8 ms·

The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades

The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades.

Spooky23 2y ago
It’s still here. We dress it up as voter ID or something similar.
- anonfordays 2y ago
  Voter ID is not racist.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Like many such policies it's not explicitly racist .. as a procedure it simply disenfranchises some demographics more than others; lower income brackets, people that have had difficult housing and record keepng pasts, indigenous voters on reservation lands lacking mailbox addresses, etc. It's a mystery how that appears to proportionally exclude along racial and ethnic lines but it's assuredly not that by delibrate intent. Just a happy accident really?
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      A fun fact is that this is specifically the question the academic framework of critical race theory was formed to address. How can systems that are not explicitly racist, that may actually have racial equity as explicit goals, still create racially disparate outcomes. It's an interesting area of study! No wonder people hate it.
    - anonfordays 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - KingMob 2y ago
    It certainly is, because the laws are passed with the intent that they won't be applied equally. Incidentally, this is one of the things critical race theory actually talked about: how laws can be non-discriminatory on the surface, but deliberately created and applied in a discriminatory manner. To trot out Wilhoit's Law again: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
    - anonfordays 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - fzeroracer 2y ago
        “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” John Ehrlichman, White House counsel and assistant to Richard Nixon
        anonfordays 2y ago
        Hilarious, your quote is also fabricated, he never said it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State." Not Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party and Reich Minister of Propaganda
  - MandieD 2y ago
    In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card. Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice. Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family? Germany, by contrast, requires every resident to register in the city or town they live in for an ID, whether they intend to vote or not, but even small towns have such an office, and as someone else pointed out, every citizen receives a letter 30 days before each election telling them exactly who/what is being voted on, where they are to go on Election Day (always a Sunday), and how to vote absentee if they’re not going to be in town that day.
    - boohoo123 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - anonfordays 2y ago
      >In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card. They're still there, most mid-sized towns still have them. >Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice. Yes they opened the big licensing centers and made them appointment only which is an improvement, you waste zero time. "Miles away" means nothing in Texas, the state is bigger than France. >Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure There is no public transportation infrastructure in most mid-sized Texas towns. >or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family? Now with appointments you can plan ahead with family or friends that are time strapped.
  - throwaway4736 2y ago
    It absolutely is. Go look at the racial demographics of the neighborhoods where DMVs are being opened and closed. And then ask yourself which racial groups, at large, are more likely to have time in their day to sit at an inconveniently located DMV and what party they most often vote for.
    - anonfordays 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Fair. It disenfranchises the poor across racial boundaries.
    - consteval 2y ago
      Poverty is not equal across racial boundaries and geography is also not equal across racial boundaries. Where you put the DPS matters, and the South is still very much segregated to some degree today. Naturally, the state government knows this and takes full advantage of it. See also: Gerrymandering. Same concept.
      - Spooky23 2y ago
        Totally. I’m being sarcastic. :) I’ve worked in the ID space and know how the parts work together. When I found myself widowed and having to get a passport for my son, the process of getting a replacement social security card for him was incredibly onerous. 3 different visits! Mind you this was to get a replacement cardboard card - getting survivors benefits is a simple phone call. Multiple visits is a barrier for folks without paid time off. Physical documents is a barrier for folks without unstable housing or noncustodial parents. It’s interesting that all of this bullshit is required to exercise your right to vote. But we have the minimal possible controls on the right to bear arms in those states.
        kmeisthax 2y ago
        Trust me, 2A will be thrown in the trash the moment poor people or minorities start arming themselves again.
        KingMob 2y ago
        Yeah, people forget Ronald Reagan passed some of the nationa's earliest gun control laws as governor of California partly as a response to groups like the Black Panthers arming themselves.
    - anonfordays 2y ago
  - detruzs 2y ago
    [dead]
- onionisafruit 2y ago
  Voter id is so far from this. You might have to jump through hoops to get an ID, but with literacy tests it was almost impossible for blacks to register.
  - Lord-Jobo 2y ago
    One disproportionately effects black voters, with an (arbitrary guess) 80% effectiveness rate. One disproportionately effects black voters with a (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-suppression-communities-color https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impa...) ~10% effectiveness Just because one is working better then the other doesn't mean they are any different in their purpose
- M4v3R 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - consteval 2y ago
