By Rev. Dr. Horace F. Whittaker, Jr.

OTHERING THE VOTE

The 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution provided voting rights only to black men, even as grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes were weaponized by the states to suppress the voting power of the new federally enfranchised. Though the 19th amendment added women the right to vote in 1920, states only allowed white women to vote in practice. Persistent civil disobedience and protests against de jure and de facto white supremacist discrimination and segregation of blacks throughout the mid 1900s across many states and the kidnapping and murder of Emmitt Till culminated in Montgomery, AL. on December 5th, 1955, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Begun by the leadership of the Women's Political Council's Jo Ann Robinson, a former Pullman porter, and local N.A.A.C.P. president E. D. Nixon, N.A.A.C.P. activist Rosa Parks, the Prophet Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who along with the powerful coalition of poor, working class and higher earning black citizens, established the Montgomery Improvement Association to boycott the segregated busing system in protest against their unequal treatment under the law because they were black. Blacks' collaborative efforts combined with the televised beating of peaceful African Americans near the infamous Edmond Pettis bridge in Selma, Al., children and youth being arrested, fire housed and attacked by police wielding dogs in Birmingham, Al., and the murders of countless persons including, N.A.A.C.P. organizers  Harry And Harriette Moore, along with Viola Liuzzo, army veteran Rev. Joseph Reeb and just eight days after its passage Johnathan Daniels, compelled congress to pass and then president L. B. Johnson to sign the 1965 Voting Rights Act which expanded voting to Black women, Native Americans, and immigrants. 

These facts are vitally important to understand better how the country has been made to recognize blacks' citizenship and its relationship to broadening democratic values here and abroad. First, it was only after black people demanded better treatment and acknowledgment of their citizenship rights through organized civil disobedience while enduring terrorist bombings and the murders of protestors and supporters, did the white supremacist economic, political, and social power structure attempt to minimally address the obstacles it had erected against the black citizenry. Power will only respond to consistent struggle, said Fredrick Douglas. In our case, that requires embodying the ways and means of our elder's persistent and collaborative struggle for human dignity. Secondly, the non-violent civil disobedience campaigns and lawsuits brought on behalf of blacks in this country directly led to laws and policies that created broader freedoms for blacks and everyone else. Since 1955, movements for greater human freedoms, to some extent, from indigenous peoples, farm workers, feminists, LGBTQ+ here and across the globe, benefitted from the courageous struggle by black citizens of Montgomery, AL.

Yet, the power structure simultaneously creates, restores, and maintains a fragile ecological context due to the contradictions of normalizing supremacist ideas and attacks on black bodies, black ethnicity, black spaces, as well as gender and class oppression while espousing American exceptionalism, democratic virtuousness and the absence of systemic racism white supremacy. This must end.  

Nevertheless, in the past as in our present day, supremacists have continued to develop rationalizations to prohibit and stop non-white voters from exercising their hard-won right to vote through ongoing voter suppression tactics due to othering, the decline of the Euro-American white population and increasing numbers of people of color. For instance, Paul Weyrich is a little-known but highly important person in developing fundamental Republican policy. Weyrich, a religious conservative, co-founded some of this nation's most influential conservative organizations, including the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority (God Forbid Documentary), and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Free Congress Foundation. He infamously stated, "I don't want everybody to vote," which was and is what Republicans were aiming for not only in the 2022 mid-terms but in all elections. So, the political system cannot be made equal because to maintain the current ecological context, which reproduces systemic white male minority control, conservative supremacists recognize they can only win elections by limiting and suppressing voter participation rather than their propagandized 'radical democratic' idea of allowing all registered citizens to vote.

Better known than Weyrich was Lee Atwater, a South Carolina former Republican National Committee chairman. Click to hear what he had to say about voting. Atwater showed that outright name-calling was no longer needed. Why? Because the branding of black on all things negative is so much a part of our culture by gaslighting, dog whistles, and voter suppression techniques like restricting early voting, communicates white supremacist ideas without saying the "n" word, thus disguising their attacks and motives as non-racial. We all saw this demonstrated to perfection by present-day white supremacist conservatives, operatives, and media outlets, promulgated by republican legislators and codified in republican controlled state legislatures in the leadup to the 2022 midterms. 

OTHERING & THE 2022 MID-TERM ELECTIONS

Case in point, Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative republican operative, began promulgating disinformation propaganda against federal diversity training. Spinning narratives fed to supremacists in their living rooms by FOX news, Rufo successfully begged the Trump Whitehouse to issue an order constricting the language federal contractors could use when discussing race in federal diversity seminars. According to Benjamin Wallace-Wells' New Yorker article, Rufo believed CRT "seemed like a promising political weapon." Why could CRT be used as a political weapon? Because it was developed by black and other non-white legal scholars to expose institutional racism, and as we've discussed, historically, white Euro American's have been indoctrinated to fear black and believe anything black is inferior. A quote from Prager says, "[T]he Black experience in America is distinguished by the fact that the qualities attributed to Blackness are in opposition to the qualities rewarded by society" (Prager, 1982, p. 11). This is to say after centuries of name-calling and othering, blacks today are still viewed as threatening to white life and treated as abnormal and inferior. Across the globe, the results of U.S. wars in Syria, and Libya, economic exploitation by corporations, and the U.S.-installed dictatorships in Central America caused millions of displaced people to migrate to Europe and the U.S. Researchers suggest that more than 65 million people are forcibly displaced by various conflicts around the world as refugees and internally displaced persons. 

