Tag Archives: race

I Was Undocumented in Arizona

July 2, 2012 – 11:06 am

Real Americans carry ID

When I turned 50 a few years ago, I started doing something sort of paranoid: I always jog with my driver’s license and medical card, in case I have a heart attack. So far it’s never come in handy, but I keep doing it.

Paranoia has its costs, though. Almost two weeks ago, I was at Logan Airport in Boston when I flipped my wallet open and stared at an empty plastic window. My driver’s license was in a t-shirt pocket in my laundry hamper. I had no other photo ID.

My first thought was to change my flight and come back tomorrow, but that would mean missing a whole day of the conference I was going to – the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix – so I went with my second thought: See what happens.

I got a boarding pass from a machine that didn’t care what I looked like, then waited in line with everybody else and apologetically told my story to the TSA guy. He called over a supervisor, who looked at what I did have: two credit cards and prescription bottle. Making no promises about what would happen when I tried to come home, he let me through.

Eight days later, TSA in Phoenix was more thorough. They scoffed at my credit cards and pill bottle, as well as at my business card (which has a photo), and the ID the conference had given me. They asked about my health-insurance card, which of course was keeping my driver’s license company in the laundry hamper. They would have liked to have seen some mail with my address on it or maybe a utility bill, which I might have packed if I had known I was going to forget all my other ID.

So they called up a government database and started asking me questions about myself: my address and phone number, my wife’s maiden name, other towns I had lived in, and so on. Some of the stuff I didn’t know, like the names of the neighbors in my apartment building. Eventually they did an explosives-residue test on my hands, and then let me through.

At no time was I treated with anything other than respect. No one implied that I was a criminal or that I was trying to get away with something.

While I was undocumented, I learned two things of political significance:

First, those advocates of voter-ID laws who claim it’s no big deal because you already need a photo ID to do absolutely everything else in this society – they’re just wrong. A lot of people will ask for a photo ID, but if you don’t have one they work around it. For example, some places took my credit card without asking. When someone did ask, nobody batted an eye when I said, “Oh, never mind, I’ll pay cash” or called my wife over to charge it on her card. They may have had other work-arounds, but I didn’t ask.

TSA definitely will work with what you have, because they’re just trying to verify your identity, not stop you from traveling. On the other hand, when you try to vote in a Republican state, you run into a process that absolutely won’t work if you don’t have an official state-issued photo ID, and even a state-university ID isn’t good enough. That’s unusual, and you have to wonder if that’s because the purpose is to stop you from voting.

Second, it was ironic that I was on my way to Phoenix, and that one of the things I would do there was protest the Arizona immigration law, S.B. 1070, which is sometimes known as the papers-please law.

I wandered around Arizona for a week with no proof that I’m a US citizen other than my white skin, my Illinois accent, and a nice pair of khakis. Nobody cared. I never had to explain myself and I never had cause to be afraid.

Everybody who heard my license-in-the-hamper anecdote thought it was funny and wanted to know how I got through TSA. But if I’d been brown, poor, and speaking with a heavy Hispanic accent, the story might not have been so entertaining.

So I was undocumented in Arizona and nothing happened. No drama, no excitement.

That’s how white privilege usually shows up: Nothing happens. Think about that the next time you’re out in public and nothing is happening.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (7)

Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030

May 14, 2012 – 12:36 pm

OK, everybody may be an exaggeration. Let’s just say every politician of any significance: every presidential candidate, every governor, every member of congress, and the leadership of every party in every house of every state legislature.

Two charts tell you all you need to know about the politics of same-sex marriage. First, it has long-term momentum:

Second, it has the most inexorable kind of momentum there is: generational. Each day a few more supporters turn 18 and a few more opponents die. That’s how it’s going to be for a long, long time.

Explain it to the kids. That’s why President Obama explained his own change of heart this way:

Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents. And Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

This is how taboos fall. One generation genuinely believes in the taboo. The next follows it out of habit, but can’t defend it. And finally there’s a generation that challenges: The kids ask “Why?” and their parents have no answer.

