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      Why California is taking on caste-based discrimination

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      Last month state senator Aisha Wahab introduced SB 403, a historic bill that, if enacted, would make California the first state to ban caste-based discrimination in the US.Practiced for centuries in the Indian subcontinent, caste is an exclusionary system within the Hindu religion that divides people and determines their access to resources. Unlike class, caste is an ascribed status; there’s no mobility to move upwards. Generally, Brahmin communities are in the highest social order, whereas the Dalit community is at the bottom.Because of the fast-growing South Asian diaspora, caste has also manifested as a burning issue in the US. A 2018 survey conducted by Equity Labs – a leading US-based Dalit organization – found that two out of three workers reported facing caste prejudices at their workplace in the US. Several instances of discrimination against Dalit students and employees in elite universities and tech companies like Google with large South Asian populations have exposed the problem.In February, Seattle became the first city in the US and the first jurisdiction outside South Asia to ban caste-based discrimination. And in 2020, Brandeis University became the first university in the US to ban caste-based discrimination, followed by Harvard University, California State University, the University of California, Davis, and Brown University.Wahab, who represents the 10th district of California, which is home to a diverse Asian population, said including caste in the protected category and expanding the understanding of discrimination is essential given how diverse the country is becoming.“It’s not accurate to say that caste-based prejudices don’t exist in the United States,” Wahab said. “Caste is a taboo topic. Although I am not ethnically of the same community, still people have come and told me that ‘What you are doing, nobody in our community has the courage to do so.’”The first Afghan American and Muslim elected to the California state senate, Wahab has received support as well as hostility from community members after introducing the bill. Some people even organized protests against this bill.The Guardian interviewed Wahab about when she became aware of caste biases and what inspired her to write this legislation.The interview has been edited for clarity and length.When did you become aware of the caste biases that exist in South Asian communities?I learned about the caste system through public education. Community members in my district have told me how their parents married different people of different castes and their families weren’t accepting. Thus, they moved to the United States but were still discriminated against in the community surroundings.The truth is caste-based discrimination happens far more than people think and realize, especially considering that the caste system is more than 3,000 years old and is very much ingrained in so many people. I am hearing more about the biases as more people are talking about them. Some people have told me that they would have separate bathrooms at restaurants for people working versus the people owning the restaurants. Because of the caste system people are treated very differently and they are restricted by their families on whom they can marry. These are all the issues that are not talked about in the mainstream media and public.What inspired you to write and introduce this bill to ban caste-based discrimination?My district is largely diverse and hugely populated in the state of California. And a lot of issues regarding caste stemmed in my district. For example the Cisco situation, California State [University] East Bay situation and several other issues. Since more and more people would talk to me about it and explain some of the problems they were having, I just wanted to address this issue through this bill to protect people.Why do you think caste is an American issue now?America is getting more diverse. We are seeing more and more types of discrimination based on things that the United States has historically not had the depth to deal with. To say caste is not an American issue is incorrect. The more diverse the country becomes, the more we are going to see a surge of these kinds of prejudices. And we have already started seeing that. Just take the example of the Google case and several other cases happening in the Bay Area as well as across the country. Why did Seattle feel the need to ban caste-based discrimination? Why is Toronto also doing the same? Why is there such a big movement to tackle this issue? Because it’s happening. So we as policymakers want to be proactive and make sure that all people are protected regardless of where they come from or their background or anything like that.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYou represent a district from Silicon Valley that is home to a growing South Asian population in the US. How long has caste been talked about as a political issue in this community?There are communities that have no idea what a caste system is. And there are other communities that are bringing this up as to why they are rejected from different opportunities whether it’s housing or jobs. I think caste is in discussion but it is a little taboo to talk about. In the United States most people try to pretend that there’s no caste prejudice here and everyone is living their best lives. But the truth is that people can only live their best lives when they are protected under United States law.What kind of support have you received from the South Asian communities regarding this bill?Every day I receive hundreds of calls and emails about this bill. People from different ethnic communities and different religious backgrounds have reached out to me and extended their support. I want to highlight that I personally feel great that people are finding the courage to speak out against what they have always believed was wrong but were too afraid to talk about. If this bill gives even a handful of people some freedom to live their own life, I will be really happy.You have also received violent threats from groups who are against this bill. What do you have to say about this?We have been hearing the arguments against the bill and some people are conflating religion with the caste movement, which is wrong. This bill is trying to primarily protect people against discrimination. Anybody who is opposed to this bill has some other motive because this bill is to help people. It’s not to cause harm and it will not.Also, it is interesting to me that the groups that tend to speak against this bill, the counterparts of the same religion, same ethnicity, same caste level, actually do support this bill. There are people on both sides of this argument.You have claimed that this bill is a civil rights bill, a workers’ bill, a women’s rights bill and a human rights bill. Can you further elaborate on this?This bill literally allows the people to live their life without the judgment of what caste, family or ancestry they belong to. It will add to the already protected categories of religion, ethnicity and gender. This bill is primarily to expand our law, and to protect our more and more diverse community members. More

