April 9, 2021
The current state of the Coronavirus pandemic is an apt metaphor for where we find ourselves as a country, on a knife’s edge between promise and disaster. Buoyed by the accelerating pace of vaccinations and heedless of the threat of the escalating number of variants, we toggle back and forth between responsibility and recklessness. Students flock to crowded beaches on spring break and governors announce reopenings, all trusting that, backstopped by the brisk efficiency of the Biden administration, we will win the race between the variants and vaccines. We see no further than what is in front of us.
Similarly, without the clarifying threat of the Trump presidency, we have become an atomized society, each of us prioritizing only that which directly affects us. We fail to see that patriarchal white supremacy is the unifying thread connecting the disparate threats we face– from vote-suppressing laws in Georgia, Texas and 45 other states to laws outlawing appropriate medical care for transgender kids in Arkansas to violence against Asian Americans everywhere.
This blind spot causes writers like Nate Cohn, in his analysis of Georgia’s onerous new election law, to profoundly miss the point. By arguing that the law is unlikely to depress turnout and therefore is not that bad, Cohn concedes the legitimacy of a statutory scheme blatantly designed to deprive one group of citizens of a fundamental Constitutional right by erecting a series of obstacles in their path. Cohn’s reliance on statistical analysis ignores the elephant in the room — that Black people have been fighting for the franchise since 1865. Despite three Constitutional amendments (the 15th in 1870 which gave Black men the right to vote, the 19th in 1920, which extended the franchise to women (and arguably Black women); the 24th amendment in 1964 which outlawed poll taxes) and one federal statute, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, the revanchist right wing has never stopped work to keep Black people from voting. The same arguments are being deployed in 2021 that were used in the 1950’s by the same outlets that opposed Black equality then — that Black people are too stupid to vote and are undeserving of the franchise (Source: @KevinMKruse, Twitter , 4/7/21).
The war to deprive BIPOC and other marginalized people of our basic human rights is being waged on many fronts, from police departments in Minneapolis and cities around the country, to Republican led legislatures in Georgia, Texas and other states too numerous to name, to the talking heads on Fox News. Our efforts to combat this hydra headed monster must also proceed on every front. We need activists on the ground, like the New Georgia Project and Black Voters Matter, to name and shame both the legislators eager to turn back the clock and the corporations that underwrite their campaigns. We need sports leagues and businesses to take decisive action to punish those states who enact anti-Democratic laws, as Major League Baseball did when it pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. We need high ranking BIPOC executives to pressure their fellow executives to be on the right side of history, as the group of Black executives spearheaded by Ken Chenault did last week, by launching a campaign against the Georgia law (Source: “Black Executives Call on Corporations to Fight Restrictive Voting Laws,” by Andrew Ross Sorkin and David Gelles, The New York Times, 3/31/21).
The truth is, defeating this pandemic and defeating the anti-democratic, white supremacist elements in our country will both require the same thing — our ability to look beyond our own individual self interest and endure some discomfort for the greater good. Progress has never come without a cost. It’s time that more of us start bearing it.