Ignition
When I was a kid, I learned about the rampant voter suppression and voter fraud perpetrated by conservatives in the postwar South. It was part of my here are the realities of being Black in America education.
I learned about state-sponsored voter suppression on one hand. I learned about the private citizens - vigilantes - who used terror to dissuade black citizens from voting on the other. And, I learned that conservative politicians, in a kind of demented public-private partnership, employed those vigilantes to keep their opponents’ voters from the polls.
Conservative politicians, standing on the shoulders of terrorism and (ironically) voter fraud, came to dominate southern states’ legislatures. Then, they amended their states’ constitutions to predicate citizens’ eligibility to vote on their ability to:
Pay poll taxes.
Pass literacy tests.
Comply with residency and record keeping requirements.
They promulgated these laws, explicitly, to eliminate the black vote and remove black folks from public life in general.
Even as a child, I understood, viscerally, that some white people (especially young, white men) are so full of hate and ignorance that, were it still socially acceptable, they’d don white bed sheets, go out into the night, and terrorize black people. I further understood that many other white people (subsisting, I imagined, in disgusting Mississippi hovels) might not spew their hate in public but nevertheless hated me just because I was me.
That kind of blatant racism always seemed sensational. It wasn't a big part of my life as a kid in the Jersey suburbs. It seemed almost a caricature of racism which, in any event, was easy to spot, understand, and dismiss as out of the ordinary.
It was harder to understand state sponsored racism and how average white people could have supported it. Of course, poll taxes and literacy tests were, on their face, racially neutral. They applied to all voters, regardless of race. (As obviously, black voters were far more likely than white voters to be poor and illiterate. So the effect of those laws was to disenfranchise most black citizens.)
Still, I struggled to fathom how otherwise reasonable U.S. citizens could have been so willfully blind, or indifferent, to such deliberate and obvious deprivation of other U.S. citizens’ right to vote.
I understood it as a historical fact in the same sense that I understood that my grandfather fought in WWII. I’d seen the photos on the mantle of my grandfather looking young and crisp in his 40s-era Army uniform. I’d witnessed, with genuine awe, the paraphernalia he’d lifted off of dead Nazis. Those artifacts connected me to that history in some vague sense. But none of it seemed relevant to any part of my young, suburban, (and frankly, privileged) 1990’s life.
I likewise understood that violent racism, and Jim Crow, and voter suppression were genuine historical facts. But they seemed relics of an appalling past to which I felt no connection. White people had always been a huge part of my life. I knew them. I studied with them. I partied with them. I fancied them my peers. I loved them. I didn’t understand how so many people of their hue could have supported (or acquiesced to) anything like the violent voter suppression I witnessed in the words of my parents and on the pages of my textbooks.
But now I get it.
In Shelby County v. Holder, SCOTUS ruled unconstitutional the two most crucial provisions in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (the “Act”). Those provisions required states with histories of racial discrimination to obtain clearance from the federal government before making changes to their voting laws. Those provisions stymied Southern states’ attempts to legislate the black vote out of existence.
In reaching its decision, SCOTUS reasoned that the Act’s preclearance provisions are no longer necessary - that they were designed to remedy a kind of racial discrimination that no longer exists.
The one thing more laughable than that conclusion is the speed with which, after the SCOTUS decision, Southern legislatures enacted exactly the sort of laws the Act was designed to prevent. Today’s voter ID laws are the 21st century’s version of 20th century literacy tests and poll taxes. In both cases, conservatives passed laws that are neutral on their face but are specifically, obviously, designed to suppress the black vote.
It’s state-sponsored racism incarnate.
Back in highschool, surrounded as I was by my white peers, I would have laughed in the face of anyone who told me that my 38-year-old self would watch a modern civil rights struggle play out in real time. To me, Civil Rights was an era - a bygone one. To me, the narrative of justice moved only in one direction - forward, toward progress. I never thought we’d be fighting to hold onto territory for which our parents’ and grandparents’ already shed their blood.
But we are. We’re fighting to recapture lost ground because the human animal has an uncanny ability to delude itself about its intentions. No one ever thinks they’re a bad person or doing anything evil. Shit, the Nazis convinced themselves that herding millions of innocent people into ovens was the right thing to do. THAT is the power of the human mind to delude itself. Especially in groups.
So it’s unsurprising that white southerners, who voted for segregationist politicians and supported racist policies in the early 20th century, never thought themselves bad people. They believ(ed) that they were supporting their candidate, or supporting states’ rights, or supporting a status quo they benefited from. Or whatever.
Today, conservatives overwhelmingly support voter ID laws and other measures that, effectively, suppress the minority vote. But they don’t think they’re supporting racist policies. They believe, as did their predecessors in the early 20th century, that they are just supporting their candidate, or their party, or their way of life.
This is how we Americans (indeed, we humans) pass evil and hate down from one generation to the next. Evil rarely flows to our progeny in an obvious deluge. It’s mostly an insidious trickle. It doesn’t violently uproot a nation’s (or a person’s) identity. It seeps into it, slowly and quietly.
Evil persists when humans delude themselves - when we refuse to confront ourselves, and our past, in the impersonal light of rational inquiry. There is no other solution - not love for our fellow humans, not retreating into our tribe, and certainly not any god.
Our children, and our grandchildren after them, will re-litigate civil rights until the day that a critical mass of Americans recognize that we must live in a society in which Reason rules above all.
Postscript
The image attached depicts a black man who a group of white men lynched. Importantly, it also depicts white men looking on with hideous detachment.
The anonymous black man was surely burned alive - ignited. But I named this post Ignition, because it’s this sort of story that can - should - ignite a people’s will.