The combination of refugees, poverty-stricken asylum seekers, human trafficking, and increased immigration due in apart by U.S. foreign policy and its corporate-friendly military war machine triggered a global response from many Europeans generally. At home, Euro-American whites' fear and anger of losing control of 'their' country to more brown Hispanic people entering the U.S. southern border, white fears of replacement by Jews, and supposed white victimization by the 'woke elite' engulfed the nation. Rufo sought to exploit and take advantage of white peoples' fear's to rebrand and spin CRT as a black weapon aimed at destroying white Euro Americans' identity, privileges, and property status in society rather than a tool to help all people see how racism is institutionally maintained in U.S. law and juris prudence. Politically, the demonization of CRT was used to enrage and compel the white supremacist conservative base and their bootlickers to vote against the so-called liberal 'woke' agenda that supported D.E.I. (diversity, equity, and inclusion), climate change, blacks and the movement for black lives, non-white immigrant asylum seekers (Latinx, Hispanic, Mestizos), a woman's right to choose, police reform, semi-automatic gun regulation, lgbtq+ issues, Medicare for all, student loan forgiveness, expanding voter access and balanced teaching of U.S. history in elementary and secondary schools. 

Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones, suggests that Fox News is a, if not, "the" major catalyst for increasing white rage in America noted "when—facing flagging ratings and increased competition from the even more far-right outlets Newsmax and O.A.N.—Fox suddenly decided to put it [Rufo's C.R.T. propaganda] into heavy rotation. The Washington Post reported that Rufo had tweeted in March his aim for the ongoing attack on C.R.T. "We have successfully frozen their brand—' critical race theory—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category," Rufo wrote. "The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.' Starting in March, Fox mentioned CRT 1,300 times in just three months. Six weeks after its campaign started, C.R.T. began trending on Google. By the end of June, 26 states had introduced legislation that restricted or banned teaching C.R.T. and related topics," and Rufo has been an advisor regarding the language used in drafting legislation in at least 10 of these states. Also, he was rewarded with a position at the conservative think tank, The Manhattan Institute, which was formally named The International Center for Economic Policy Studies (I.C.E.P.S.), founded by Antony Fisher and former C.I.A. director William J. Casey in 1978. 

As we have previously discussed, the false idea of black inferiority has been repeated for centuries and resulted in whites viewing and treating blackness negatively. Through lies and propaganda, Rufo and Fox disguised racist hatred of blacks by rebranding C.R.T. as an avatar for blackness into the minds and lives of fearful white Euro Americans through repeated digital propaganda for about 90 days. In both cases, name-calling, othering, and rebranding worked to reinforce white supremacist ideology and control. These results also clearly reveal that like words or a semi-automatic rifle in the hands of someone who wants to do harm, media outlets' promulgation of racist content can and do break minds and bodies. 

THE 2022 MID-TERMS: OTHERS OVERCOMING OTHERING

The 2022 mid-term elections proved a historic testament to the nation's young voters, mainly aged 18 to 29 years. Right-wing and conservative political pundits and their propaganda media outlets had predicted a 'red wave' of Trump-backed candidates' takeover of state government positions and the U.S. house and senate. Though influenced, according to some media outlets, by the SCOTUS ruling against federal support for a woman's right to choose, black youth, led by black young women, continued to overwhelmingly support democratic candidates, thus breaking the momentum towards an autocratic, dictatorial white male supremacist regime in the U.S.; for the time being. The youth of this nation deserve all the credit for stopping the supremacist right. They voted for their right to choose concerning their bodies and expanding choices relative to health, gun control, economic wage earning, and voting, issues they cared for as well. 

Despite supremacist republican operatives' attacks against the 1619 project developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Critical Race Theory, combined with voter suppression tactics and the vehement and insane QAnon conspiracy theories voiced by Jenny Thomas, wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas and elected republican supremacist during the confirmation hearings against now Supreme Court Justice Mrs. Ketanji Brown Jackson all done to stoke white supremacists fears, black young women and their allies courageously voted against these racially provoked schemes and for more inclusive and progressive candidates who voiced issues they felt mattered. By doing so, this powerful coalition halted the transformation of the current neoliberal ecological context from becoming the white supremacist autocratic regime conservative supremacists had hoped to gain electorally, who then, along with the former president and his administration republican legislators, active duty military, secret service agents, capital police officers and convicted Oath Keepers, Jan.6 insurrectionist and proud boys, were willing to attempt a coup d'é tat to force the will of the minority white supremacists on the majority of citizens in this nation. Historically, though, this was how the U.S. republic was framed, according to James Madison; to protect the minority opulent from the masses. It must be noted that this present-day environment could not have come about without, first, the aid of conservative media outlets like Fox and others that repeatedly reported the lie of a stolen election, creating a politically convenient excuse for an armed takeover by "so-called patriots" and secondly, white Christian nationalism that provides a pseudo-religious rationale for destroying government as we know it.  

The fact that both parties were willing to codify same-sex marriage before a woman's right to choose or securing voting rights is problematic, given homosexual and lesbian marriage was not the main driver for black and brown youth voter populations and democratic support though cisgender youth support their choice. What is needed to secure the right to vote is to demand the For The People Act be made law in this nation. By doing so, we can leave coming generations our last will so that they need not have to fight, bleed, and die to secure these same vital human rights that support the formation of 'the beloved community". Let's support our young people as they lead us to a better, more humane, and habitable world.

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