“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic (June 2014) was eye opening for someone who spent a few formative years in Chicago. I did not spend them living on the South Side, and was too young to know much about real estate or race relations. So although I’d heard the term, Coates detailed account of how decades of redlining and government policies on home loans served to keep Black people living there impoverished was as new as it was shocking.
From The Windy City, we moved South the year Goldwater fever was as dominant. So were white people. Schools would remain segregated for another half decade or so.
Four years ago in Montgomery, Alabama, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened on a site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol. I wrote at the time that it was inspired by the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. This museum remembers the victims of white supremacy, including those who died in over 4,000 lynchings.
A few months earlier, a federal judge lifted a consent decree dating from 1982 that inhibited the Republican Party from engaging in “ballot security” measures. The decree arose from violations in New Jersey of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws. Among other things, Democrats accused Republican operatives of “efforts to disenfranchise duly registered black and Hispanic voters.” Their “National Ballot Security Task Force” operation allegedly included the posting of armed, off-duty police outside polling stations “in predominantly black and Hispanic precincts.” (Digby has written about the GOP’s 1964 Operation Eagle Eye in Arizona in since this blog’s earliest days. )
There is more, of course. The decades-long, federal “war on drugs” tended to be heavily waged in minority communities. Lengthy criminal sentences for minor drug offenses fell heavily on minority communities. The school-to-prison pipeline targets primarily minority students. Despite a downward trend, the U.S. still has the highest incarceration rate in the world. That statistic, too, disproportionately impacts U.S. minorities, particularly Black Americans.
High-visibility killings of Black Americans by police, including the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sparked Black Live Matter protests from coast to coast in 2020. There are too many to name.
That walk down memory lane is precipitated by this headline from Thursday:
Florida lawmakers approve an elections police force, the first of its kind in the U.S.
From the Washington Post:
The agency will be the first of its kind in the nation. Its staff of 25 will be part of the Department of State, which answers to DeSantis. Both chambers approved its creation by wide margins after debate that had Democrats invoking the name of the late civil rights leader John Lewis and a Republican representative making reference to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The governor has indicated he will sign the measure into law.
“It’s drastically improved from what the governor wanted, but I don’t believe we should have an elections police force at all,” said Joe Scott, the elections supervisor in Broward County. “These are people who will be looking for crimes where there are none. That has the potential to intimidate a lot of voters and the organizations who try to help voters.”
The bill also includes harsh repercussions for some voting practices that were common in the state until last year, when the legislature, at the governor’s behest, passed sweeping changes to state elections laws.
One of the most controversial penalties is for “ballot harvesting.” The 2021 law made it a misdemeanor for anyone to have more than two ballots, which impacts efforts at churches and community centers to have volunteers gather ballots and deposit them at an elections office or in a drop box. The bill passed this week raises that to a felony, punishable with a fine of up to $50,000 and five years in prison.
“So now we’re criminalizing certain acts around the elections process that most folks, particularly in the Black community, have long held as a way to assist those in need,” said Genesis Robinson, political director of Equal Ground, a voting rights advocacy group. “To spend time in jail for simply trying to be a good neighbor, that’s a problem.”
The Florida bill (and legislation like it in other states) targets practices and voting methods for increasing voter turnout that are heavily used by minority communities: drop boxes, voter registration drives, vote-by-mail. Between January 1 and December 7, 2021, the Brennan Canter reports, “at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting.”
Redlining, segregation, lynchings, the “war on drugs,” police shootings, and more, all heavily target minority communities in this “land of the free.”
And the war on voting? Same communities.
Just don’t call it systemic.
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