LeBron James on Black Voting Rights: 'We've Seen Our Voices Be Muted Our Whole Lives'

NBA superstar LeBron James told USA Today on Sunday, that black people’s votes don’t count.

In an interview published on Sunday, James exclaimed that blacks just don’t feel that their vote counts and he hopes to fix that with his voter registration project.

“Black people in the community don’t believe that their vote matters,” James told the newspaper.

“We grow up and don’t think that our vote actually matters. It doesn’t. We’ve seen recounts before. We’ve seen our voices be muted our whole lives,” he said.

While James may feel blacks’ votes are meaningless, many of his fellow citizens don’t seem to agree, at least where it concerns voter turnout. Black voters have often had a higher turnout rate than white voters, and in other elections are within a single percentage point of white turnout.

According to the liberal Brookings Institute, blacks have a higher turnout rate than all other minorities and at times — in 2012 and 2016, for instance — have even had a higher rate of voting than whites.

If blacks feel their vote doesn’t count, it is not reflected in how many of them go to the polls each election day. And this is even after some states had implemented voter ID rules. James is pushing this negative view of our electoral system to flog his More Than A Vote project, which he organized this year to register voters in majority-black districts across the country.

The L.A. Lakers star also claims that he hopes to fight “voter suppression” with his political group.

“Because of everything that’s going on, people are finally starting to listen to us — we feel like we’re finally getting a foot in the door,” James told the New York Times in June. “How long is up to us. We don’t know. But we feel like we’re getting some ears and some attention, and this is the time for us to finally make a difference.”

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