Many of those parents will stay stuck in their ways, but politicians can’t afford to. They have to follow the majority, even if it goes against what they’ve stood for in the past.

We’ve seen this happen before.

Race and the Owens-Louis kids. When Jesse Owens won Olympic gold in Munich in 1936, and then Joe Louis defended his boxing title against Max Schmeling in a sold-out Yankee Stadium in 1938, the rooting wasn’t black vs. white. It was America vs. Nazi Germany.

To many of the white American kids who listened to those two events on the radio, it only made sense to let Jackie Robinson play major league baseball in 1947, and later, to start breaking down color barriers all across society.

When Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? raised the interracial marriage taboo in 1967, the Owens-Louis kids were the generation in between the Tracy-Hepburn parents and their Sidney-Poitier-dating daughter. They knew interracial marriage was still beyond the pale. Most of them would never consider it themselves. But they couldn’t explain why.

When the Owens-Louis generation reached middle age in the 1970s, segregationist politicians had to capitulate. In 1963 George Wallace could pledge “segregation forever”. In 1970 he successfully ran a race-baiting campaign for governor. But by 1979 he was saying, “I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over.”

The 1970s didn’t end racism — racists can still dog-whistle and use code words — but they ended the days when a politician could stake out an openly racist position and hope to win on it, even in Alabama.

Today, the Owens-Louis kids are the old folks, and returning to Jim Crow is as unthinkable as returning to slavery. Whenever same-sex marriage proponents are allowed to make the link to interracial marriage, the argument is over. No public figure will defend banning interracial marriage — a practice that was controversial even to talk about in 1967.

The Willow-Tara generation. In its acceptance of gays and lesbians, sports has trailed the culture rather than leading it. The characters who changed our thinking about homosexuality are more likely to be fictional ones we met through TV and movies.

In the late 1970s, it was edgy for Jack even to pretend to be gay on Three’s Company. Gay and lesbian minor characters started appearing on dramas like Hill Street Blues in the 1980s. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his starring role as a sympathetic gay character in Philadelphia in 1993. From 1998-2006 Will and Grace (cited by Vice President Biden) centered on a gay man’s friendship with a straight woman.

I decided to symbolize this generation with a fictional same-sex couple almost exactly the age of the oldest Millennials: Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose relationship began right around the turn of the millennium.

Earlier pop-culture characters got viewers sympathizing with the problems of gay and lesbian individuals and their same-sex relationships. But for most of two seasons Willow and Tara raised a different question: What if there is no problem? What if two people of the same gender meet and fall in love and are happy together?

Like Willow and Tara, the oldest Millennials are about 50 years younger than the Owens-Louis kids. So as a guess, let’s set the 2020s as the decade of capitulation on gay rights: Every major politician will either leave the business or have a change-of-heart by 2030. Even conservatives, even in the Bible Belt.

Remember the Dixiecrats. Does that seem unthinkable? What about Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and younger politicians who seem eager to follow their lead? But what about Strom Thurmond, who during his Dixiecrat presidential campaign of 1948 said:

that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

In 1971 Senator Thurmond integrated his staff, and in 1983 he voted to honor Martin Luther King with a federal holiday. The sincerity of his transformation may be dubious, but he had to make it.

Biden first. The leading edge of gay-rights capitulation is in the Northeast and among Democrats. So it’s no coincidence that President Obama was put on the spot by Vice President Biden. Whatever happens in 2012, Biden is looking down the road to the Democratic primaries of 2016. No way a Democrat with an ambivalent gay-rights position wins in New Hampshire (where same-sex marriage is already legal) in 2016.

Politicians can read trend lines. If you hope to win statewide office in the Northeast or in California in 2020 — or anywhere in 2030 — you can’t be against same-sex marriage. The question isn’t whether you’ll change, it’s when.

