When Conservatives Want To Limit Voting, Their First Target Is Always Black Folks

Last week Digby was sitting in Kevin Drum's blogging chair at Mother Jones and one of her posts was about the history of conservative jihads on behalf of voter suppression in America. (Did you know that the straw that broke the camel's back in France in 1789, setting off the Revolution, was when King Louis XVI called together the Estates-General and backed an attempt to give the 99% a third of the decision-making power, another third going to the nobility and another third to the clergy. He lost his head over it.) "Vote suppression," wrote Digby, "has been with us for centuries, of course. Jim Crow was built on it. Very famous and important Americans have participated in it, including former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. But according to a 2004 report by the Center for Voting Rights it wasn't until the Jesse Jackson campaign in the 1980s that the Republicans began to organize nationally."

And like most progressives, Digby worries that Establishment Democrats haven't taken the threat seriously enough. Many passive observers must wonder why, if Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the economy and deliberately undermining democracy and disenfranchising our citizens they haven't been punished. Why aren't Scott Walker and Rick Scott in prison? Digby senses Dems may finally be waking up to the direness of the threat:

Attorney General Eric Holder told members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches on Wednesday that the right to vote was threatened across the country. "The reality is that in jurisdictions across the country, both overt and subtle forms of discrimination remain all too common and have not yet been relegated to the pages of history," Holder told the audience, made up of black church and political leaders, during a faith leaders summit in Washington. He also reaffirmed the Justice Department's commitment to the Voting Rights Act, and in particular, the section of the law which prohibits certain states from making changes to their election laws without first getting federal approval, and which has been the focus of several recent court challenges.

After the American Revolution, the conservatives who didn't flee with the British, particularly wealthy Southern conservatives, were sure to insist that only wealthy, older white males be allowed to vote. They didn't want the masses voting and every step along the way-- from enfranchisement to the electoral college to the creation of the anti-democratic Senate, they put up obstacles to the possibility of the popular will ever having as much weight as wealth. It was at that moment that the Founding Fathers should have cut the South loose to go its own reactionary way.

And today they are still-- and with renewed vigor, attempting to thwart the popular will and limit the franchise. And once again, it is blacks who are their main focus. For anyone delusional enough to argue that we're in a post racist-society, I'd like to offer some enlightening research gathered by Joshua Holland when he wrote his book The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy.

In 2003, Northwestern University sociologist Devah Prager conducted a study in which she sent pairs of volunteers to apply for entry-level jobs advertised in local newspapers. The white “applicants” admitted to their prospective employers that they’d served eighteen months in prison for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. The black volunteers offered the same level of education and experience but presented clean criminal records. Prager was surprised when more white “criminals” were offered jobs than African American men who’d stayed on the straight and narrow. “I thought the effect of a criminal record would swamp other effects,” Pager said. “That assumption was clearly wrong. It really suggests that stereotypes and assumptions about black males are very much a factor in hiring decisions.”

Some people questioned Prager’s findings because it was possible that the volunteers’ performances weren’t consistent. Perhaps the white volunteers simply happened to be more charismatic. Another study, by the University of Chicago’s Marianne Bertrand and MIT’s Sendhil Mullainathan, took the human factor out of the equation entirely. The
researchers gathered hundreds of real résumés that were comparable in terms of experience, education, and the quality of the résumés themselves. They then replaced the names with monikers that were picked to “sound white” or “sound black,” and used the résumés to respond to thirteen hundred job ads in the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. Bertrand and Mullainathan found that the “white” names got about one callback per ten résumés, while “black” names got one per fifteen.

They then tried sending résumés with different levels of education and experience. The CVs of more experienced “applicants” who sounded white were 30 percent more likely to elicit a callback, but those whose names sounded black were only 9 percent more likely to get a response.

In 2001, a class action lawsuit against Nissan prompted an analysis of 300,000 auto loans the company had made in thirty-three states between 1993 and 2000 and found that African Americans “consistently paid more than white customers, regardless of their credit histories.”

Another study conducted by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy found that “even when median income levels were comparable, home buyers in minority neighborhoods were more likely to get a loan from a subprime lender.” These tended to come with “higher interest rates, fees and penalties.”

Keeping African-Americans from being able to vote and have equal participation in society has a little extra bonus for those who advocate against it the most consistently. Perhaps a lot of us had hoped that in electing a Democratic president, House and Senate in 2008, we could expect some substantive action to end this anti-social and illegal behavior. It makes it hard to listen to their whining now. Watch Bernie Sanders: