For years now, Republicans have used voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls to minimized the minority vote whenever and where possible. Its the same mindset from the Jim Crow era when poll taxes kept blacks in the South from voting and it surged in the wake of desegregation when Richard Nixon devised his "Southern Strategy" to recruit Southern whites to the GOP. The other mechanism used by Republicans, certainly here in Virginia, was the "war on drugs" and Virginia's draconian marijuana laws (a topic this blog has addressed numerous times) to criminalize minorities, especially blacks. The city of Norfolk, Virginia, is a prime example. The city is not majority black, yet drug arrests and convictions are disproportionately against young black males (when I go to criminal court in Norfolk, the racial imbalance of those charged continues to be shocking). Given the ridiculously small amount of marijuana required to make possession a felon, those convicted lose their voting rights permanently (there is no automatic restoration of voting rights once one's sentence is served - again by design).
As the book "
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," a New York Times best seller, lays out, none of this was by accident. Here in Virginia, we may be on the cusp of change with a drastic overhaul of the state's marijuana laws, plus dramatic change in control gun laws. The reaction from the far right has been apoplectic and could well see violence erupt in Richmond tomorrow. An op-ed in the
New York Times by Michelle Alexander, the author of the reference book, looks at where America now finds itself in the age of Trump who lauds white supremacy. Here are column highlights:
Ten
years have passed since my book, “The New Jim Crow,” was published. I wrote it
to challenge our nation to reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform,
retrenchment and rebirth of caste-like systems that have defined our racial
history since slavery. It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and
nothing has changed.
When
I was researching and writing the book, Barack Obama had not yet been elected
president of the United States. I was in disbelief that our country would
actually elect a black man to be the leader of the so-called free world. As the
election approached, I felt an odd sense of hope and dread. I hoped against all
reason that we would actually do it. But I also knew that, if we did, there
would be a price to pay.
We
had recently birthed another caste system — a system of mass incarceration —
that locked millions of poor people and people of color in literal and virtual
cages.
Our
nation’s prison and jail population had quintupled in 30 years, leaving us with
the highest incarceration rate in the world. A third of black men had felony
records — due in large part to a racially biased, brutal drug war — and
were relegated to a permanent second-class status. Tens of millions of people
in the United States had been stripped of basic civil and human rights,
including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries and the right to be
free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, education and basic public
benefits.
I
was right to worry about the aftermath of Obama’s election. After he was
inaugurated, our nation was awash in “post-racialism.” Black History Month
events revolved around “how far we’ve come.” Many in the black community and
beyond felt that, if Obama could win the presidency, anything was possible. Few
people wanted to hear the message I felt desperate to convey: Despite
appearances, our nation remains trapped in a cycle of racial reform, backlash
and re-formation of systems of racial and social control.
Things
have changed since then. Donald Trump is president of the United States. For
many, this feels like whiplash. After eight years of Barack Obama — a man who
embraced the rhetoric (though not the politics) of the civil rights movement —
we now have a president who embraces the rhetoric and the politics of white
nationalism. This is a president who openly stokes racial animosity and even
racial violence, who praises dictators (and likely aspires to be one), who
behaves like a petulant toddler on Twitter, and who has a passionate, devoted
following of millions of people who proudly say they want to “make America
great again” by taking us back to a time that we’ve left behind.
We
are now living in an era not of post-racialism but of unabashed racialism, a
time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for
an age when their cultural, political and economic dominance could be taken for
granted — no apologies required. Racial bigotry, fear mongering and scapegoating
are no longer subterranean in our political discourse; the dog whistles have
been replaced by bullhorns. White nationalist movements are operating openly
online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and
recruiting thousands into their ranks.
White
nationalism has been emboldened by [Trump] our president, who routinely unleashes
hostile tirades against black and brown people — calling Mexican migrants
criminals, “rapists” and “bad people,” referring to developing African nations as
“shithole countries” and smearing a district of the majority-black city of
Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Millions of
Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities.
[W]hat
our nation is experiencing is not an “aberration.” The politics of “Trumpism”
and “fake news” are not new; they are as old as the nation itself. The very
same playbook has been used over and over in this country by those who seek to
preserve racial hierarchy, or to exploit racial resentments and anxieties for
political gain, each time with similar results.