The ancient ship Homophobia has had a long run, but it is going down. While it may take years to sink completely, no politician wants to go down with it. Those with any sense are already checking the exits and plotting their departure.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (12)

Too Racist for the National Review and other short notes

April 9, 2012 – 11:45 am

It’s rare to see white racism this explicit. National Review writer John Derbyshire (writing for Taki’s Magazine, not NR; the traffic nearly brought Taki’s web site down Saturday afternoon; you may still have trouble raising that “white racism” link to the article), wrote a “non-black version” of “the Talk” parents give their kids about race. (Various black parents had previously published their version of the Talk, for example Daryl Owens.)

Among other dubious advice, Derbyshire tells his son to avoid events that are likely to attract a lot of blacks, and to leave if an unexpectedly large number of blacks show up. He should also not “play the Good Samaritan” to blacks in distress or settle in a town where black politicians are in control. And of course:

Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(I guess that’s why we all had to see Obama’s birth certificate and listen to his minister’s sermons — things I don’t recall ever doing for a white candidate.)

Derbyshire lays it on the line that “The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites.” And of course they hate you anyway, so always use the white clerk at the DMV if you have a choice.

Finally, on the rare occasions when you can find an IWSB — intelligent, well-socialized black (Derbyshire’s acronym) — make friends with them, because

In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

For some reason, that amulet didn’t save Derbyshire this time. National Review fired him. That’s what happens when you forget to use your dog whistle.

Daily Kos’ Bill in Portland puts two and two together:

The Supreme Court says corporations are people. The Supreme Court also says that people can be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, corporations can now be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Let’s start with…[Snaps rubber gloves]…oh, how ’bout Koch Industries.

Alternet’s Sara Robinson sees conservatives mobilizing for an all-out attack on state universities.

Democrats introduced an amendment to the FCC Process Reform Act of 2012 that would have allowed the FCC to block FCC-regulated companies from requiring employees to reveal their Facebook passwords. It failed, because all Republicans in the House voted against it. I haven’t found any reason beyond a general distaste for workers’ rights.

Nicholas Kristof’s Easter column “Learning to Respect Religion” is worth reading whether you are religious or not.

Executive pay: Obscenely high and still rising.

Large numbers of journalists continue to believe that it’s not their job to question whether what a candidate says is true.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Comments (2)

Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism

April 2, 2012 – 9:43 am

As the national argument about the killing of Trayvon Martin continues, the people who sympathize with Martin’s killer keep bringing up this point: Yes, it’s racist to be suspicious of young black men for no reason beyond their youth, blackness, and manhood – but given the crime statistics, isn’t that reasonable?

Before I start addressing that question, I need to tell you that I spent nearly six years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, which at the time (the Eighties) was an oasis of middle-to-upper class, integrated-but-mostly-white America, surrounded by a predominantly black ghetto. (Since then, the siege has been lifted by an army of gentrifiers marching south down Michigan Avenue from the Magnificent Mile.) Just about everybody I knew had been a crime victim at some time or other. Personally, I was never threatened with bodily harm, but I had a car stolen once, and my bike was stolen out of my girlfriend’s car.

Like just about all my classmates, I developed a special awareness of young black men (despite the fact that one of them was a fellow grad student whose office was just down the hall from mine). I spotted them at a great distance, and might cross the street if I couldn’t figure out what they were up to.

Sometimes, my wariness turned out to be so ridiculous I had to laugh at myself. Once, I remember, closer inspection showed that the “young men” were more like 12, and the mysterious objects they were carrying were musical instruments. What they had done to raise my suspicion was mill around on the sidewalk waiting for someone to unlock the door to their recital.

Clearly I had been just minutes from death.

Prejudice. During those years I came to understand that there is a difference between prejudice and bigotry. Prejudice is exactly what it sounds like: a pre-judgment, an opinion that you have before you learn any specific facts about the situation. Your prejudices may be justified or unjustified, they may save your life or create dangerous confrontations out of nothing. But you can’t help having some, because the human mind constantly creates expectations of the near future. A well-trained mind will base those expectations on facts if it has some, but if it doesn’t it will expect something anyway.