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      Popularity is optional as Republicans find ways to impose minority rule

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      “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.” These were the words of Justin Jones, a Black Democrat, to Tennessee Republicans after he and a colleague, Justin Pearson, were expelled for leading a gun protest on the state house of representatives floor.A week later, Jones and Pearson were reinstated amid applause, whoops and cheers at the state capitol in Nashville. But few believe that the assault on democracy is at an end. What happened in Tennessee is seen as indicative of a Donald Trump-led Republican party ready to push its extremist agenda by any means necessary.Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Republicans are increasingly out of touch with mainstream sentiment on hot button issues such as abortion rights and gun safety. Accordingly, the party has suffered disappointment in elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Yet instead of rethinking its positions, critics say, it is turning to rightwing judges and state legislators to enforce minority rule.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The ballot box didn’t work – the voice of the people said, we’re not going to tolerate these kind of threats by Republicans. But Republicans are using other tools and shredding the fabric of American democracy. It’s a kind of minority authoritarianism.”Despite extraordinary pressures, democracy has proved resilient in recent years. It survived an insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Joe Biden was sworn in as the duly elected president and declared in his inaugural address: “Democracy has prevailed.” And election deniers were routed in last year’s midterms.But while Democrats control the White House and Senate, Republicans have proved expert at finding workarounds, using cogs in the machine that have typically received less attention from activists, journalists and voters. One of them is the judiciary.The supreme court, which includes three justices appointed during Trump’s single term, last year overturned the Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined the right to abortion for nearly half a century, despite opinion polls showing a majority wanted to protect it.Lower courts have also flexed their muscles. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge nominated by Trump in Amarillo, Texas, has ruled against the Joe Biden administration on issues including immigration and LGBTQ+ protections. Earlier this month he blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, the most common abortion method in America.A legal battle ensued with the justice department pledging to take its appeal all the way to the supreme court. The political backlash was also swift.Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said: “One extremist judge appointed by a twice impeached, now-indicted former president, Donald Trump, was attempting to effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. The decision is a prime example of minority rule at its worst. These extremists will not stop until they control our reproductive health decisions.”Polling by Ipsos shows that two-thirds of Americans believe medication abortion should remain legal, including 84% of Democrats, 67% of independents and 49% of Republicans. Timmaraju added: “It’s obvious that anti-choice extremists and lawmakers are out of step with Americans. It’s really worth remembering how far out of step they are.”If judges fall short of the Republican wishlist, state governors have shown willingness to intervene. In Texas, Greg Abbott has said he will pardon an Uber driver convicted of murder in the July 2020 shooting of a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, the state capital.The case hinged on whether the shooting was in self-defence. A jury found that Perry, who is white, shot and killed Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man, who was carrying an AK-47, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. Abbott tweeted that he will pardon Daniel Perry, 37, an army sergeant, as soon as a request from the parole board “hits my desk”.Earlier this year Abbott also led a state takeover of Houston’s public school district, the eighth biggest in the country with nearly 200,000 students, infuriating Democrats who condemned the move as politically motivated.In Florida another Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has centralised power as he assails gun safety and voting rights, the teaching of gender and race in schools and major corporations such as Disney. On Thursday he signed a bill to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.In this he is backed by a supermajority in the Florida state legislature. State governments, which receive less and less scrutiny as local newspapers go extinct, are another key weapon in the Republican arsenal. In deep red states they have imposed near or total bans on abortion, loosened gun restrictions, curbed LGBTQ+ and voting rights and endorsed Trump’s false claims of election fraud.RaceMinority rule is, more than anything, about race. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the population when Barack Obama was first running for president in 2008, they now make up only 44%.Activists point to Republican-dominated state governments pushing legislation that would allow them to control Black-led cities and push hardline policies on crime. Examples include expanding the jurisdiction of state police in Jackson, Mississippi, and removing local control of the St Louis police department in Missouri. Republicans in the US Congress itself overturned police reform in Washington DC.Makia Green, a lead strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said: “A lot of it is not only taking away the people we sent to speak for us – to make sure that our voices are heard and that we are part of the process – but also to overwhelm Black voters, to instil apathy in Black voters so that it feels like, ‘I went out, I voted, I did what I had to do, and they took the power away from me, so why should I show up next year?’”Green, co-founder of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black community organisation in the Washington area, added: “Our democracy has holes in it, especially with the record number of attacks on voting rights and civic education. Republican and rightwing extremists have been making it harder and harder for our people to vote and so people are questioning, do I still live in a democracy?”Then there was Tennessee where, on 6 April, Republicans sparked national outrage by kicking out Jones and Pearson, two young Black Democrats, as punishment for breaking rules of decorum a week earlier by leading a protest inside the house chamber. The demonstration was prompted by a March school shooting in Nashville in which three children, three adults and the attacker were killed.Just as on abortion, Republicans are demonstrably at odds with public opinion on gun safety. A poll last year by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “It’s never the situation that the GOP moderates their position on something. It’s always a reflexive pivot to attacking and undermining democracy and that’s exactly what they did in this situation.”But Hatcher-Mays added: “If there’s any silver lining to the way that the GOP behaves it’s that they can’t hide forever from the bad and unpopular things that they do.”Republicans have long been struggling against demographic headwinds and political trends. They have lost the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. They suffered another reminder of abortion’s potency when a Democratic-backed Milwaukee judge won a recent Wisconsin supreme court race with the fate of the state’s abortion ban on the line.Republicans remain competitive in the US Senate – the body that approves nominated judges – because small, predominantly white states get two seats each, carrying as much weight as vast, racially diverse ones. In 2018 David Leonhardt of the New York Times calculated that the Senate gives the average Black American only 75% as much representation as the average white American, and the average Hispanic American only 55% as much.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, noted that the government was founded with checks and balances to ensure that minority viewpoints could be heard. “But it was not the intent of the framers and founders to have those minority views imposed on the majority and certainly not to have those in the minority attack the rule of law to try to unravel majority rule, which is what’s happening right now. It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than expelling members from a legislative body for expressing themselves in a constitutionally protected way.“Republicans are inflicting injury and harm on democracy. It’s a continuation of what they started to do with the big lie [that the 2020 election was stolen] … which paved the way for an insurrectionist attempt. We’re seeing other extreme iterations of that play out in individual states. When you have a minority of people exercising power over the majority, that’s authoritarianism.”Additional reporting by Lauren Gambino More

