Assignment 16- Sippy

It's all too easy to divorce the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s from the events that occur today. we're inclined to believe that somehow this nation has matured from the bigotry and racism of that era and entered a new one:  one of peace, prosperity, and pluralism. The epitome of which is when some claim to be “colorblind.”

This movement is lead by people like Tomi Lahren who have said that “To me true diversity is diversity of thought, not diversity of color. I don't see color.”

For lack of a better term: this is bullshit. The history of America, is the history of injustice and subjugation that people of color, religious minorities, gay and queer people (just to mention a few) are subject to.

It is easy to overlook this if you’re white. It's the power of privileged thinking.

Very few people in American society, are openly bigots, who publically disdain anyone who isn’t white, christian, cis-gendered, and straight.

But that doesn’t mean that we have become color-blind, rather it just means that racism in America today is more societal, institutionalized, and subconscious.

There is not a more perfect example of the abuse that people of color endure than their right to vote than the struggle to access the ballot box.  While African Americans would be officially enfranchised by the 15th Amendment, and granted “equal protection under the law” by the 14th. This was and still has not been achieved.

Like the promise of forty-acres and a mule, America has defaulted on many of its most central promises to people of color, especially African Americans.  

There is no better example of this than the right to vote. From 1870 to 1965, the denial of access to the ballot box was the official public policy of the American South, and many other states. As President Johnson once explain to a resistant joint-session of Congress: ““The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”

But  this inequity, with respect to gaining access to ballot box, was supposed to end  with the stroke of President Johnson’s pen in 1965 to the Voting Rights Act, this was all supposed to change. And in many respects it did.

As Ari Berman, the author of GIVE US THE BALLOT, explains: “Well if you look at the history of the Voting Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was meant to end decades of discrimination against African Americans in the South and it was a transformative piece of legislation. It outlawed literacy tests and poll taxes, it sent federal officials to the South to register black voters in segregationist strong-holds like Selma, Alabama. It kept federal officials in the South to monitor elections to make sure they weren’t stolen. It forced those states with the worst histories of voting discrimination to actually have to approve their voting changes with the federal government to prevent discrimination in the future. All of these things were transformative and they led to a revolution in American politics it made America a truly multi-racial integrated democracy.”

This is not to say that America became some post-racial society, as Tomi Lahren and her alt-right goons might claim it is. But, rather that things improved, slowly, that it until Shelby County v. Holder.

The Voting Rights Act provided that any significant change to voting policies had to get the sign off from the Department of Justice, protecting black Americans from having the vote stipped away form them. But the 2013 ruling according to Berman: “We have a Supreme Court that has struck down one of the centerpieces of the Voting Right Act in 2013. We have state legislatures all across the country that are passing laws making it harder to vote and we have a congress that has done nothing about this problem. And so, for all of those reasons I believe there has been a counter-revolution against the Voting Rights Act and we’re seeing that play out today. I see it as an attempt to deprive certain people of their right to vote. I think that’s what it’s always been about. If you look at the history of the Voting Rights Act, days after it was passed you had Southern officials who wanted to challenge the constitutionality of that law to prevent, uh, newly registered African American from participating in the political process. This was done all across the South. Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, they all challenged the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act and even after that failed the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act a year after Bloody Sunday in Selma.”

This led to two main manifestations of injustice when it comes to the ballot box.

Excessive gerrymandering enabling the politicians to pick their voters, instead of the way it should be. And voter ID and other unnecessary restrictive laws.