At the corner of West Jefferson and 3rd Avenue in South Central Los Angeles sits the Black-owned library known for its free teach-in events, prison program support days, open mic nights and Black-only game nights: Radical Hood Library.

Exterior of Radical Hood Library located in South Central Los Angeles. (Photo by Sheridan Hunter)

On November 5, as the 2024 presidential election results poured in, Radical Hood Library announced “Voting Will Not Save Us” – their post-election teach-in event meant to challenge the notions around voting and “explore what it means to prepare for a Trump or Harris presidency with the orgs who are doing it, regardless of the outcome” – to their Instagram followers. Five days later, on the day of the event, people gathered, filling the room past capacity to learn why “Voting Will Not Save Us.”

Makeen Yasar, a second-year medical student and facilitator at Radical Hood Library, spearheaded the teach-in. With a background in youth organizing and supporting underrepresented students, Yasar’s passion for change-making runs deep, often manifesting itself in movement work that challenges governmental systems.

“As someone who did some organizing work around electoral politics… what always got me was… how much energy and time and focus would always be spent during these electoral cycles on these candidates who never really give a damn about us,” Yasar said.

Especially when considering this year’s presidential candidates, Yasar believes that some people’s blind support of Vice President Kamala Harris took away from critical conversations that needed to be had around the two-party system in America.

Additionally, organizing helped Yasar see the ins and outs of voting. For example, when he and his community voted, he observed how the things they voted on were either obstructed, co-opted or held up in what he considered to be “bureaucratic hell,” failing to be implemented at all.

“The people who voted for those things really had no power or choice in terms of how those same things they voted on were actually implemented,” he said. “It was always at the behest of the control of the governmental entities themselves. So they would say one thing and just not do the thing.”

For Yasar, a prominent example of this was with Proposition HHH. Passed in 2016 by Los Angeles voters, the Proposition allocated $1.2 billion dollars to the buildout of permanent housing units for those experiencing houselessness. According to Yasar, however, that did not pan out.

“What has ended up happening over these past years is much of those funds going unspent… [and] not going directly towards the initiatives,” he said. “So it’s like, what are you doing with that money?”

Inside of Radical Hood Library where Makeen Yasar leads his "Voting Will Not Save Us" teach-in event on November 10, 2024. (Photo by Sheridan Hunter)

It was with this growing frustration around the American political system that Yasar’s presentation, "Voting Will Not Save Us: Unpacking Electoral Politics & Our Movements, came to be.

The idea behind this post-election teach-in was that “regardless of who [got] elected, these next four years are going to be crucial because people are hungry, groceries [and] rent [are] up, there’s a genocide happening in Palestine, imperialism has its teeth in the Congo, there are proxy wars happening in Sudan, and these things are all connected to each other,” Yasar explained.

BadSchoolBadSchool's Instagram post published June 13, 2024. (Photo by BadSchoolBadSchool)

In an Instagram post shared on June 13 of this year, the educational account, BadSchoolBadSchool, made a similar connection. Using a cartoon tree as a metaphor, BadSchoolBadSchool depicts Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, as well as Haiti and the prison industrial complex as branches that are connected by the tree’s roots of U.S.-led capitalist imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy – indicating their connection to and result of these systems and ideologies.

Yasar concurs. “We can’t be thinking of these things in isolation… there are other threats that need to [be taken] into consideration, and voting won’t be the thing to solve them. We need to be more engaged,” he said. “If we’re not utilizing our collective energy to try and get to the root of a cause – which is racial capitalism, which is imperialism, which is white supremacy and patriarchy – then it just becomes sustained and we’re always in a constant cycle.”

Definitions

Challenging the traditional notions of voting being the solution to change, Yasar presents an alternative that exists with and for the people: revolutionary organizing.

Broken down into five components – community care/mutual aid, political education, autonomous institutions and community control, direct action/mobilization, and community self-defense – Yasar encourages people to pursue these actions and do the necessary work to build community and trust, which, in his eyes, are the foundation for revolutionary organizing.

According to Yasar, it is through these components of revolutionary organizing that "we do the work of building together to then dismantle the systems that harm us [and] bring up new solutions that we are able to build together."

Voting– what is it not?

