Reader, I hope you will forgive me for abjuring, in this instance, the absurd rule against using the first person in writing such as this. I recently posted a column under the title, “Don’t Forget about Slavery.” My topic was the current imbroglio over election procedures that has erupted after the state of Georgia quickly enacted a major, ill considered revision to its procedures after the Republican candidate, which the legislature favored for unknown reasons (okay, we know, pure partisan loyalty is the reason), lost the last presidential election, then two other Republicans lost runoff elections for the State’s two U.S. Senate seats.
Having a Ph.D. in U.S. history with expertise in the history of civil rights law and policy, I connected the current imbroglio and the new Georgia law back to our ugly history of racial segregation and the regime of legal slavery that segregation strove to emulate by way of controlling supposedly unruly, dangerous African Americans, as we are pleased to call the visible descendants of the slaves, who originally hailed from Africa in the United States. Context matters. History matters.
Reader, I was, and am, in earnest. I meant it. Georgia’s Republican leaders harken back, wittingly or not, to the days of segregation and slavery with their new law. This should put the thinking citizens of the republic into highest dudgeon.
One not terribly surprising consequence of the new Georgia law is that Major League Baseball as an organization has decided to move its All Star Game away from Atlanta (notionally — the “Atlanta” baseball stadium is actually in a neighboring, suburban town) to Denver, Colorado. One not terribly surprising consequence of that decision is a gracious plenty of “conservative” pettifogging about the relative election procedures in Georgia and Colorado. Again, I hope you will forgive me for recycling this delicious morsel of the excellent Ms. Psaki spanking the Faux “News” fool on the topic:
One not terribly surprising consequence of “conservative” pettifogging about the respective election procedures in Georgia and Colorado has been a surfeit of more or less technocratic, more or less obviously liberal explanations, in the vein of Ms. Psaki above, about how much easier voting is in Colorado than any reasonable person can expect it to be under the new, as yet untried, regime in Georgia.
I will not claim to know the political opinions of this author, who has been doing “fact checking” reporting for some time now. I will recall the old adage that reality has a liberal bias, which is mostly the fault of good “conservatives” who have a bad habit of deciding what they think, then trying to gin up evidence to support their preconceived notions, which typically does not work very well. The “conservative” Party claimed, by nominating him, that Donald Trump would be a good president. They were obviously, disastrously wrong, as any fool could have, and did, see going in.
Reducing the universe of political options to “liberal” and “conservative” makes little sense. Even though their position would seem to dictate uniformity of belief, and they do have an amusing habit of cutting off, not to say, “canceling,” anyone who dares utter a whisper of heterodoxy (see Liz Cheney, most recently), conservatives in the United States come in a variety of flavors, from paleo conservatives through to neo conservatives, a term people like to use much too freely. Not all conservatives are neo conservatives. The left end of the political spectrum, perhaps not surprisingly, offers a veritable plethora of options, with “liberal” being perhaps the most tepid, socialism and communism being the most well known options beyond, and “socialism” coming in a number of different flavors.
But we humans create our worlds with our labels, and the current voting procedures imbroglio does break down well along lines of “liberal” and “conservative,” perhaps because the United States is a distinctively liberal polity in which we have always relied on voting as the primary mechanism for deciding major public issues, starting with the ratification of the Constitution, and have consistently expanded the suffrage, first by eliminating property requirements in the hope of discouraging white men who owned no property from moving west where they could secure a free plot from the federal government, then prohibiting discrimination in voting on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the decision most at issue again now, some 170 years after the fact (!), then prohibiting discrimination in voting on the basis of sex, and finally setting the maximum minimum voting age at 18. And, even though monarchists are few and far between here, the bizarre fascination with the British royal family to the contrary notwithstanding, we have yet existed long enough and our population has grown enough that we do harbor within our borders people who are suspicious of voting, or at least of our, um, liberal definition of who may participate, never more so than when it prohibits racial discrimination. We may call them “conservatives.”
