Filing this one under “No This Muthafucka/Motherfucker Didn’t.” Ari Berman’s recent offering in The Nation calls our attention to the current—and historic—climate in South Carolina around voting and people of color. Across the country but with special zeal in the South voter ID laws have sprung up to suppress voting by the populace, African Americans specifically, and they have faced court challenges. The proceedings of these challenges have revealed rather interesting tidbits. Like this email to South Carolina State Representative Alan Clemmons, sponsor of South Carolina’s voter ID bill, from a Republican supporter named Ed Koziol:
“ … if African Americans were offered a $100 award for obtaining voter ID, ‘you would see how fast they got voter ID cards with their picture. It would be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon.’ ”
Black folks and watermelons. Yes, that muthafucka/motherfucker did say that.
Fighting white supremacy is tiring. It can be so tiring that losing focus can be real easy. Super easy. This is the headline of Berman’s piece, along with the subheading:
63,756 Reasons Racism Is Still Alive in South Carolina
That’s the number of minority registered voters who could be blocked from the polls by the state’s new voter ID law.
I take issue with Berman only in that those 63,000+ folks are not the reasons racism is alive in South Carolina. White supremacy is the reason racism is alive in South Carolina. It is the reason 20 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters disagree with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that ‘freed the slaves’ in the states that were “in rebellion against the United States,” but not in those states or parishes in Louisiana that remained in the Union.
White supremacy is the reason that 70 percent of Trump’s South Carolina’s supporters wish the Confederate flag was still flying over the state house, and white supremacy is the reason 38 percent wish that the South had come out victorious in the Civil War.
Republican-controlled state legislatures are behind the efforts at voter suppression. Voter suppression is just one tool in an arsenal that seeks to dismantle any semblance of a functioning, democratic—as in everyone is allowed to freely participate and make their wishes for governance known—and socially responsive society. Republicans holler about voter fraud where there never is any. In South Carolina, initially, they thought they had found six cases, but:
[State Election Commission director Marci Andino] explained that of the initial batch of six names of allegedly dead voters on the DMV’s list, one had cast an absentee ballot before dying; another was the result of a poll worker mistakenly marking the voter as his deceased father; two were clerical errors resulting from stray marks on voter registration lists detected by a scanner; and two others resulted from poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter above or below on the list.
The agency went on to investigate more than 200 other names on the dead voter list and found zero cases of illegal activity.
Meaning, they found zero cases of voter fraud.
Let’s face it: we are in a war. Less government regulations to enable more profits over people at any cost is seeking to dominate the entire planet. That is the enemy. Its disciples will stop at nothing to get what they want, including appealing to the lowest, basest, crudest, most racist elements in this society. That is what we are up against in the war for a better, more humane and saner society. That is what we cannot lose focus on. In spite of muthafuckas/motherfuckers like Ed Koziol.