So anybody who tells you that they’re not prejudiced is blowing smoke. Everybody is prejudiced. Your prejudices may or may not be racial (though if you grew up in America they probably are), but if you’re dropped into a situation you know nothing about, you’ll react to it somehow, based on some pre-judgment.

Bigotry. Prejudice is universal, but bigotry is more sinister; it’s an attachment to your prejudices. Sometimes people fall in love with their prejudices to the point that they don’t want to know the facts. If confronted with facts that conflict with their prejudices, they will ignore them and make up new facts.

So imagine that you’re a white admissions officer at an Ivy League college. Your mail today includes two applications, one from a white student at an upscale suburban high school, the other from a black student at a ghetto school. If your snap expectation is that the white kid will have higher SAT scores than the black kid, that’s prejudice.

But what you do next determines whether or not you’re a bigot. When the test scores become available, do you look? If it turns out that the ghetto kid’s scores are higher, do you accept them or do you assume something funny must have happened? Do you scour the application looking for evidence that he’s not really that smart?

If you’re not a bigot, you look at the scores and change your opinion accordingly. And the next time you get an applicant from the same ghetto high school, your prejudice will be a little less sure of itself.

Everybody has prejudices. But reasonable people hold those prejudices lightly, re-judge a situation when facts become available, and continually re-train their prejudices to be more accurate.

Zimmerman and Martin. OK, now imagine you’re George Zimmerman doing your Neighborhood Watch thing. You spot a black teen you’ve never seen before, and it sets your alarm bells ringing. That’s prejudice, but so what? Maybe it’s got some reasonable basis.

When I listen to Zimmerman’s 911 call, though, I hear bigotry. He can’t point to a single suspicious thing Martin is doing, but he’s trying hard to interpret anything he sees so that it will confirm his prejudice. Mostly, he reports judgments rather than facts. Martin is “up to no good”, he “looks like he’s on drugs” and so on. (Actually, we know, Martin is staying with someone in the neighborhood, has been to the store and is on his way back. He’s talking to his girlfriend on the phone, which might be why he’s in no hurry.) “They” always get away with it. And so on, right up to the much-debated “fucking coons” comment.

So anyway, I’m willing to cut Zimmerman some slack for his original suspicions. Who knows, maybe I’d have been suspicious too. But what should he have done then?

How about this: No gun, no 911 call. You just walk up to Martin with a smile and say, “Hi, I’m with the Neighborhood Watch. I didn’t recognize you so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m George Zimmerman and I live over on XYZ Street. Do you live around here or are you visiting someone?” Maybe you get an answer and go on your way. Maybe Martin tells you to go fuck yourself. Maybe he runs. Maybe (for all you know before you ask) he really is the thug you’re afraid of, and he pulls a handgun out of his hoody and starts blasting.

I think that’s the chance you have to take. If you’re not brave enough to take it, you’ve got no business being out there in the first place. Stay home, lock your door, and let somebody else watch the neighborhood.

When is racism reasonable? Finally, we come to the question of whether suspicion of blacks is a reasonable prejudice in the first place. After my Trayvon Martin post last week, a reader emailed me a link to FBI crime statistics broken down by race. If that’s where your analysis ends, being suspicious of black men looks reasonable.

But chaunceydevega on Daily Kos went a little further and challenged the basis of those statistics. How much black crime do police find simply because they are looking for it?

As compared to white neighborhoods, black and brown communities are also subject to more severe surveillance and aggressive police tactics.

And how often is a white let off with a warning where a black might be charged? (It seems particularly ironic to quote crime statistics when discussing Martin and Zimmerman. So far, Zimmerman killing Martin doesn’t register as a crime. How many similar cases don’t draw national attention and so never show up in crime statistics?)

Sometimes when illegal drug use is measured in ways unrelated to the criminal justice system, whites turn out to be at least as guilty as blacks and Hispanics. Yet, they are arrested, charged, convicted, and jailed far less often. Maybe that’s true of other crimes as well.

So where does that leave us? In my Chicago days, I doubt chaunceydevega’s arguments would have convinced me. (Even though I never actually saw the people who stole my car. For all I know, Saul Bellow and Bruno Bettelheim took it for a midnight joy ride. Their alibis were never checked.) I thought I knew what I thought I knew, so young black men scared me.

As any white-knuckle flier can testify, telling scared people not to be scared usually doesn’t work very well, even if you have statistics. Or reason to challenge the prevailing statistics.

Here’s my hope: Maybe encouraging scared people to be brave works a little better. Whether you think your prejudices are justified or not, keep your eyes open and try not to give in to fear too quickly. Hold your prejudices lightly. Watch carefully for evidence that contradicts them.

Otherwise you might end up running from 12-year-old musicians. Or shooting Trayvon Martin.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (11)

Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See

March 26, 2012 – 1:38 pm

I tend to filter out crime stories, because so often they get more coverage than they deserve, like O. J. Simpson. So I’ve been slow to catch on to the significance of the Trayvon Martin story. But lately this has turned into a meta-story: reactions to the killing say even more about our country than the killing itself did.

The basic facts are simple: A white-Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer (George Zimmerman) got suspicious of a 140-pound black teen-ager (Trayvon Martin) for no apparent reason. He called 911, and the dispatcher told him not to follow the kid. Zimmerman followed anyway. Some kind of confrontation ensued and he shot Martin dead. Martin was unarmed and had nothing easily mistaken for a weapon, but the police accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim (in spite of at least one witness who denied it) and let him walk away. That all happened back on February 26, there’s still been no arrest, and the local African-American community is getting pretty upset about it.

The story points out the continuing presence of racism in America. To some segment of the population, being black raises suspicion all by itself. Probably Zimmerman is not the kind of racist who would go out hunting black teens at random. Probably he really believed that Martin was planning some kind of mischief, and that Martin must be armed, so that he had to shoot first once the confrontation started. But why did he think that? Why did he frame the situation in such a way that shoot-to-kill seemed sensible?

And why did the police find his story credible and his actions excusable? You’re an armed white adult chasing an unarmed black teen-ager you outweigh by about 100 pounds. Naturally, you would feel threatened.

That’s the kind of racism that is still endemic in every nook and cranny of America. We’re almost entirely past the “I don’t hire niggers” phase, but still in a phase of “he just doesn’t look trustworthy to me”. What would look like a well-deserved break for a white employee is goofing off when a black does it. An ordinary mental glitch becomes evidence of low intelligence, and so on.

Being black is no longer three strikes against you, but it’s still one or two.

By and large, White America doesn’t want to believe that. Last year a poll found that 51% of whites (also 60% of Republicans and 68% of people who name Fox as their most trusted news source) say that reverse discrimination against whites is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

You can see just how badly White America doesn’t want to believe in its continuing racism by how it has reacted to the Martin story. Fox News did its best to ignore the whole thing. ThinkProgress totaled up how much attention each cable news network gave the Martin story during its first three weeks:

Compare this to Fox’s obsessive coverage of a series of scary-black-people stories. For example, it devoted 95 segments totaling 8 hours of air time to the trumped-up voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

Or check out how the Glenn-Beck-founded blog The Blaze has covered Martin’s death. Searching on the word “Trayvon” got me 15 stories, five of which were about the scary ways black people are reacting to the incident — the New Black Panther Party (of course), Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and the New Black Liberation Militia. The Sharpton post ends by raising more suspicion about Martin. (He was on a 10-day suspension from school, and “Sources sympathetic to Martin say he was suspended for ‘excessive tardiness’.” But the Blaze makes sure we know all the more serious stuff that a 10-day suspension could be about.)

A sixth Blaze post quotes Beck himself, who is worried not about white vigilantes, but about black extremists “winding everybody up”:

“We have this extremist African-American militia group that says they’re just going to come in and handle it. You’re got Al Sharpton winding everybody up. You’ve got Color For Change winding everybody up.” … Beck ceded that the man who shot Trayvon could indeed be a racist, but that many of his detractors are driven by a racial agenda too, and thus are everything they claim to stand against.

