It seems that what I noted in my
last blog about the “poisons hatching out” has already begun. To wit, the latest
outrage from the Supreme Fools, who voted in their usual 5 to 4 pattern to
eviscerate the once universally-admired and most “American” Congressional
action of the last century, the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ended the
disenfranchisement of black voters. That act, pushed by Lyndon Johnson through
a Congress still housing racists from the South, was paid for and stimulated by
the blood of civil rights marchers in the very state of Alabama which brought
the recent case to the Supreme Court. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice
John Roberts argued that Section 4 of the law—the part designating which
states, mostly in the old South like Alabama, and based on past discrimination
(again like Alabama), needed federal “preclearance” for any changes in their
voting laws—could no longer be upheld. The data on which their constraints was
based, said Roberts, was “decades old;” the nation, after all, has black mayors
in Mississippi and even a “black” president. Thus, the once-inhibited states
would henceforth be free to establish any voting rules they chose. Texas, one
of the liberated nine, immediately announced that it would go ahead with its
voter ID and redistricting laws previously blocked by the Justice Department
and the courts:
“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect
immediately,” he [the Texas Attorney General] said in a statement.
“Redistricting maps passed by the legislature may also take effect without
approval from the federal government.” (NY Times, 6/25)
These are precisely the kinds of
discriminatory changes that the Voting Rights Act was meant to forestall, for what
these and other rules like gerrymandering (redistricting) do is create “safe”
districts for white racists. The voter ID laws (most of which follow a pattern
recommended by groups like ALEC, and which 7 of the 9 affected states have
tried to pass) tend to make it far more difficult for racial minorities to
prove their eligibility to vote—thus increasing the chances that Republican
voters in rural areas can outvote the usual Democratic majorities largely composed
of black, Latino, and women voters in the cities. This is a more subtle type of
disenfranchisement than the old poll taxes, but it is disenfranchisement
nonetheless. The disenfranchisement, according to Spencer Overton, law
professor at George Washington University, will particularly affect local offices
like city councils, school boards, and sheriffs, and thus affect “important
decisions related to schools, criminal justice, health and family services, and
economic opportunity that directly affect our daily lives.” (NY Times, 6/25)
The
shameful vote was shared by two Italian Americans—whose parents were subject to
discrimination themselves—and by the one remaining black justice, Clarence
Thomas, who sits where he does thanks to the very civil rights laws he now
joins his conservative colleagues to strike down. His, like theirs, is a
classic case of repudiating one’s origins. Thomas, in fact, reminds one of
nothing so much as the “house negro” portrayed in Quentin Tarantino’s recent
blockbuster, Django Unchained. This
is not to say that I liked the movie; it’s an exploitation-of-violence film if
there ever was one, and preposterous on its face. But Tarantino’s house slave
Stephen (played by Samuel Jackson), portrays, if in highly exaggerated form, the
devotion to the Massa over any empathy to his fellow slaves that Malcolm X long
ago excoriated. Stephen gets his comeuppance in the end, of course, this being
Hollywood, but we are not likely to see Justice Thomas getting his any time
soon. Too bad. He deserves, like Stephen in the movie, to be kneecapped for his
betrayal of his own people. The same goes for Scalia and Alito. They shamefully
betray the pain endured by Italian immigrants like their parents (who were in
fact racialized by the white America
they entered a century ago) by inflicting it upon those who suffer a like pain
in our time. Scalia, in fact, said that the renewable of the Voting Rights Act would
be a “perpetuation of racial entitlement”—as if the Africans who were brought
to this country in chains, and who still suffer outlandish racial profiling and
discrimination and economic slavery, are somehow taking advantage of their
oppressed state. Amazing that someone with such intelligence could be so blind
to his own prejudice, so ignorant of his own people’s history, so unaware of
his own sick need to identify with his oppressors.
The
NAACP and other groups are calling, expectedly, for Congress to write new
updated rules to maintain the protections lost under Section 4. But most
Congress-watchers consider it very unlikely that the current divided Congress
could possibly agree on such rules. As Senator Charles Schumer of New York
said, “As long as Republicans have a majority in the House and Democrats don’t
have 60 votes in the Senate, there will be no preclearance.”
Indeed.
And as long as the current racists hold a majority on the Supreme Court, we can
expect similar outrages. The hits will keep coming, the racists will keep being
appointed (remember John Roberts at his confirmation hearing, talking about
being a “non-activist” and impartial judge who would simply “call balls and
strikes”?), the oppression and inequality will get worse, the poisons will keep
hatching out. All that remains to be seen is whether the benighted public has a
breaking point, or whether it will, as is its wont, simply bow its head and
keep hoping the axe will get dull on others before it makes its fatal cut.
Lawrence DiStasi
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