White supremacy has been a powerful tool of the ruling class in the United States for generations. From the federal government wiping out the Native American population to the Civil War, from Japanese American internment camps to Jim Crow—the examples of racial discrimination are not only endless but ongoing.
There is a persistent movement by those at the top to whitewash this nation’s history, pun intended. Too many continue to think that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” (it wasn’t), and the Confederate flag is still seen far too often. Many people know that military service members returning from World War II had access to G.I. benefits; even fewer know that most of those benefits were denied to Black soldiers. There are countless examples like this throughout our nation’s history, yet many people are purposely unwilling to confront that and the right-wing media encourages that obstinance.
The removal, or even the proposal of removing, Confederate monuments is enough to make some Republican politicians lose their minds and exclaim that those behind the removal are attempting to “erase our history.” Except that monuments are used to glorify people or moments in history, and history is taught from books and lectures, not statues. We obviously should not be glorifying the South for starting a civil war in an attempt to preserve slavery. And yet, there are those who are determined to do just that.
In the present day, the MAGA minority ensconced in all branches of the federal government is successfully taking us backward to the days when people of color had less of a voice, or even no voice at all. Instead of expanding democracy, the current Republican Party is doing everything it can to take the country back to a time when only the votes of white people (though often not the poorer ones) matter. It’s no way to run a democracy, and to borrow a phrase co-opted by the right that entirely misses the point, all votes matter.
The conservative majority of the Supreme Court recently threw out Louisiana’s congressional map, ruling it an unconstitutional gerrymander in Louisiana v. Callais, thereby making it more difficult to challenge future maps for racial discrimination. Because of this ruling, state legislatures controlled by Republican majorities could eliminate Democratic held seats, especially in the South, where some of them are still fighting the Civil War. State lawmakers in Florida have approved new congressional boundaries, devised by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, in an attempt to help the GOP secure 24 of the state’s 28 House seats for the midterms, which would reduce the number of Democratic seats from 8 to 4.
In yet another instance that shows the politicians in the South are still mad they lost the war, many of the same states whose senators voted ‘No’ on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are rushing to redraw their own congressional maps after the Supreme Court ruling. Louisiana suspended its primaries scheduled for May 16, and Alabama enacted a law that would ignore the results of its May 19 congressional primaries. Alabama plans to hold a new election if a federal court agrees to lift an order requiring the state to have a second congressional district in which a majority or near-majority of residents are Black. South Carolina is considering drawing a new map that gives the Republican Party a chance to win all seven House seats. Tennessee enacted a law creating a new House map that carves up a majority-Black district, the only one held by a Democrat, giving Republicans a chance to win all nine seats.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais completely obliterated the commitments laid out in the Voting Rights Act to racial equality in elections. The fact that many Southern states are rushing to redraw maps in an effort to disenfranchise minority voters is proof that the Voting Rights Act was keeping politicians from blatantly expressing their racism.
In Virginia, the people spoke so loudly in voting for the new congressional map that the state had to get the courts involved to override them. In Tennessee, cops physically removed two Black lawmakers from the room where Republicans held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the majority-Black district. That district is in Memphis, the same city where Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.
The erosion of voting rights is nothing new for the Republican Party—and hasn’t been for years. In 2016, North Carolina’s Republican majority passed voter suppression laws that were so transparently racist that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the “provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” Former South Carolina Senator and Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint gave the game away when he once said, “…in the states where they do have voter ID laws…elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates.”
What the rise of Donald Trump, the system that spawned him, and the fascism that system enables have shown is thus: A not insignificant number of white people in positions of power believe that if democracy means minorities have the same rights as they do, they are okay with getting rid of democracy. They would rather see the country destroyed by their own hand, as long as people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community are destroyed as well. These Republican lawmakers have gone full mask-off racism, revealing the white hoods underneath.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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