No Question: A Case for the Voting Rights Act

Greetings all!

This post comes just days before the so-called “sequester” in the United States, among other things. However, I have had my eye on a smaller issue that seems to have gone unnoticed among most of us. Namely, that section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has received a new challenge, this time by a small county outside Birmingham, Alabama. Most Americans turn away at news of this because we feel the outcome is inevitable; section 5 will likely be upheld by the Supreme Court, and nothing will change. However, this passivity strikes me as dangerous. America was a nation built on racism, and racism is alive and well in our nation, that is clear. That we automatically accept that section 5 is under no threat proves how foolish we may be. In this post, I intend to show why our inaction on this may cost us severely. This week’s quote comes from Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, an agrarian populist president of Guatemala prior to a CIA-backed and United Fruit Company-sponsored coup against his democratically elected government.

First, we must know what section 5 states. In the Voting Rights Act, section 5 notes that 9 states—Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia—must receive permission from the DOJ or a federal court before any state voting laws are changed. The provision was included in the law to ensure that states with a history of oppressive voting practices would comply with the new law no matter what. Of course, most of the states are primarily in the south, outside Alaska, as the south was the primary battleground of civil rights issues in the 1960s. While the north suffered from de facto segregation that it had to confront, the south legislated de jure segregation which made section 5 absolutely necessary to progress. Without it, the Voting Rights Act would have been moot because many states would find ways around the law in order to prevent minorities from voting.

The reason states challenge the law, as noted in the link earlier, is that many claim the south has “outgrown” the racist policies of its past. This is often based on population and representation statistics, in that the south is more racially diverse than its past and its state government make-up reflects these demographic changes.

However, we should know by now that these are mistruths. Having minorities in leadership positions does not a diverse government body make; what matters is how much power and equality the common minority has. If they have less in any way, no amount of representation makes up for that. Given, the south is more racially diverse and less oppressive than the past. Racially based policies are outlawed, and about 56% of African-Americans reside in the southern states. But this does not change the fact that 74.1% of Americans are white, meaning that all American minorities still do not constitute much power in governance. This is especially true of the southern states section 5 applies to; while they may have large representative amounts of African-Americans, other minorities are not represented as well in these states as compared to the rest of America.

And we should also not be foolish enough to believe that racism is not apparent in the governance of these states. While it is rare to get legislators on the state level openly proposing racist policy, racism is still reflected in socio-economic inequality between whites and minority groups. Even Fox News, the bastion of the Republican Party which absorbed racist southern Democrats after the civil rights movement, acknowledges that racism still exists in America. Racism towards African-Americans is not our only problem; we also have become less tolerant of Arabs and Muslims in exchange for more tolerance of Hispanics. Note that this does not mean that we have overcome our intolerance of Hispanics, either. This becomes especially easy to see when we consider such American policies as the war on drugs, in which blacks constitute 13% of drug users, yet also represent 38% of those arrested for drug offenses and 59% of those convicted.

It should be clear now that the arguments these southern states make for abolishing section 5 are false, and as such the Voting Rights Act in its entirety should be upheld. I contend that, because section 5 is for the good of minorities, it should in fact be extended to all states. This way, we can prevent racist policies in voting for all states. We already know that racism is not limited to these 9 states the law originally applies to; this was proven by Pennsylvania, which tried to pass new restrictive voter ID laws ahead of this year’s presidential election. Not only did this law disproportionately harm Democratic voters (and democracy), it easily targeted immigrants, the elderly, and other minority groups which were not prepared for the law. And while the law failed, the fact that such propositions are still made is symptomatic of our troubles. Therefore, we must extend section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to all states, to protect all Americans from discriminatory policies in the present and the future.

That is all for this week, and I hope I’ve provided sound reasoning. I can be contacted through the comments section here, along with my email at zerospintop@live.com. I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, Steam, Tumblr, and Reddit. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing off.