Ideas being the drivers of human action, simple, if sometimes bizarre, ideas can cause centuries of historical events. So it is that the English people who first settled in “North America” and would go on to create the United States brought with them their own peculiar, noxious arrogance, crossed with the even more peculiar, more noxious arrogance of Christian belief, which manifested as a vicious contempt for first, the Natives who had lived on the continent for thousands of years, then for the Africans they were pleased to buy for use as forced labor in their profit making enterprise. As an aside, it is vastly amusing that the very conservatives who are usually great defenders of western culture and at least implicitly the very English version of it that informs the culture of the United States would now have us believe that they deplore the effects of this profit making attitude that is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the originally English culture that is now ours. Some of them, anyway.
The reason to insist on the direct relevance of segregation and slavery to our current debates over election and voting procedures is that, which should surprise no one, the "conservative” position, the position that Georgia Republicans have taken, necessarily rests on and perpetuates that very noxious contempt for the descendants of the slaves, for African Americans, that all civilized citizens of the republic rightly condemn and deplore. The technocratic impulse that leads people to argue from data and unproven hypotheses around the edges of this issue is not wrong, but it is too tepid by half.
The idea of “white supremacy” has been the simple idea that has driven much of the history of the United States. Anyone who disputes this claim is a knave or a fool, or both.
Historians of the United States find endlessly puzzling the seemingly ineradicable circulation of what we might call the Confederate apologist version of our nation’s history, with too many people continuing to bleat the absurd claim that states seceded, sparking the Civil War, over “states’ rights,” which is a ridiculous misnomer on its face. States do not have rights. They have powers, and no state ever has any right to discriminate against its own citizens. In the decades preceding the Civil War, in the United States, the leading issue of state power was how to decide if new states entering the Union would have slavery. Slavery and “states’ rights” were not disjunctive. They were the same. See “Bleeding Kansas.”
Finally, after a four year war that killed over 600,000 people, still the deadliest war for U.S. citizens we have yet engaged in, we enshrined that principle in our Constitution with the Fourteenth Amendment, then followed soon after with a more specific statement in the Fifteenth Amendment prohibiting discrimination in voting on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Amendments to the Constitution are the clearest, most emphatic ways we have to express our national opinion in terms of public policy. White people at the South have never fully surrendered their lingering objections to these two emphatic statements of the axiomatic, legal equality of all citizens, “born or naturalized,” in the United States. For reasons that are more the province of psychology than history, although one doubt that any fully satisfying explanation will ever emerge, the “white supremacist” position still holds a powerful appeal for too many people, throughout the republic. Donald Trump understood this appeal intuitively. That he chose Mexicans and Muslims as his chief targets is not at all to the contrary. “White supremacy” is a roving impulse that, again, originally worked to give our English ancestors a feeling of contempt for Native Americans before they started buying Africans. African American voters smelled that rat and voted for Trump at the lowest rate of any identifiable group in the population.
One of the greatest successes of the African American civil rights movement, beyond its obvious policy victories in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, was to make the allegation of racism the most grievous insult in our political culture. No allegation produces more histrionic disavowals than the charge that one is racist.
This is as it should be, but does have the unhappy side effect of making honest discussions of problems around race and racism nearly impossible and has set up the typically clever, “conservative” riposte that anyone who mentions race and racism is “the real racist,” apparently on the bizarre proposition that we can best eliminate the scourge by ignoring it. This has the benefit, to “conservatives,” anyway, of allowing them to dismiss as “race hustlers” anyone who dares point out their obvious racism.
Um, no. And there is no neutral observer who can decide the issue, with Chief Justice Roberts having already taken the side of the slave owners by writing the opinion striking down parts of the Voting Rights Act, in part because of “federalism costs,” which is the polite, 21st century way of saying “states’ rights.” Yep, the chief justice of the Supreme Court is on the side of the slave owners. I wrote that and I mean it.
I have a J.D. as well as a Ph.D. and I will put my knowledge of U.S. law and history up against anyone’s. Our nation’s continuing racism is immoral and despicable, and now is the time for all good persons to denounce and oppose the descendants of slave owners and their apologists everywhere in the republic.