At times I feel like a broken record, but the examples of the racism and bigotry in general of today's Republican Party just seems to spring up from every direction. If it's not out right racist batshitery like that of Arkansas Rep. Hubbard who is maintaining that slavery was good for blacks, then its the thinly veiled racism of voter ID laws that seek to block non-white minorities and the poor from voting. Leonard Pitts sums it all up well in a column in the Miami Herald. Here are highlights:
“Welcome back, Jim Crow” said the headline on a Miami Herald editorial. Ain’t that the truth. Between policies like these, new restrictions on Sunday and early voting and, of course, Voter ID laws, the NAACP estimates that 23 million Americans stand to be disenfranchised — a disproportionate number of them African American.
We have seen these shenanigans before: grandfather clauses; poll taxes, literacy tests. Yet African Americans — heck, Americans in general — seem remarkably quiescent about seeing it all come around again, same old garbage in a different can.
“If you want to vote, show it,” trilled a TV commercial in support of Pennsylvania’s Voter ID law before a judge blocked its implementation. The tenor of the ad was telling, though, implicitly suggesting that voting is a privilege for which one should be happy to jump through arbitrary hoops. But voting is emphatically not a privilege. It is a right. By definition, then, it must be broadly accessible. These laws ensure that it is not.
We are indebted to the NAACP for bringing attention and leadership to this. Five years ago, a newspaper columnist — a guy named Pitts, actually — raked the organization for being “stagnant, static and marginal to today’s struggle.” But that was then. In fighting to restore the voting rights of ex-felons, in calling last year for an end to the failed “War on Drugs,” the NAACP has done more than energize itself.
It has also challenged us to recognize that the brutish goals of Jim Crow America never died, but simply reshaped themselves to the sensibilities of the 21st century, learned to hide themselves in the bloodless and opaque language of officially race-neutral policy. It would be a critical mistake not to understand this.
Indeed, the advice of the late Teddy Pendergrass seems freshly apropos: Wake up, everybody. And realize: Garbage is garbage, no matter how pristine the can.
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