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Why Trump’s Racist Backlash Is Worse Than Jim-Crow Alabama

Why Trump’s Racist Backlash Is Worse Than Jim-Crow Alabama

My daughter was born in December 2008, just weeks after the nation had elected Barack Obama its first black president. I was euphoric, overly confident in my country, giddily optimistic about the future. Addressing her in a diary, I wrote: “I’m thrilled you’re going to grow up in a nation that is a much better place for little black girls than it was just a few short years ago.”

If she were born today, my words would reflect my disappointment, my anger, my fears for her future. The election of President Donald J. Trump and the intervening years have shown me a country that I thought was long gone, a mean, narrow and racist place that I believed had been cast aside. Nothing I have known in all my years has prepared me for this place.

This is a territory that we will have to travel through no matter what happens in November 2020, no matter who occupies the Oval Office. This ugly backlash, this fierce resistance to progress, this mindless determination to return to a time that never existed will not be so easy to purge. We are a broken nation now.

Even my Alabama childhood spent in the shadow of Jim Crow was tempered by a cautious optimism that the nation was moving forward, embracing its principles of justice and equality for all, beginning to acknowledge a history of bigotry and oppression. After all, the presidential campaign of George Wallace, with all its contempt for black Americans, captivated only a small minority of voters. His overt racism was shunned by the political establishment, black, white and brown, old and young, Democrat and Republican.

That’s not to say that the political establishment shunned all racism. Richard Nixon beat Wallace with a Southern strategy that used coded language to signal his allegiance to white voters who were uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. The Republican Party had a respect for decorum if no interest in fairness, a concern for civility if not equality.

That Republican Party is no more. Its dependence on whites who want no part of a richly diverse nation has only deepened, and its fealty to Trumpism is now total. When Trump attacked four congresswomen of color with clearly racist language, virtually no elected Republicans castigated him for his bigotry. They hemmed and hawed, they equivocated, they attacked the congresswomen themselves. They stood by Trump.

Was Trump’s language racist? Absolutely. It was as racist as his birther-ism, which insisted Obama was not born in the United States — a way of attempting to de-legitimize the first black president as a non-citizen, an African. His attacks on Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib  (D-MI), are meant to stigmatize them as something other than legitimate citizens, though three were born here and the other is naturalized. The president is clearly signaling that America is for white people.

As for Fox News commentator Brit Hume, who insisted Trump’s attack was merely “nativist” and “xenophobic,” he engaged in linguistic hair-splitting of the “what the definition of ‘is’ is” sort. Nativism, xenophobia, and racism are all children of an evil, lesser god.”

GOP standard-bearers have abandoned all pretense of decency for the prospect of victory, no matter the cost. As Trump now spews racism on the campaign trail — encouraging his supporters to yell, “Send her back!” about Somali-born Omar — Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL), whom I had (wrongly) respected as an honorable man, joined the frightening bandwagon, telling a right-wing Alabama political website that he would pay the airfare for the four Democrats to go live in Venezuela “so they can enjoy their failed socialist paradise.” Byrne clearly believes that sort of demagoguery will aid his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Trump, of course, has picked up not only Wallace’s coarse bigotry, but also his 1960s red-baiting rhetoric of “socialist!” and “communist!” to wield against his opponents. That was a well-honed tactic back during the days of the civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King Jr. and a host of other activists were smeared as a communist fifth column. The next year and a half promise to be the most hate-soaked period in American politics since Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. And that wildfire of racism will be hard to contain.

IMAGE: George C. Wallace.

Strict Voter ID Laws Are The New Jim Crow Laws

Strict Voter ID Laws Are The New Jim Crow Laws

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Thirty-four states currently have voter ID laws, and 32 will be in effect on Election Day. These laws require voters to present some form of identification document when going to vote — a step beyond the “non-documentary” identity verification requirements used across the country. Right-wing media have played an important role in making it hard for certain Americans to vote. They tout the necessity of the most restrictive voter ID requirements to supposedly thwart voter fraud, while dismissing the risk of voter disenfranchisement that accompanies these strict voter ID laws as a “myth.”

