I didn’t want to vote on Tuesday, not like that. I’m afraid my decision to attend the polls in Wisconsin will get me sick, but I’m also afraid of what it would’ve meant to skip voting.

This country is in the midst of a pandemic, and my state held elections regardless. It chose to prioritize politics over public health and safety, confirming what we’ve known all along: Wisconsin does not care about Milwaukee.

With an estimated population of 592,025, Milwaukee went from 180 polling locations to five. With an estimated population of 258,054 residents, Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, had 66 open polling locations. It is undeniable that people in different parts of Wisconsin had different levels of access to voting yesterday.

This is how disenfranchisement works. Up to 50,000 people were expected to vote in Milwaukee yesterday — about 10,000 at each of the remaining polling locations —but the final number was just under 19,000, a sign of how depressed the turnout was. And still, thousands of people have not received their absentee ballots. The United States Supreme Court then decided that Wisconsin wouldn’t be able to extend absentee voting.

As a young child, my immigrant parents instilled in me a sense of the privilege of citizenship. For them, I saw how citizenship guaranteed access to our democracy and a promise of opportunity. I remember helping my parents study for the citizenship test when I was in the sixth grade, and learned about the density of the U.S. federal government.

My family and I immigrated to the United States almost 20 years ago, with a leg of our journey after leaving Eritrea to spend time in Italy, where my mother had spent most of her years undocumented. Many of our family members around the world are refugees, asylum seekers, or undocumented immigrants, so we have firsthand experience with the privilege of citizenship and what it means not to have it.

As an East African immigrant, my father made sure that my sisters and I knew we were not only privileged to be in this country, but also to be citizens and have rights. He’d go on and on about the sacrifices Black Americans made so African immigrants like us could have an education and go to the grocery store and pump gas and vote — things Black people could not do just a generation ago. Needless to say, we do not take voting lightly, because we knew the history of the fight for the Black vote in this country.

I have voted in every local, state, and federal election since I turned 18. The first time I voted, I walked in with my parents, absolutely beaming that I could share the moment with them. Not voting feels like a slap in the face to my immigrant family and the battle we endured coming to this country. Black people in this country fought for the right to vote, for elections to be fair and free; I fear this election was neither. All the same, I cannot ignore the fear and anxiety associated with the coronavirus outbreak and the possible exposure by going to my polling site.

And a part of that anxiety is rooted in the racial disparities in who is getting hit by the virus. As of Thursday afternoon, Milwaukee County’s coronavirus dashboard showed 1,500 positive cases in the county and 67 deaths. Figures show nearly twice as many Black residents have tested positive for the virus as white people. As of last Friday, ProPublica reported that Black residents made up 81% of Milwaukee’s coronavirus-related deaths; we are only 26% of Milwaukee County’s population. Overall, Wisconsin is less than 7% Black, according to the most recent Census data, and half of the state’s confirmed coronavirus cases are in Milwaukee County, which has the largest population of Black people in the state. Figures are fluid, but as of Thursday afternoon, data indicates that, of the 115 confirmed deaths in Wisconsin, at least 68 have been in Milwaukee County.