By Jeffrey D. Sachs
NEW YORK – America is two cultures in one nation. The first culture brought slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the “Jim Crow” laws enforcing white supremacy, and the bullying, lying and cruelty of former President Donald Trump, which ended with the Jan. 6 uprising at the Capitol. The second culture brought enfranchisement, the civil rights movement, President Barack Obama, and now the election of Joe Biden. The white supremacist culture – embraced by a shrinking minority in America – has always based its power on violence and voter suppression. This is why the current fight for voting rights is a struggle for America’s future.
The battle of both cultures is now playing out nationwide and in Washington, DC. Biden’s victory has upset senior white officials to double voter suppression. The Republican Party knows it cannot hold national power in a fair vote. Thus, Republican-controlled state legislatures are enacting new restrictions on voter participation targeting non-white people. In Washington, on the other hand, the inclusive culture promotes in Congress the most significant voting rights reforms since the 1960s, intended to ensure access to polls for all Americans.
Voter suppression is a long-standing tool of white supremacy in America. The story was most vividly told by WEB Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935. Du Bois describes in harrowing and comprehensive terms how African Americans bravely fought for their freedom in the US Civil War (1861- 65) and – through education and hard work – for full emancipation as citizens in the Reconstruction years (1865-77). And yet, that enfranchisement was cruelly cut short by the violence and terrorism of Southern whites, along with the indifference or racism of many Northern whites. At the heart of the Jim Crow regime of the South after Reconstruction was the suppression of African-American voting, in violation of the Constitution.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s led to what became known as the Reconstruction, as it aimed once again to reconstruct American democracy by ending Jim Crow. But heroic advances, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prompted another racial backlash. When Northern Democrats in Congress blocked the segregationist opposition of Southern Democrats to pass the legislation, the Democratic Party split in two, and the Republican Party, led by Richard Nixon, adopted the infamous “Southern Strategy” to win over white racists in election 1968..
White Southerners changed from Democrat to Republican in droplets, while racism itself remained. The Southern Strategy was followed by new tactics for suppressing mass voter turnout, this time relying heavily on mass incarceration of people of color for minor interaction, or often for no real cuts at all, thus taking their vote to away – often for life.
But the white supremacists’ grip on American power is declining in the long run. The 2008 election and the 2012 re-election of Obama, and the 2020 election of Vice President Kamala Harris – the woman and first person of color to hold office – prove the point. In response, Trump desperately tried to retain power by overturning the result, first by trying to convince state Republican officials to fake their electoral heights, and then by trying to prevent Congress from endorsing the results.
As the Brennan Justice Center at New York University Law School carefully documents, Trump’s defeat has resulted in a wave of voter suppression bills – more than 250 in 43 provinces – developed by Republican lawmakers. The Brennan Center sums it up: “These proposed bills will make it harder to vote, target colored voters, and aim for the exact election changes – such as postal voting – that made the 2020 election,” during a pandemic. , “Not only successful but possible.”
Biden has rightly called the new law by a Georgia Republican-controlled legislature to restrict voting in the state a clear case of “Jim Crow in the twenty-first century.” Thus, exactly 160 years after the slave states of the south distanced themselves to protect and extend slavery and white supremacy, the United States now finds itself in its Third Reconstruction. The first was needed to end slavery; the second to end American apartheid; and the third to end voter suppression and mass incarceration. (One of the leaders of the Third Reconstruction, Reverend William J. Barber II, has written an eponymous book that describes the challenges alive.)
American racism is dying hard, but it is dying. The U.S. House of Representatives has just passed and sent to Parliament the most significant voting rights and political reform legislation since the Voting Rights Act. This legislation, A.1 in Parliament, would create national standards to facilitate voter registration and voting, including early voting and postal voting; enforcing federal laws against voter discrimination; and restoring voting rights in federal elections to a convicted felon who is out of prison. The legislation would also take several important steps to reform campaign finance.
The Senate will soon receive an A.1 and the Republican senators representing white supremacy will seek to kill it through the filibuster, which requires a bill to win 60 votes rather than a simple majority of 51 This is the same tactic that the separatists used to do. blocked civil rights bills until the 1960s, and unsuccessfully tried to use them in the 1960s. Their attempt will probably fail again. Democrats, while trying to bury white supremacy once and for all, will not sit idle while racists try again to block the votes of people of color. The Senate will most likely change the rules to prevent the filtering of this vital legislation to finally ensure fair voting for all Americans – more than 230 years after the adoption of the US Constitution.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021
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