In 1956, almost a decade before the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, famed writer and thinker W.E.B. Du Bois said, “I shall not go to the polls.” This declaration was written in an essay called “I Won’t Vote” in The Nation and was met with criticism and dismissal from many black intellectuals.

Du Bois hadn't even registered to vote. In his essay, he wrote, “I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ’two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”

It has been 62 years since Du Bois penned those words, and 53 years since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, yet many young folks are still grappling with their entrance into a political system they are skeptical of. Regardless, young people voted this midterm election cycle. This past spring, a Harvard Intitute of Politics survey estimated that 37% of young people would take to the polls on November 6. Early data puts the youth turnout figure at 31% in the 2018 midterms.

The lead-up to the midterm elections felt decades long for many, with voter-engagement efforts pushing lots of rhetoric in marginalized communities about why everyone should vote in the midterms. There’s something about the way they’ve been talked to and about. The language used by the Democratic Party, nonprofits, and in celebrity culture around voting in marginalized communities has aimed to guilt-trip folks into voting in a system in which many are not interested in participating, outside of mandatory civic duties.

Much focus has been put on the apathy and the lack of youth voter turnout in prior elections, but little has been paid to those nonvoters who didn’t cast a ballot as a very pointed political choice. Just after the November 6 midterm elections, we spoke with some of these nonvoters to find out why they didn’t vote.

For some politically engaged black and brown young people who spoke with Teen Vogue, the chaos of the election cycle brought a storm of frustrations for a number of reasons. They said there’s a variety of reasons they don’t vote in U.S. elections, most of which fit into a larger belief that the U.S. government is not something they want to participate in.

“The system isn’t in place where we can vote for our liberation. It’s in place to reform itself for the better domestically. We don’t demand more from the system because the system was never designed to help everyone in the first place,” Ebony Short, a black 22-year-old cofounder of Georgia State University Panthers for Black Feminism, tells Teen Vogue, speaking about how the U.S. electoral system, built in the 18th century, was created to protect the interests of states with large slave populations.

"Choosing not to vote, as I have done in the past and will do now, is the active decision to control — in some part — how I am engaging (or [not engaging]) a system I never opted to be a part of,” explains Da'Shaun Harrison, a 22-year-old black organizer, writer, and former student at Morehouse College. “There are ways to be civically engaged without legitimizing this two-party system, so choosing to take ownership of my right to not legitimize this system via electoral politics is a moral and just — morally just — decision."

These young folks have valid reasons for deciding not to play further into U.S. capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Many feel as if voting for legislation, initiatives, or policies that have proven to be inefficient for those on the margins is a vote for a continued system of disenfranchisement. These young black and brown folks are aware of the forces of white supremacy that they must experience, and have chosen the act of not voting as a means to make space to fight for a new and better world.