>>> sawicky at epinet.org 12/01/00 12:23PM >>>
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Beal wants RN to tail the Democrats, who get no criticism in this column, in making an issue of efforts to thwart African American voting. I guess I'm the only one who sees this as grossly opportunistic and hypocritical, in view of the fact that the Dem protest is solely premised on helping to put Al Gore over the top in FL.
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*************************************************************************** This Message Is From: Fran Beal <FBeal at aclunc.org> ***************************************************************************
Here is my column of Nov 22nd in which I say Black chickens come home to roost for dems:
Elections 2000: Racial Politics Take Center Stage By Frances M. Beal
While political pundits and public relations firms slug it out in Florida about who will be the next president of the United States, African American communities across the country are still reeling from the exposure of egregious violations of the Voting Rights Act in that southern state. We all know it happens. Blacks in the south have for years been complaining about voting irregularities, including broken voting machines, running out of ballots and absentee voting fraud among whites. What was not so clear was that the systematic disenfranchisement of as many Black voters as possible was to be a conscious campaign policy and what Gov. Jeb Bush meant when he promised delivery of Florida's 25 electoral votes to his brother, George W.
While the media concentrated on the butterfly ballot in W. Palm Beach and the fight over whether to recount the ballots, stories began to emerge about the systematic attempt to diminish the Black turnout. However, these offenses came under national scrutiny when the NAACP held hearings and heard testimony that taken as a whole, amounts to a policy of systematic black vote denial. These tactics included police roadblocks near voting precincts that stopped Black men demanding identification, issuing tickets for driving without a taxi license to get out the vote workers driving carloads of people to vote, not picking up ballots at several black precincts until the Friday or Saturday following the election, turning Blacks away from the polls claiming they were not registered voters, closing Black precincts early or running out of ballots, the denial of voting rights to students at Florida A&M University and Bethune-Cookman College. In addition, first time Haitian voters were not permitted translation assistance, a five minute voting limit was imposed and voters who made errors were illegally refused a second ballot, some Blacks were turned away because they were falsely accused of being former felons. (Disenfranchisement exists for one in three adult African American men in Florida, or 200,000 males who can not vote because of a prior felony conviction.)
And then there is the Electoral College and its racist history.
Many of us didn't realize when we punched our ballots on Election Day that we were not voting for a president, but for a mysterious elector who would in turn select the next U.S. president, who currently needs 270 electoral votes to be proclaimed president. Gore leads Bush in the popular vote by 200,000 but this number is not taken into account, only the electoral vote is determinant. How could such an undemocratic procedure be embedded in the U.S. Constitution? Once again, the U.S. history of racism is at the root of this anachronism.
After the 13 colonies defeated the British king, the Electoral College was created to appease the slave owners in the new federal arrangement. Vastly under populated because of the dependence upon slave labor, the Southern planters demanded that the slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person in determining congressional representation and in the selection of the U.S. president. After the Civil War, Black access to the voting booth was wiped out by the rise of the KKK and state sanctioned violence until the mass movement won the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
But in some minds, election 2000 will also be known as the year that black chickens came home to roost for the democrats. For eight years the conservative forces in the Democratic Party neglected their most loyal base, African Americans, in favor of a strategy of appealing to the white suburban voter by adopting the policies of the Republican Party, including a reactionary welfare reform policy, the criminalization of social issues and a trade policy that furthered the emiseration of Black workers at home. The ideological face of this strategy has been the rise of racism in the form of assaults not only on affirmative action and propagating racist juvenile justice schemes, but a tepid defense of fundamental democratic liberties like voting rights.
Gore's silence on racism and white supremacy fit all too neatly with the GOP southern strategy of tacit (and explicit) appeals to white chauvinism in Florida. The dems were thus ill-equipped to counter the Republican web of conspiracy to steal the election by the systematic denial of voting rights to the Black population.
Frances M. Beal is a columist for the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and National Secretary of the Black Radical Congress: fmbeal at igc.org