Got that? You should focus not on what actually happened to an innocent black teen, but on what “extremist” black groups might do. Zimmerman could be a racist, but blacks and liberals upset by the Martin story are racists.

So the beat goes on: For the part of the media that panders to I-am-not-a-racist whites, the Martin story is just one more example of racism against whites and one more reason for white people to be afraid of black people.

Among the presidential candidates, only Newt Gingrich directly pandered to white racists by turning the incident into a reverse-racism story. President Obama had reached out to Martin’s parents, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Gingrich’s response:

Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. … When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich glossed over the whole walking-while-black angle that makes the story important: If Trayvon Martin had been white, he might not have been shot at all. George Zimmerman “turned it into a racial issue”, not President Obama.

While researching this case, I learned something interesting about the law: Self defense falls into a class known as affirmative defenses. In other words, at your trial you’re not just looking at the state and saying “Prove I did it”, you’re making assertions about facts that are supposed to exonerate you. When you do that, part of the burden of proof shifts to you.

So the state does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense. In making a self-defense plea, Zimmerman would be conceding that he killed Martin, and he would then need to convince the jury of his self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence (not beyond reasonable doubt).

Want some background music to read this piece by? Try Eminem’s “White America“:

Look at these eyes:
Baby blue, baby, just like yaself.
If they were brown, Shady lose,
Shady sits on the shelf.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (28)

Jim Crow Returns

March 19, 2012 – 12:13 pm

A fascinating new analysis technique has added weight to the claim that voter-ID laws are functioning as “Jim Crow 2.0“.

In state after state, the Republican governors elected in 2010 have been pushing voter-ID laws that follow the ALEC template. The Brennan Center for Justice has been on this issue for a long time, pointing out how these laws erect unfair barriers to voting by the young, the old, minorities, and many women (particularly those recently married or divorced, who might not have ID in their current names) — all constituencies that tend to vote Democratic.

Ostensibly, these laws are intended to prevent the voter fraud that allegedly alters elections through the high-risk/low-reward process pictured below:

Lately, judges and the Justice Department have been agreeing with the Brennan Center that disenfranchising marginal voters is not just an unfortunate side-effect, but is the true intention behind these laws.

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks had been virtually disenfranchised in many southern states. The Act dismantled the Jim Crow laws that enforced that disenfranchisement, and gave the Justice Department veto-power over any new laws in Jim Crow states that would affect the voting rights of minorities (rather than letting the laws take effect and requiring disenfranchised voters to sue). The Justice Department has used that power to invalidate voter-ID laws in South Carolina and Texas.

The Texas law is particularly egregious. ColorLines reports:

Texas has no driver’s license offices in almost a third of the state’s counties. Meanwhile, close to 15 percent of Hispanic Texans living in counties without driver’s license offices don’t have ID. A little less than a quarter of driver’s license offices have extended hours, which would make it tough for many working voters to find a place and time to acquire the IDs.

Now Texas has struck back: Its lawsuit claims the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, because southern states aren’t being treated the same as northern states. The Supreme Court is probably going to have to decide this.

When they do, I hope they take a hard look at the work of LeoT on Daily Kos. LeoT examines the historical frequency-of-use of terms like election fraud, vote fraud, and voter fraud. (Don’t you just love the Google tools that make this possible?)

All the terms have similar usage patterns except voter fraud. The term was virtually unknown until around 1960, then mysteriously in 1965 its usage began a steady increase, uncorrelated with the other election-fraud terms, until now it gets more usage that vote fraud.

LeoT interprets:

“voter fraud” … increased in usage 15,000% (150x) between 1965 and 2008, while “election fraud” increased 250% (2.5x) in the same period. Apparently, “voter fraud” didn’t matter until you weren’t allowed to disenfranchise minority voters.

Conclusion: The voter fraud issue has been manufactured to justify Jim Crow 2.0.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged , | Comments (4)