The recent spate of whites calling 911 on African Americans for barbecuing while black, waiting in Starbucks while black, sleeping at Yale while black ad nauseum has led to a much-needed discussion about the policing of public spaces.
Yet, there’s another important public space where blackness has been policed and we have been far too silent about it: the voting booth. And the implications are just as far-reaching and devastating, and, despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ claim, not some relic of a bygone past.
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The US Civil Rights Commission “concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53% were cast by black voters. In Florida,” the commission’s report continued, “a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.”
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Pleased with what they had accomplished, North Carolina Republicans “celebrated” mowing down black access to the voting booth.
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In Indiana, once it became clear that black people could determine the outcome of an election, like when Barack Obama carried the state in 2008, the Republicans mobilized to cut off African Americans’ access to the polls. [ ... ] Not surprisingly, by design, in the 2016 election, early voting in the county plummeted by 26%.
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Georgia is also adept at policing black citizens who dare to vote. In 2010, when African Americans in Brooks county organized a massive voter turnout drive and elected the first majority-black school board in its history, the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, had a dozen African American activists and school board members arrested and, over the course of a long grueling four-year period, dragged through the courts. Although, in the end, there were zero convictions for voter fraud, there was a chilling effect as lives were ruined, jobs lost, and a hard lesson on the costs of voting made abundantly clear.
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In 2016, pummeled by voter suppression in more than 30 states, the black voter turnout plummeted by 7%. For the GOP, that was an effective kill rate. For America, it was a lethal assault on democracy.
-- Voting while black: the racial injustice that harms our democracy, Carol Anderson, The Guardian
(Lots of inline links in the article to back up the claims of the author)
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