Some people, mostly good Christian “conservatives,” think where baseball’s All Star Game gets played is more important than the number of people who have had vaccines during the pandemic (150 million):
A lot of people are also getting bogged down in the gory details of voting procedures and their impact on voter turnout, for example.
Certainly both the evil and the obvious effect that the Voting Rights Act aimed at was the various methods states used to keep African Americans from voting, but voting was a focus mostly because the “white supremacist” leaders in those states knew that letting African Americans vote would spell the end of racial segregation and unfettered oppression of African Americans in general.
They were right. Voting rights are critical to the defense of all other rights, which is why “white supremacists” persist in attacking them.
That the majority white nation chose to prohibit segregation with the Civil Rights Act nationally before it chose to take steps to prevent those various methods to keep African Americans from voting with the Voting Rights Act was just a historical coincidence. Civil rights protests against segregation in general were much more vivid and induced moral revulsion in places where de facto segregation was the norm, rather than the de jure sort, leading to majority support for legislation prohibiting the practice, which protesters then followed on with protests against discrimination in voting.
But as we look at the recent changes in voting procedures in Georgia, we need to remember that intent matters. No one should find surprising that the NAACP has filed suit against the Georgia law. A fundamental point in combating “white supremacy” is to listen to African Americans and take seriously what they say.
The NAACP complaint states flatly that “SB 202 is the culmination of a concerted effort to suppress the participation of Black voters and other voters of color by the Republican State Senate, State House, and Governor.” This is the opening salvo in a law suit. The claim will undergo the usual testing in court that any claims do as part of litigation. But those of us who will be neither judge, nor jury (unlikely, but possible) in the case have to make our own decisions about what we think about the Georgia law and the various challenges to it. The operative Amendment to the Constitution, the Fifteenth, prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The Voting Rights Act was a necessary, technocratic statute for the purpose of enforcing that Amendment, but we should not let the technocratic details blind us to the larger purpose, especially not when intent is more obviously a factor under the Amendment than under the statute. Not that intent is necessary anyway, but discriminatory intent is obvious here.
We all have to decide if we will support the Republican Party, the Party of “white supremacy,” or not.
All of this is only happening because the Republicans on the Supreme Court chose to strike down the parts of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that would have prohibited it were they still in force. In that decision, Shelby County v. Holder, 570 US 529 (2013), Republican chief justice Roberts found that the evils the provisions of the VRA in question prevented had mostly disappeared.
What he conveniently ignored was that the underlying, “white supremacist” impulse, to discriminate against African Americans in voting, and presumably in other areas of human activity, remains as strong as it ever was.
The proof is in the pudding. It was no accident that a former slave state, and the one where famous protests against segregation and in support of voting rights for African Americans took place, was the one that threw up the case to invalidate portions of the VRA. The civil rights protests that horrified the republic took place in Birmingham, Alabama, but before the Birmingham protests came similar, less successful, protests in Albany, Georgia. During the Civil War, Georgia was a critical state, and Atlanta a critical city, in supplying the Confederacy with munitions and food. After perhaps the most famous Supreme Court decision in our history, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 US 483 (1954), which held that racial segregation in public education violated the Constitution, arch segregationist Herman Talmadge, governor of Georgia and son of arch segregationist Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, led “massive resistance” to school desegregation.
In his decision striking down parts of the VRA, Roberts wrote about “federalism costs,” which is the polite, 21st century way to say, “states’ rights,” which is a gross misnomer. States do not have rights at all, and certainly no state has any right to discriminate against its own citizens. Good “conservatives” are never so concerned about “states’ rights,” or “federalism costs,” as when the nation as a whole takes steps to improve the lot of African Americans. The Civil War was just a violent, four year foray in the attempt to vindicate “states’ rights,” or reduce “federalism costs.” After it was over, we amended the Constitution specifically to set a national floor to the basic rights of citizens that states may not disregard, including specifically the right to vote. “Federalism costs” are not relevant in the face of the specific permission the Fifteenth Amendment gives to Congress to enforce the principle it articulates. Roberts takes the side of the Confederacy.
Context is essential to meaning, and the historical context of slavery and segregation, and the central role Georgia played in perpetuating both institutions, is critical for our discussion of their current efforts to suppress voting.
Republicans in Georgia remain on the side of slavery and segregation. The rest of us are free to join or repudiate them.