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      A Fever in the Heartland review: chilling tale of the Klan and a dangerous leader

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      Hubris can be difficult to resist, no matter how well one appreciates the danger. Foremost, in his new book A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them”, Timothy Egan indicates just how self-destructive hubris can be.It led to the downfall of David C Stephenson, a sadistic, grifting, backstabbing, vengeful, womanizing grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the center of Egan’s story of extremism and white rage, a tale with many parallels to our own time. Similar overconfidence might yet bring down Donald J Trump. For sure, reading Egan’s gripping book, my own hubris nearly waylaid me.At first, it seemed no writer could possibly offer anything different from what had already been compellingly presented on TV. In 1989, I was among rapt multitudes introduced by the miniseries Cross of Fire to this lurid tale from the second rise of the Klan.The KKK was born at the close of the civil war, in resentment of burgeoning African American independence. By the 1890s it was fading, with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, but the first world war “birthed” a more virulent second coming. Determined to keep Black people in their place, klansmen were also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Native American, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-abortion and anti-communist.Cross of Fire, made 70 years later, concerned a rape and murder. Madge Oberholtzer was a 28-year-old educator, unmarried and living with her parents. Stephenson, her assailant, led the Indiana branch of the Klan. Armed with a private force, 30,000-strong, wielding graft and bribes, he reigned supreme, the governor and many other officials firmly under his thumb. When he was brought to trial, he was in no doubt he would get off.Cross of Fire was shown in two segments, two hours each, and reached about 20 million viewers. Back then, I think, a certain optimism was still alive in America. With most social struggles behind us, it was broadly imagined, we were well on the way to rectifying our worst problems. In that context, a televised account of the Klan’s insidious rise across 1920s America seemed almost hard to believe.But the truth is chilling. At one point, the Klan reached millions of white Americans. Feeling threatened by newly enfranchised women, growing numbers of immigrants and African Americans made restive by commendable war service, many such white men felt certain they had been robbed of the position their fathers and grandfathers knew. Stevenson was a crusading would-be strong man. If not plain-spoken, he was at least an ignorant man’s idea of a wise one. Seemingly amiable, seemingly much like those who followed him, to some he felt like an answered prayer.If this is starting to sound familiar, back in 1989 it seemed outrageously implausible. Weren’t the 1920s the Roaring Twenties, the rebellious, modernizing Jazz Age? Was it not an era of prosperity and wellbeing? The problem is a matter of nuance. Setbacks or backlash attendant to progress are seldom acknowledged with the same emphasis as advancement. That’s why it is imperative to teach all American history, good or bad.The idea of making America great again is an old one, rooted in a nativist embrace of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant supremacy. A hundred years ago, many were throughly taken in by nationalist rhetoric and circus-like spectacle.Stephenson had no education beyond high school. He was an ardent fan of Mussolini. He claimed he had studied psychology and knew how to play on people’s emotions. Klan rallies whipped up followers, as frenzied as any at Nuremberg, into ecstatic orgies of cheering. Some called beseechingly for Stephenson to become president. In the flickering light of flaming crosses, large banners insisted: “America is for Americans.” It all planted a seed in a man convinced that everything – and anyone – could be bought.In his book, Egan explains how, much as with African Americans and the Black church, to many whites, Klan membership “gave meaning, shape and purpose to the days”.From neo-Confederates to hardline Brexiters, how perplexing is the malfeasance, the villainy, the rank hypocrisy of those who preach law and order and freedom and justice the loudest? It all brings to mind Churchill’s observation about Stalin and Russia after the pact with Hitler in 1939: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”Undaunted, Egan examines and sorts out the complexities and contradictions of the rise of Stephenson and the Klan. In doing so, unlike a writer for TV, he has no need for dramatic license.In Cross of Fire, Oberholtzer marries Stephenson – or so she thinks. It turns out the officiant is a henchman. This detail is important. It sets into motion a supposed honeymoon, a joyride on a private railway car to Chicago, a wedding trip that facilitates Stephenson’s crime.Dealing in fact, Egan reveals that not even a pretend wedding took place. Oberholtzer believed Stephenson could keep her state job from being cut but she never trusted him to the extent of getting married. She was drugged and taken by force.On her deathbed, she summoned the will to give an account of her ordeal. A transcript was presented in court. So was a doctor’s testimony. As much as the poison Oberholtzer ingested, the doctor said, sepsis, from deep bites on her face, breasts, tongue and elsewhere, resulted in Oberholtzer’s death. With timely attention, her life might have been saved.Another fact absent from Cross of Fire but featured in Egan’s account is yet more disturbing. Stephenson was found guilty of Oberholtzer’s murder and sentenced to life, but he was never chastened. He broke parole and was re-imprisoned but he ultimately died a natural death, in 1966, aged 74. He tricked, cheated, married and sexually assaulted many times more. It is this learning of the limits of the wages of sin that distinguishes A Fever in the Heartland as an honest look at what really happened.
      A Fever in the Heartland is published in the US by Viking More

