Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill's newsletter makes a clear call to us all. Republicans seek to drive the diverse majority which we are on the way to becoming out of public life. That's what the current redistricting push to make southern congressional delegations all white amounts to. Voters will lose their options and their power. It all starts with disenfranchising Black Americans, as it always has.
When Trump decided to name his movement “Make America Great Again,” many of us immediately understood the nature of the appeal. White supremacy in this country has always been a nostalgic ideology built on the premise of a great past when Black people knew their place, when white people were assured the guarantee of prominence in public life, and could count on being the beneficiaries of the spoils of government policies and programs.
What white supremacy promises its adherents is a life without challenge - the right to be free of competition and judgment, the right to be shielded from new ways of thinking, to be insulated from diverse cultural practices that challenge their hegemony. White supremacy offers the false narrative of superiority. You see it in every facial tick, every desperate boast and sad outburst of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose fast-talking insults and tirades are designed to distract from his incompetence. His purge of Black and women leaders in the military is a textbook white supremacy move. The field of competition must be artificially restricted to keep competition narrow and culturally constrained, so that whiteness itself can become proof of competence.
The myth of white supremacy can only flourish when Black achievement is out of sight and out of mind. ...
But the deal offered by white supremacy has always been at the cost of democracy in this country.
... No democracy can survive if tens of millions of its citizens refuse to fight to protect it because they “don’t do politics.”
If you think that the Republican plan to strip Black voters in the South of congressional representation is not your problem because you are white, or because you don’t live in the South, then you have accepted the end of democracy in this country. Are you really prepared to watch as your fellow citizens are disenfranchised in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama?
... Whatever (non-violent) actions you can undertake, now is the time to engage. This is not happening to someone else, to some other community, to some other Americans. This is happening ot all of us. They have made their goals clear. Now it’s time for us to be as clear and unequivocal about ours while we still can.
Read the whole thing. And vote. And let's harass our electeds to make whatever structural reforms to the system that are required to make democracy work for all of us ...
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