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Some thoughts on the SCOTUS VRA ruling

The late John Lewis and other civil rights marchers being attacked by police in Selma, Alabama

Yesterday, our vaunted Supreme Court of these very United States gutted the Voting Rights Act even more. It seems to be a fondness that the six "conservative" justices have to dismantle this country's greatest achievement in civil rights.

The usual suspects—the ones who have all the smoke for the Democratic Party but none for the party actually committing the malfeasance—are wailing and gnashing their teeth, declaring this is the end of the VRA and of democracy as we know it. These people would not have survived the civil rights marches, or the Second World War, or the Great Depression. I do agree with the man-children on the right: we've become coddled, used to instant gratification, unwilling to put in the work required to maintain democracy. (The irony, of course, is that those rightists are even more coddled and living in privilege.) People echo John Lewis about getting into "good trouble," but absolutely do not comprehend the sacrifices that would entail.

But I wish to return to the idea that this ruling is the "end of democracy." First, it isn't. But more importantly: What democracy?

I would argue that until 1965, this country was, at best, a partial democracy. Yes, there were elections. Yes, power alternated between Democrats and Republicans. But can you call a country "democratic" if in an entire region an entire population was unable to vote? Can you call a country a "democracy," as I would guess many of us define it, if large segments of those living in the country were second-class citizens? Can you call a country a "democracy" if for a large portion of its history it enslaved a captive population, and committed genocide against its native inhabitants?

Of course you can. And that is what was so epochal about the Voting Rights Act. For the first time in law, it was stated that, ideally, this was not a republic for white people only. That all citizens had the most fundamental right of citizenship: the franchise. That it could not be withheld by law or custom. It was a watershed moment in American history. 

Before 1965, America was a partial democracy. It was a democracy which subjugated people at home and abroad. It was a democracy which placed 120,000 of its citizens of Japanese descent into concentration camps. It was a democracy in which its Supreme Court declared segregation legal. The idea that we have had two hundred and fifty years of wondrous democracy is simply farcical. Even most white men weren't able to vote until the Jackson reforms of the 1820s because they were not property owners.

But look at this history. It is a history of slow, aching progress. It is a history of the expansion of what it means to be an American. It is a history of people struggling for, and many times dying for, rights which should have been theirs from birth. It is a history of people who would not give up, who would not accept "no" as an answer.

It is time for those who are rending their garments to study that history. To learn from those movements. They were not guaranteed success. They began from a place where they had few if any rights. And the only thing which power respects is power. These movements showed their power: their power to organize, their power to move the conscience of a nation.

And now the forces which always opposed those movements are in power and desperately seeking to reverse the past sixty years. Donald Trump's election is nothing other than that. Chief Justice John Roberts has always been an enemy of the VRA. But even he didn't do what he really wanted to do, which was to repeal it in its entirety. Hobbs cratered the court's legitimacy; a repeal of the Act would create a firestorm that he and the other five radicals would not survive.

So, what do we do? Well, Bowzer speaks for me.
The democracy we've taken for granted has existed for only sixty years. Do we meekly succumb, twirl a forelock, and bow to our betters? My parents didn't flee to this country to be anyone's serf, or for their sons to serve anyone. It's time for white people to realize that they are as much being pushed into serfdom as anyone. And by that point it won't matter what your pretensions about being superior to "those people" are. You'll be right there with them. 

The Voting Rights Act wasn't "Black history." It was a monumental achievement of American history. Its ghettoization has allowed this ruling. But rights which can be taken from some can be taken from all. The majority of this nation needs to grok this, and the sooner the better.
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