    From a statistical standpoint, there are proportionally less black people with ID than other racial groups. It's not a matter of capability, it's purely a factual matter. It's not up for debate black Americans would be disproportionality affected, and as such you can easily argue the policy has racist intentions. What some black Americans say, and what some politicians say, does not matter.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Assuming that you’re sharing this in good faith, the claim “it’s difficult for black folks to get identification” is a compressed way of saying “ease and necessity of accessing civil services like DMVs is not evenly distributed across the country e.g. very GOOD accessible civil services in Harlem, Manhattan and NOT very accessible civil services in rural Appalachia, and the unevenness tends to correlate with other forms of inequality in our society such as along rich/poor and white/black lines, meaning some types of voter ID laws create systematic bias in who is able to exercise their constitutional right to vote, and given that it is effectively impossible to make any impact in any election via voter fraud even without voter ID laws, the mass disenfranchisement of a non-random sampling of Americans is not worth the upside.” Hope that helps!
    - agsqwe 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - tbyehl 2y ago
    Weird how young-ish people in a particularly dense urban setting with plentiful public transit and many DMV offices to choose from — TIL: several exclusively for AAA members — may have a different lived experience than, say, older people in a rural county roughly half the size of Rhode Island with no public transit and a single DMV office. Tho the county I refer to barely has any black residents so there couldn't possibly be any racial motivations. Just like the nearby restaurant plastered with a bunch of "rules" in giant lettering on the exterior, such as "No sagging pants", isn't owned by a racist. /s Ruby Bridges is still alive and younger than our last president.
- refurb 2y ago
  The biggest thing we need to work is the subtle racism of low expectations.
  - consteval 2y ago
    The implication that acknowledging statistical reality that certain income groups and racial groups have less ID is in it of itself racist is, well, racist. Because then you can use this adject dismissal of reality to apply racist laws and claim they're not racist. In the naivest, most shallow analysis Voter ID is not racist because black Americans are just as capable of receiving ID. The logic is fine, but purposefully ignorant. The barrier to ID IS NOT just "do you have the physical/mental ability to get ID". The barriers are economic and geographic. When you don't put DMVs in black areas that becomes a barrier. When IDs cost money that becomes a barrier. When a motor vehicle is required that becomes a barrier.
    - refurb 2y ago
      The subtle racism is that just because a DMV is a mile further away that black people somehow can’t figure out how to get ID. The subtle racism is ignoring poor rural whites that face the same “challenges” of distance (even more so!) but are somehow ignored. The subtle racism is making the claim over and over again without actually presenting any data.
      - hn_acker 2y ago
        Movement Advancement Project has some data about the de facto discriminatory effect of voter ID requirements [1] that separately accounts for for low-income people regardless of race [2] and black people in particular [3]. Here's something I wrote on the voter ID topic before [4] (disregard the citation numbers in the quote): > A question that isn't for you in particular to answer is, in the current day and age, would the number of fraudulent ballots prevented by a new strict voter ID requirement be greater than the number of valid votes prevented by such a requirement? The current legal framework of obtaining government-issued IDs makes strict voter ID laws de facto voter suppression. 30 million people lacked a driver's license as of 2022 [2], and I'd be willing to bet that at least 1 million of them are US citizens of voting age. Let's assume that 25% of them would vote if they had the option to do so from their homes (a arbitrary but conservative hypothetical percentage in light of actual voter turnout percentages [5]). There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots. Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting. [1] https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report [2] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-low-income-communities.pdf https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-low-income-communit... [3] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-Black-communities.pdf https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-Black-communities.p... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41351632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41351632
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Or racist police profiling and felony convictions for things white people would walk for (felony conviction = you lose the right to vote, effectively stripping someone of their citizenship. I don't know if it's for life, is it?)
- boohoo123 2y ago
  [flagged]
whaaaaat 2y ago
We've removed some of the structural racism, but we've also gotten much better at hiding and "justifying" it. Additionally, think about all the votes that were passed when these tests were present. Every one of those votes meant a huge and consistent portion of the population could not participate. Which probably created a situation where that population was at a disadvantage across many systems. Even if they stopped doing this test in 19XX, it would take a significant amount of time to unwind not only the unfair policies enacted under it but also the damage done by those policies to families. We might still be undoing the damae from them. A similar case is redlining -- city policies that forced immigrant and minority populations to live in certain areas, limiting those family's abilities to participate in the growth of housing value. A couple generations cannot accrue value from their homes, because they've been forced to live in a low value area. Even once redlining became illegal, those families were 60 years behind in an exponential growth curve. Fixing the policy is a great start, as was removing these tests, but we need to do more to actually make things right. The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is still very much being felt in the present, as waves and ripples from past decisions and policies led to inequal financial and social outcomes that take generations to repair (if they ever can be repaired.)
jhp123 2y ago
[flagged]
- boohoo123 2y ago
  [flagged]

The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades.