Back
in the 1980s and ’90s, Democratic and Republican politicians leaned heavily on
the racial stereotypes of “crack heads,” “crack babies,” “superpredators” and
“welfare queens” to mobilize public support for the War on Drugs, a get-tough
movement and a prison-building boom — a political strategy that was traceable
in large part to the desire to appeal to poor and working-class white voters
who had defected from the Democratic Party in the wake of the civil rights
movement.
[T]he
rhetoric has changed, but the game remains the same. Public enemy No. 1 in the
2016 election was a brown-skinned immigrant, an “illegal,” a “terrorist” or an
influx of people who want to take your job or rape your daughter.
The
fact that Trump’s claims were demonstrably false did not impede his rise, just
as facts were largely irrelevant at the outset of the War on Drugs. It didn’t
matter back then that studies consistently found that whites were equally
likely, if not more likely, than people of color to use and sell
illegal drugs. Black people were still labeled the enemy.
Black
people charged with possession of crack in inner cities were still punished far
more harshly than white people in possession of powder cocaine in the suburbs.
And it didn’t matter that African-Americans weren’t actually taking white
people’s jobs or college educations in significant numbers through affirmative
action programs.
Getting
tough on “them” — the racially defined “others” who could easily be used as
scapegoats and cast as the enemy — was all that mattered. Facts were treated as
largely irrelevant then. As they are now.
Fortunately,
a growing number of scholars and activists have begun to connect the dots
between mass incarceration and mass deportation in our nation’s history and
current politics.
The
story of how our “nation of immigrants” came to deport and incarcerate so many
for so little, Hernández explains, is a story of race and unfreedom reaching
back to the era of emancipation. If we fail to understand the historical
relationship between these systems, especially the racial politics that enabled
them, we will be unable to build a truly united front that will prevent the
continual re-formation of systems of racial and social control.
[T]hose
who argue that the systems of mass incarceration and mass deportation simply
reflect sincere (but misguided) efforts to address the real harms caused by
crime, or the real challenges created by surges in immigration, tend to
underestimate the corrupting influence of white supremacy whenever black and
brown people are perceived to be the problem.
Once
human beings are defined as the problem in the public consciousness, their
elimination through deportation, incarceration or even genocide becomes nearly
inevitable.
White
nationalism, at its core, reflects a belief that our nation’s problems would be
solved if only people of color could somehow be gotten rid of, or at least
better controlled. In short, mass incarceration and mass deportation have less
to do with crime and immigration than the ways we’ve chosen to respond to those
issues when black and brown people are framed as the problem.
It
is tempting to imagine that electing a Democratic president or more Democratic
politicians will fix the crises in our justice systems and our democracy. To be
clear, removing Trump from office is necessary and urgent; but simply electing
more Democrats to office is no guarantee that our nation will break its habit
of birthing enormous systems of racial and social control.
Equally
important is the reality that “felons” have families. And “criminals” are often
children or teenagers. The notion that, if you’ve ever committed a crime,
you’re permanently disposable is the very idea that has rationalized mass
incarceration in the United States.
None
of this is to minimize the real progress that has occurred on many issues of
race and criminal justice during the past decade. . . . . Everything has
changed. And yet nothing has.
The
politics of white supremacy, which defined our original constitution, have
continued unabated — repeatedly and predictably engendering new systems of
racial and social control. Just a few decades ago, politicians vowed to build
more prison walls. Today, they promise border walls.
The
political strategy of divide, demonize and conquer has worked for centuries in
the United States — since the days of slavery — to keep poor and working people
angry at (and fearful of) one another rather than uniting to challenge unjust
political and economic systems. At times, the tactics of white supremacy have
led to open warfare. Other times, the divisions and conflicts are less visible,
lurking beneath the surface.
The
stakes now are as high as they’ve ever been. Nearly everyone seems aware that
our democracy is in crisis, yet few seem prepared to reckon with the reality
that removing Trump from office will not rid our nation of the social and political
dynamics that made his election possible. No issue has proved more vexing to
this nation than the issue of race, and yet no question is more pressing than
how to overcome the politics of white supremacy — a form of politics that not
only led to an actual civil war but that threatens our ability ever to create a
truly fair, just and inclusive democracy.
We have a lot of work to do, beginning with removing Trump from office by any means.
