it.

When we watch our votes be challenged, circumvented, or erased by political maneuvering, the stress response is real and it is physical. Research on racial stress and political trauma shows that Black Americans carry a particular burden when democratic institutions fail us — because we know, in our bones and in our history, that those failures are rarely accidental. The exhaustion you feel is not weakness. It is your nervous system responding to a genuine threat. It is appropriate. And it does not have to be the end of the story.

The danger is not in feeling the weight. The danger is in letting the weight convince you that nothing you do matters — that the game is so rigged that participation is pointless. That is precisely the conclusion that those who engineer these situations want you to reach. Disengagement is their goal. Your despair is their victory.

We cannot give them that.

We Have Been Here Before — and We Are Still Standing

I want you to hold something in your mind for a moment. Not abstractly — really hold it.

Our ancestors were legally prohibited from voting for the first two and a half centuries they lived on this soil. When emancipation came, poll taxes were invented. When poll taxes were challenged, literacy tests appeared. When literacy tests fell, grandfather clauses rose. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally guaranteed what should never have required a guarantee, state legislatures spent the next six decades finding new ways to chip away at it — gerrymandering, voter ID laws, purged rolls, and yes, laws that eliminate the offices of people who win elections by 68 percent of the vote.

They have been trying to silence us for four hundred years.

And we are still here. We are still voting. We are still running for office, winning elections, building institutions, raising children, creating art, founding businesses, and refusing — absolutely refusing — to disappear. That is not nothing. That is everything. That is the most profound act of resistance imaginable, sustained across generations, without ceasing.

You come from people who kept going when the obstacles were incomparably worse than what we face today. That inheritance is yours. It lives in you whether you feel it right now or not.

Protecting Your Peace Is Not Surrendering the Fight

Here is something I need you to hear, especially if you are the kind of person who feels guilty stepping away from the news cycle, who checks your phone compulsively for updates, who loses sleep over political developments you cannot immediately control.

Protecting your peace is not the same as giving up.

You cannot pour from an empty vessel. You cannot organize, vote, advocate, show up for your community, raise your children in consciousness, or sustain any kind of meaningful civic engagement if you are running on empty, hollowed out by anxiety, and emotionally depleted by a 24-hour news cycle that is specifically designed to keep you activated and exhausted simultaneously.

Rest is resistance. Joy is resistance. Sitting on your porch in the evening, laughing with people you love, cooking a good meal, going to church, turning off your phone for one afternoon — these are not acts of disengagement. They are acts of self-preservation that make every other act possible. Our elders knew this. The people who marched from Selma to Montgomery rested, prayed, sang, and took care of each other between the marches. The movement was not only in the streets. It was also in the churches, the kitchens, the living rooms where people gathered to remind each other who they were.

You are allowed to do the same.

What Thriving Looks Like When the System Is Doing What Systems Do

Thriving in the middle of political turmoil does not mean pretending everything is fine. It does not mean performing happiness or suppressing legitimate anger. It means choosing — deliberately, consciously, every day — to build a life of meaning and dignity that no legislation can reach.

It looks like knowing your history deeply enough that no political setback can make you believe this is the worst it has ever been — because you know it isn’t, and you know how we got through worse.

It looks like staying connected to your community in ways that are not mediated by social media or cable news — real conversations with real people who share your values and your stakes.

It looks like participating in the democratic process at every level available to you, not just presidential elections — school boards, city councils, clerk of court races, judicial elections — because as the current New Orleans fight makes painfully clear, those offices matter enormously to the texture of daily life in your community.

It looks like taking care of your physical body — sleeping, moving, eating in ways that sustain your energy — because the long fight requires a body that can go the distance.

And it looks like holding onto joy with both hands, not because the world has earned it, but because joy is the proof that they have not won. Every time you laugh, love, create, celebrate, and refuse to be reduced to your circumstances, you are carrying forward the same spirit that carried Fannie Lou Hamer, that carried Rosa Parks, that carried every ancestor who looked at an impossible situation and decided to keep going anyway.

Your Vote Still Matters — The Fight Over Counting It Proves That

Here is the thing about the Napoleon-Duncan-City Council fight that I want you to sit with before I let you go.

The reason powerful people in Baton Rouge worked so hard to eliminate Calvin Duncan’s position — rushing a bill through the legislature, accelerating its effective date at the governor’s request, racing to the 5th Circuit to undo a federal court ruling — is because your vote terrified them. Sixty-eight percent of New Orleans voters made a choice, and that choice was so threatening to people in power that they moved mountains in a matter of weeks to undo it.

That is not evidence that your vote doesn’t matter. That is the most powerful evidence imaginable that it does.

They do not spend this much energy fighting something that is powerless. They do not pass emergency legislation, race to appeals courts, and threaten lawsuits over something that doesn’t threaten them. The chaos you are watching is the sound of people in power being afraid of what happens when Black communities vote, organize, and put their people in office.

Be afraid of that. Stay in that fight. And take care of yourself so you can.

We have been through worse. We are still here. And we are not done.