Why Republicans Are Suppressing Black Votes
Not long after losing its second presidential election to Barack Obama, the GOP, so the story goes, operated on itself. Like a lung-cancer patient declaring that its time to quit smoking, the Republican National Committee declared in a 2013 autopsy report that the Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African-American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring.
A few months later, Republicans cheered a Supreme Court decision that maimed the Voting Rights Act. Three years after that in the wake of more than a dozen states pushing through fresh new laws to make it more difficult for African-American and Hispanic people to vote the party crossed another Rubicon by nominating Donald Trump for president, a birther with an unquestioned record of racial discrimination and bigoted rhetoric. This was not so much hypocritical as it was suicidal.
An aging, nearly 90 percent white GOP cannot carry its candidates to electoral victory on a platform that revels in the consequences of unvarnished racism such as Charlottesville or the terror of family separation and placing babies in cages, Emory University professor Carol Anderson tells Rolling Stone. How does one maintain such a model for electoral success in a browning America? For those Republicans who indulge in it or silently benefit from it, voter suppression provides the leeway.
In her new book, One Person, No Vote, Anderson argues that the Republican Partys inability, and unwillingness, to reform its policies have led inexorably to silencing those who oppose racism as public policy. The unconscionable seizure of Hispanic-Americans passports along the Texas-Mexico border and the targeting of college students for invalidation in New Hampshire and Wisconsin both work toward the same goal. Felony disenfranchisement has affected one of every 13 black adults, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project. The Trump administrations desire to add a citizenship question to the census could dramatically cut the political power of Hispanic communities. And in North Carolina, even after a voter-ID law designed to discriminate with almost surgical precision was struck down in 2016, heavily gerrymandered (and unconstitutional) congressional districts aimed at helping Republicans were used in primaries this year to nominate several candidates across the state. If this all evokes the poll taxes and literacy tests of Americas shameful past, it should. Voter suppression is as toxic to democracy as old-school Jim Crow disenfranchisement, says Anderson.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/republicans-suppressing-black-votes-738059/