Just as Jim Crow laws denied the right to vote through literacy tests, poll taxes, the grandfather clause and violence, strict voter ID laws unfairly target minorities, especially Latinos and African-Americans. Communities of color are more affected than other groups by these unnecessary and redundant voting restrictions because many Latinos and African-Americans disproportionately lack access to the required form of photo IDs or the personal documentation needed to obtain them, or they just don’t have the necessary information on how to get them. This is how strict voter ID laws harm voters:

  1. Strict voter ID laws target the poorest voters, according to the Brennan Center for Justice: “More than 1 million eligible voters [in states with the most restrictive laws] fall below the federal poverty line. … Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can cost between $8 and $20,” compared with the poll tax during the Jim Crow era, which “cost $10.64 in current dollars.”
  2. Strict voter ID laws target minorities, the Brennan Center reports: “In the 10 states with restrictive voter laws, … 1.2 million eligible black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week.” Plus, many of these offices that issue IDs maintain limited business hours, making it harder for those “in rural regions with the highest concentrations of people of color and people in poverty” to get there during open hours.
  3. Strict voter ID laws can cause serious confusion. For example, in Texas, “half of the residents who said they didn’t vote in 2014 because they lacked a voter ID actually had an acceptable ID and didn’t know it.”

Lawmakers in states with voter ID laws echo right-wing media by claiming they are preventing voter fraud, but many have openly admitted that these laws are just meant to prevent people from showing up, so as to sway an election. In addition, these photo requirements would prevent only voter impersonation — a type of in-person voter fraud that is virtually nonexistent. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to protect voters from barriers to voting and was used to challenge these overly restrictive laws, but it’s been under attack, and those efforts have drawn support from Chief Justice John G Roberts and a conservative majority of the Supreme Court. Roberts questioned the necessity of the act, claiming that “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.”

Expanding the right to vote to include all Americans has been a long process, requiring excluded communities to clear countless barriers and hurdles to ensure that all people can make their voice heard on Election Day.

IMAGE: An election worker checks a voter’s drivers license as North Carolina’s controversial “Voter ID” law goes into effect for the state’s presidential primary election at a polling place in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. on March 15, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane/File Photo

Clinton: GOP Disenfranchising Voters Jim Crow Style

Former President Bill Clinton lambasted Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in battleground states across the country at a meeting of progressive college students in the capital on Wednesday, comparing them, as Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz did recently, to Jim Crow laws that prevented blacks from voting until 1965.

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton said to the Campus Progress annual conference.

The laws in question restrict or eliminate early voting and late (or same-day) registration, all of which clearly benefited Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Indeed, Obama won the early vote in several battleground states by a healthy enough margin that losing the vote on election day was no big deal.

“Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate,” Clinton added.

Florida Governor Rick Scott’s move to block felons from voting was especially frustrating for the former president.

“Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they’ve paid their price?” Clinton posed to the audience. “Because most of them in Florida were African-Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats. That’s why.”

Indeed, it is clear that early voting–and voting on Sundays (after church)–mostly boosts minority, and especially black, turnout.

Republicans, of course, claim they are simply trying to block voter fraud and protect the “integrity” of elections. But by imposing obstacles on the least represented groups of America’s electorate, they are doing their best to keep the electorate small, old, and white.

Rough Start for New Dem Party Chief

When Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was selected by President Obama to run the Democratic National Committee earlier this year, it was obvious that she’d be different than her predecessor, former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. Whereas Kaine is known for being quiet and calm, Wasserman Schultz is best known for her energetic partisanship. Which means that, as Politico reports–they call it it a “rough start”–she got into trouble these last few weeks for comparing Republican bills to restrict early voting and require photo ID (which would have the effect of making it tougher for minorities to vote) with Jim Crow laws and was lectured for her claims about the Paul Ryan Medicare-privatization plan. Former Pennsylvania Governor and DNC Chair Ed Rendell, more than capable of the occasional faux-pas himself, stood up for her, and it seems unlikely Dems will call for her head. [Politico]