Over the weekend, I was on FaceTime with one of my oldest mentors, an 85-year-old retired history professor who lives in Houston’s historic Fourth Ward — one of the city’s oldest Black communities. Our conversations often drift toward history, memory, and the quiet responsibilities we carry. Before we hung up, he repeated a warning he has given me for decades: “Don’t ever forget what the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments cost us — or what they demand of us.”
While we often imagine the dismantling of civil rights as loud and dramatic, today’s erosion of voting rights is quiet, bureaucratic, and frequently disguised as an administrative or security update. In recent legislative cycles, this has manifested nationwide through targeted voting restrictions and gerrymandered redistricting maps designed to systematically dilute Black political power.
As a result, communities already burdened by inequities in housing and education must also navigate civic inequities. Yet, when these targeted populations express frustration with the voting process, public narratives often mislabel them as “apathetic” or “disengaged,” conveniently shifting blame from an exclusionary system onto the voters themselves.
As a behavioral health scholar, I view voting not merely as a civic act, but as a psychological one — shaped by the same forces of trust, memory, systemic trauma, and stigma that dictate how people engage with healthcare or education. When communities experience generations of structural exclusion, they develop protective instincts; when systems consistently fail them, expecting failure becomes a logical defense mechanism.
Therefore, when voting rights are eroded through quiet, bureaucratic maneuvers, it is entirely predictable that targeted populations begin to question whether their participation matters. While political commentary frequently laments voter apathy, it rarely accounts for voter trauma — the accumulated emotional labor required to participate in a system that historically devalued your voice. As the late congressman John Lewis famously reminded us, voting is “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have.” Yet tools are only effective when people trust they can use them, and that trust is deeply fractured today because history has taught these communities otherwise.
This psychological toll mirrors a broader national crisis. As my mentor’s warning reminded me, the cultural and political fractures of this moment are connected to a long lineage of struggle and an equally deep history of forgetting. Philosopher and essayist George Santayana wrote more than a century ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And here we are, repeating it, not because we do not know better, but because we have allowed memory to fade. The erosion of voting rights today is not a step backward into history; it is the modern execution of its oldest playbook.
Ultimately, we owe those who came before us a commitment of memory, vigilance, and active participation, recognizing that democracy is sustained not by slogans, but by ordinary people who consistently show up, vote, and refuse to let their rights erode quietly. My mentor’s words still ring clearly: “Don’t ever forget what those amendments cost us — or what they demand of us.” As we enter another election season, we must carry that reminder forward, translating nostalgia into vigilance and memory into action. Because democracy is never permanent, it remains a continuous practice — protected one vote, one memory, and one act of participation at a time.
Dr. Sharon M. Holder is a behavioral health researcher with more than 25 years of experience examining aging, health disparities, and mental health stigma.