One of the main misconceptions Yasar notes around voting is the concept of voting as “harm reduction.”

“When we think about voting as harm reduction, the idea is that we’re choosing between the lesser of two evils,” Yasar said. “Where that argument doesn’t stand is we are already existing in an environment within a country that is already perpetually perpetuating massive harms.”

According to Yasar, some of these harms include the increase in houselessness rates, budding cop cities and their disproportionate levels of harm done to Black and Brown communities across major cities in the U.S., high rates of police killings, increasing deportation and turn away rates at the borders, and the gutting of Roe v. Wade last year. In his eyes, voting to reduce harms such as these is the equivalent of “putting a bandaid over a gaping wound.”

Geoffrey Cowan, a university professor of communication and Annenberg family chair in communication leadership at USC, has a different perspective on voting. As someone who participated in the 1963 March on Washington, Cowan is deeply passionate about voting and has dedicated himself to getting people registered to vote "to show that it matters," he said.

“Up until 1965, there was no law that protected the right of African Americans to vote in the south,” Cowan said. “There were all kinds of obstacles to Blacks voting in the south, and there [were] a number of different efforts during that period to change a lot of different laws, including the right to vote... but there are ways in which a lot of progress has been made and will continue to be made.”

Yasar, however, believes this narrative contributes to a condescending misconception around Black people and voting that needs to be squashed.

“People need to stop saying our ancestors died for the vote,” Yasar said. “Our ancestors died for our liberation, and each step towards gaining some form of civic or human right along that process was just adding to the toolkit that we now benefit from and are able to use. They didn’t die specifically for the vote and that was the end of it… they wanted so much more for us than to be lap dogs for the democratic party.”

As such, and in unpacking these misconceptions, Yasar believes it is important for people to instead approach voting as a tool and strategy for change rather than the solution, and thinks it is still worthwhile for people to cast their ballots in local elections.

“When things that are progressive show up on the ballot, I always have the mindset [that]… you should vote for those things because a lot of the time… these are community centered initiatives.”

Revolutionary Organizing

When it comes to making change in society, Yasar believes the best way to do so is through revolutionary organizing. With community and trust at its foundation, Yasar thinks taking action to build and strengthen both is the most important thing for people to do, and it starts with community care and mutual aid.

“What’s really great about mutual aid and community care is [that] it’s so focused on the relationships that we have between each other,” Yasar said. As “someone in my community, in my neighborhood, you are someone who I care about. I want to make sure that you have what you need, and I would hope that you would want the same for me.”

Screenshot of slide from Makeen Yasar's "Voting Will Not Save Us" presentation depicting a list of mutual aid organizations for people to consider getting involved with. (Photo by Makeen Yasar)

This inherent mutuality makes mutual aid a grounding force in society, said Yasar. Things like providing food and clothing, first aid and healthcare, skill sharing, gardening, and building and repairing things is what helps to “reset the relationships that we have that are most immediate and proximate to us,” he explained.

In addition to addressing people’s immediate needs, it is equally important to build political consciousness and education around the root problems of those needs, Yasar added. In fact, “that analysis is so important in terms of us determining how we come up with solutions that address those root issues,” he said.

According to Yasar, when people’s needs are met and they understand the systems and structures behind their situations, they are empowered to “create systems in which they can make choices about where [their] resources go."

Things like democratizing ownership of businesses and creating unions that advocate for workers’ rights and pay, for example, all work in unison to establish autonomous institutions and community control, explained Yasar. In fact, it’s these types of things that, according to Yasar, “build up our capacity to directly challenge the state” through direct action, mobilization and community self-defense.

For example, “what would it be for us to do a countrywide general strike and to be like… we want money out of federal and state politics. No more lobbyists, no more dark money. We want housing for all. We want Medicare for all. We want free education. We want student loan forgiveness. And we’re not going to work until those things get met,” he proposed.

While Yasar admits that this only works in short spurts and when people are deeply connected with one another, it’s this type of revolutionary organizing that, in his eyes, creates lasting change.

Hope Street Distro

When considering his call to action, there are several mutual aid organizations that exist in and beyond Los Angeles that Yasar encourages people to get involved with – one of them being Hope Street Distro.