We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks, we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground …
The southern states aren’t the only ones trying to suppress votes and turn their minority into a plurality, but give them credit. They’re so damn good at it.
Take the literacy tests of past times. A white laborer could prove his literacy by reading from the first grade reader, while a black college professor could jump through all sorts of hoops and then fail because he couldn’t read ancient Aramaic..
It’s one reason that back before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there were counties in the Deep South that were majority black yet had zero black voters registered.
“Hey, we were nice enough to stop lynching you …”
The whole voter suppression thing exposes very clearly the different between the idea of America and the reality.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 that all men are created equal, it might be fair to say he meant white men. He certainly didn’t mean black men or even white women. Women didn’t have the franchise in federal elections until 144 years later, and although African-Americans technically got the vote soon after the Civil War, it wasn’t until 1965 that they actually were able to exercise it.
And ever since 1965, Republicans have been chipping away at it.
Whether you believe it or not, the GOP is fading away.
Republicans know it, too. That’s why they have introduce nearly 250 bills in different states to make it more difficult for black voters and young voters to cast their ballots.
In Georgia, where Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams in the 2018 governor’s race by 50,000 votes, he had more than 300,000 black voters removed from the rolls.
Heading into the 2022 elections, Republicans are trying to eliminate absentee voting without a reason, advance voting on Sundays and other times that make it easier for black people to vote, and the worst of all, they want to arrest people who provide water and snacks for people waiting for hours to vote.
The saddest part of it is that black people in the South understand exactly what white people are doing and why they’re doing it.
For all the talk about America being a melting pot, the reality is that it was a melting pot for different kinds of white people. Until after WWII, many Asian immigrants were not allowed to become full-fledged citizens.
Of course that was a lesser sin than chattel slavery or the genocide of American Indians.
It isn’t just olden times, either. In the late 1970s, Vietnamese refugees came to the Gulf Coast of Texas and got into the fishing industry by doing what they did best — outworking everyone else.
As you might guess, it didn’t end well.
White people don’t like losing jobs to foreigners who outwork them, especially if those foreigners are something other than white.
Our ancestors might have some of the same racist tendencies,, but my guess is if they were losing to people who worked harder, they would work harder too.
They knew something we apparently never learned.
There’s no free lunch, and keeping black people or other ethnic types from eating doesn’t do a damn thing for our hunger.