By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | The concerted efforts by many politicians to have voter registration drives seeks to get more participation in our democracy by citizens who so far don’t vote.
On the surface, it seems a reasonable move.
But not to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the former UCLA and Milwaukee Bucks basketball star, who was once known as Lew Alcindor. The other day on National Public Radio we heard him explaining why he thinks such voter registration drives are not a good idea. You may be surprised at the way he reasons:
“Ignorance is not something that really lends itself to a meaningful discussion. So some of these people really shouldn’t vote, because they don’t know what the issues are. And I think people that are voting in the blind are doing a dis-service to our country by not being better informed….I hope that everybody understands the issues and votes their conscience according to a well-informed effort on their part.”
Abdul-Jabbar
By now I was paying close attention. He continued:
“By knowing what the issues are and how things can proceed, given what the issues are, I think we get a lot more done when we have the electorate being well informed. And it is my fervent hope that a well-informed electorate is the result of all this. Some (people) definitely aren’t prepared to vote. And that’s unfortunate, but it’s a fact.”
Immediately his thoughts found acceptance by me.
In our family, we remember we had one member who at one time was not paying much attention to the political process. This person was also registered to vote, and our fear was that she would vote…..wrong because of her-then ignorance. Happily, this person is fully informed today, and we are pleased at the way she thinks, and will “vote right.”
We remember when Abdul-Jabbar was a star player, setting records one after another, at both the college and professional level, finishing in 1974. But we had not kept up with him after his sporting career.
He has written several books, including his latest just published, Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White. For years he has been a regular columnist for TIME magazine, and a regular contributor to discussions on race and religion, among other topics, in national magazines and on television.
He was raised a Catholic, but became a Muslim not liking the way the Catholic church treated Africans years ago. At that time, he also changed his name, with him saying he was “latching on to something that was part of my heritage, because many of the slaves who were brought here were Muslims. My family was brought to America by a French planter named Alcindor, who came here from Trinidad in the 18th century. My people survived slavery. My father, a New York policeman, found out about that when I was a kid and it gave me all I needed to know, that, hey, I was somebody even if nobody else knew about it. When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. And that’s a terrible burden on black people, because they don’t have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted.”
That NPR news program has given me a new understanding of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and a new way of looking at voter registration drives.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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