First, let's get something out of the way. The point of this article is not to convince people that they shouldn't vote. In fact, my belief is that progressives should vote for Hillary Clinton because as problematic as her politics are, she is still the lesser of two evils.

Rather, the point of this article is to encourage empathy for the scores of marginalized people who are not willing to make the choice between two candidates that do not care about their issues.

The mainstream narrative about non-voters has not been very kind to them. They've been called privileged. They've been called foolish millennials who don't know what's at stake. This narrative allows us to ignore non-voters and the issues they are having with the election.

But if you actually look at demographic data, that narrative doesn't hold up at all. As of July 2016, 48 percent of people of color said they would not support Hillary Clinton. The same polls found that 57 percent of LGBTQ+ people would not vote for Clinton and neither would 68.7 percent of women.

Some of this data is due to people in said communities being Trump supporters. But considering Trump's historic unpopularity among many of these communities, it seems very unlikely that they all are. The point is, there are a lot of marginalized people who are unwilling to vote for Hillary Clinton. That is something we need to consider.

And if we look at Clinton's record, this should not be that surprising. She referred to black children as "superpredators" back in the 90s. She and her husband played a significant role in building the infrastructure of mass incarceration. She played a role in gutting welfare in 1996 (she would later brag about this in her 2003 book). She has, throughout her political career, supported American Imperialism and has even praised war criminal Henry Kissinger.

Liberals often defend Clinton's record by claiming she is just a political realist. Maybe she is, but that doesn't change the fact that many of these policies had a substantial negative impact on marginalized communities. Even if Clinton is the lesser of two evils, her hands are certainly not clean.

People are dismissing non-voters as being "privileged." However, in my experience, the people making that argument have quite a lot of privilege themselves. I would even argue that privilege is what makes these people not understand the tremendous dilemma marginalized people are facing this election.

But this is bigger than just Hillary Clinton. The political system in the United States is oppressive on a very fundamental level. This country has a long history of brutalizing people of color, demonizing LGBTQ+ folks, excluding immigrants, fighting to keep women out of positions of power, etc. There is simply no period in American history in which the government was not engaged in something completely morally repugnant. And it should be clear to anyone who keeps up with current events in the US, that oppression is still very much alive today.

Audrey Lorde famously wrote,"the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house." In this context, all politicians have a stake in maintaining the current system of power so we can't expect any of them to dismantle U.S. oppression. Thus, there is a reasonable argument to be made that voting just supports the current system of oppression.

Again, my purpose here is not to convince people that they shouldn't vote. My own perspective is that while the political system is oppressive, engaging in mainstream politics can be a useful avenue for achieving progressive ends (like keeping a fascist out of power). But this is an issue we all need to think critically about and we can't just dismiss non-voters because it's easier.

So please, stop with the gaslighting.