Spooky23 2y ago

It’s still here. We dress it up as voter ID or something similar.

anonfordays 2y ago
Voter ID is not racist.
- defrost 2y ago
  Like many such policies it's not explicitly racist .. as a procedure it simply disenfranchises some demographics more than others; lower income brackets, people that have had difficult housing and record keepng pasts, indigenous voters on reservation lands lacking mailbox addresses, etc. It's a mystery how that appears to proportionally exclude along racial and ethnic lines but it's assuredly not that by delibrate intent. Just a happy accident really?
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    A fun fact is that this is specifically the question the academic framework of critical race theory was formed to address. How can systems that are not explicitly racist, that may actually have racial equity as explicit goals, still create racially disparate outcomes. It's an interesting area of study! No wonder people hate it.
  - anonfordays 2y ago
    [flagged]
- KingMob 2y ago
  It certainly is, because the laws are passed with the intent that they won't be applied equally. Incidentally, this is one of the things critical race theory actually talked about: how laws can be non-discriminatory on the surface, but deliberately created and applied in a discriminatory manner. To trot out Wilhoit's Law again: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
  - anonfordays 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - fzeroracer 2y ago
      “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” John Ehrlichman, White House counsel and assistant to Richard Nixon
      - anonfordays 2y ago
        Hilarious, your quote is also fabricated, he never said it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State." Not Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party and Reich Minister of Propaganda
- MandieD 2y ago
  In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card. Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice. Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family? Germany, by contrast, requires every resident to register in the city or town they live in for an ID, whether they intend to vote or not, but even small towns have such an office, and as someone else pointed out, every citizen receives a letter 30 days before each election telling them exactly who/what is being voted on, where they are to go on Election Day (always a Sunday), and how to vote absentee if they’re not going to be in town that day.
  - boohoo123 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonfordays 2y ago
    >In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card. They're still there, most mid-sized towns still have them. >Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice. Yes they opened the big licensing centers and made them appointment only which is an improvement, you waste zero time. "Miles away" means nothing in Texas, the state is bigger than France. >Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure There is no public transportation infrastructure in most mid-sized Texas towns. >or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family? Now with appointments you can plan ahead with family or friends that are time strapped.
- throwaway4736 2y ago
  It absolutely is. Go look at the racial demographics of the neighborhoods where DMVs are being opened and closed. And then ask yourself which racial groups, at large, are more likely to have time in their day to sit at an inconveniently located DMV and what party they most often vote for.
  - anonfordays 2y ago
    [flagged]
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Fair. It disenfranchises the poor across racial boundaries.
  - consteval 2y ago
    Poverty is not equal across racial boundaries and geography is also not equal across racial boundaries. Where you put the DPS matters, and the South is still very much segregated to some degree today. Naturally, the state government knows this and takes full advantage of it. See also: Gerrymandering. Same concept.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      Totally. I’m being sarcastic. :) I’ve worked in the ID space and know how the parts work together. When I found myself widowed and having to get a passport for my son, the process of getting a replacement social security card for him was incredibly onerous. 3 different visits! Mind you this was to get a replacement cardboard card - getting survivors benefits is a simple phone call. Multiple visits is a barrier for folks without paid time off. Physical documents is a barrier for folks without unstable housing or noncustodial parents. It’s interesting that all of this bullshit is required to exercise your right to vote. But we have the minimal possible controls on the right to bear arms in those states.
      - kmeisthax 2y ago
        Trust me, 2A will be thrown in the trash the moment poor people or minorities start arming themselves again.
        KingMob 2y ago
        Yeah, people forget Ronald Reagan passed some of the nationa's earliest gun control laws as governor of California partly as a response to groups like the Black Panthers arming themselves.
  - anonfordays 2y ago
- detruzs 2y ago
  [dead]
onionisafruit 2y ago
Voter id is so far from this. You might have to jump through hoops to get an ID, but with literacy tests it was almost impossible for blacks to register.
- Lord-Jobo 2y ago
  One disproportionately effects black voters, with an (arbitrary guess) 80% effectiveness rate. One disproportionately effects black voters with a (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-suppression-communities-color https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impa...) ~10% effectiveness Just because one is working better then the other doesn't mean they are any different in their purpose
M4v3R 2y ago
[flagged]
- consteval 2y ago
  From a statistical standpoint, there are proportionally less black people with ID than other racial groups. It's not a matter of capability, it's purely a factual matter. It's not up for debate black Americans would be disproportionality affected, and as such you can easily argue the policy has racist intentions. What some black Americans say, and what some politicians say, does not matter.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Assuming that you’re sharing this in good faith, the claim “it’s difficult for black folks to get identification” is a compressed way of saying “ease and necessity of accessing civil services like DMVs is not evenly distributed across the country e.g. very GOOD accessible civil services in Harlem, Manhattan and NOT very accessible civil services in rural Appalachia, and the unevenness tends to correlate with other forms of inequality in our society such as along rich/poor and white/black lines, meaning some types of voter ID laws create systematic bias in who is able to exercise their constitutional right to vote, and given that it is effectively impossible to make any impact in any election via voter fraud even without voter ID laws, the mass disenfranchisement of a non-random sampling of Americans is not worth the upside.” Hope that helps!
  - agsqwe 2y ago
    [flagged]
- tbyehl 2y ago
  Weird how young-ish people in a particularly dense urban setting with plentiful public transit and many DMV offices to choose from — TIL: several exclusively for AAA members — may have a different lived experience than, say, older people in a rural county roughly half the size of Rhode Island with no public transit and a single DMV office. Tho the county I refer to barely has any black residents so there couldn't possibly be any racial motivations. Just like the nearby restaurant plastered with a bunch of "rules" in giant lettering on the exterior, such as "No sagging pants", isn't owned by a racist. /s Ruby Bridges is still alive and younger than our last president.
refurb 2y ago
The biggest thing we need to work is the subtle racism of low expectations.
- consteval 2y ago
  The implication that acknowledging statistical reality that certain income groups and racial groups have less ID is in it of itself racist is, well, racist. Because then you can use this adject dismissal of reality to apply racist laws and claim they're not racist. In the naivest, most shallow analysis Voter ID is not racist because black Americans are just as capable of receiving ID. The logic is fine, but purposefully ignorant. The barrier to ID IS NOT just "do you have the physical/mental ability to get ID". The barriers are economic and geographic. When you don't put DMVs in black areas that becomes a barrier. When IDs cost money that becomes a barrier. When a motor vehicle is required that becomes a barrier.
  - refurb 2y ago
    The subtle racism is that just because a DMV is a mile further away that black people somehow can’t figure out how to get ID. The subtle racism is ignoring poor rural whites that face the same “challenges” of distance (even more so!) but are somehow ignored. The subtle racism is making the claim over and over again without actually presenting any data.
    - hn_acker 2y ago
      Movement Advancement Project has some data about the de facto discriminatory effect of voter ID requirements [1] that separately accounts for for low-income people regardless of race [2] and black people in particular [3]. Here's something I wrote on the voter ID topic before [4] (disregard the citation numbers in the quote): > A question that isn't for you in particular to answer is, in the current day and age, would the number of fraudulent ballots prevented by a new strict voter ID requirement be greater than the number of valid votes prevented by such a requirement? The current legal framework of obtaining government-issued IDs makes strict voter ID laws de facto voter suppression. 30 million people lacked a driver's license as of 2022 [2], and I'd be willing to bet that at least 1 million of them are US citizens of voting age. Let's assume that 25% of them would vote if they had the option to do so from their homes (a arbitrary but conservative hypothetical percentage in light of actual voter turnout percentages [5]). There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots. Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting. [1] https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report [2] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-low-income-communities.pdf https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-low-income-communit... [3] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-Black-communities.pdf https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-Black-communities.p... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41351632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41351632
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Or racist police profiling and felony convictions for things white people would walk for (felony conviction = you lose the right to vote, effectively stripping someone of their citizenship. I don't know if it's for life, is it?)
boohoo123 2y ago
[flagged]

whaaaaat 2y ago

We've removed some of the structural racism, but we've also gotten much better at hiding and "justifying" it. Additionally, think about all the votes that were passed when these tests were present. Every one of those votes meant a huge and consistent portion of the population could not participate. Which probably created a situation where that population was at a disadvantage across many systems. Even if they stopped doing this test in 19XX, it would take a significant amount of time to unwind not only the unfair policies enacted under it but also the damage done by those policies to families. We might still be undoing the damae from them. A similar case is redlining -- city policies that forced immigrant and minority populations to live in certain areas, limiting those family's abilities to participate in the growth of housing value. A couple generations cannot accrue value from their homes, because they've been forced to live in a low value area. Even once redlining became illegal, those families were 60 years behind in an exponential growth curve. Fixing the policy is a great start, as was removing these tests, but we need to do more to actually make things right. The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is still very much being felt in the present, as waves and ripples from past decisions and policies led to inequal financial and social outcomes that take generations to repair (if they ever can be repaired.)

jhp123 2y ago

[flagged]

boohoo123 2y ago
[flagged]