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      The Guardian view on US book bans: time to fight back | Editorial

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      “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door,” warns a character in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of an America where books are considered so dangerous they must be incinerated. The novel appeared 70 years ago, in the aftermath of Nazi book burnings and amid McCarthyism and Soviet ideological repression. But the urge to ban books has resurged with a vengeance, with the American Library Association (ALA) recording a doubling of censorship attempts in 2022, to 1,269 across 32 states: the highest rate for decades. Pen America, which champions freedom of expression, tallied more than 2,500 cases in the last school year.These attempts are not merely more numerous but are also broadening and deepening. The decisions of school boards and districts take place in the context of politicians grasping electoral advantage and punitive yet often vaguely worded state laws on education – such as the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis’s, Stop-Woke Act. At least 10 states have passed legislation increasing parental power over library stock, or limiting students’ access. In place of spontaneous challenges to single titles come challenges to multiple titles, organised by campaign groups such as Moms for Liberty. The ALA says that 40% of attempts last year targeted 100 books or more.Not only schools but now community libraries too are under scrutiny. The efforts are also increasingly punitive. Missouri Republicans this week voted to defund all of the state’s public libraries after librarians challenged a bill that has removed more than 300 books and that threatens educators “providing sexually explicit material” with imprisonment or a fine of up to $2,000. A library in Michigan was defunded last year; another in Texas is under threat this week.These challenges are overwhelmingly from the right. And while liberal parents have sought to remove titles such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from mandatory reading lists over their approach to race, this time the demand from parents is not merely that their child should not have to read particular titles – but that no one’s child should be able to unless they buy it privately.Pen America notes: “It is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history.” They include works by celebrated children’s writers such as Judy Blume, literary greats including Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood – and even the comic picture book I Need a New Butt. Librarians are attacked as “paedophiles” over sex education titles or those depicting same-sex relationships. In part, this is a backlash against efforts to diversify reading matter in schools and libraries. The pandemic also gave parents greater insight into what their children are studying and fostered a “parental rights” movement rooted in opposition to mask mandates.The primary cost is to children denied appropriately selected books that could be life-affirming and life-changing – even, perhaps, life-saving. The chilling effect of challenges makes librarians and teachers second-guess their choices and cut book purchases. In two Florida counties, officials this year ordered teachers to cover up or remove classroom libraries entirely, pending a review of the texts – reportedly leaving weeping children begging: “Please don’t take my books.” But parents, librarians and communities are waking up to the threat, and are organising and educating to counter it. Books are the building blocks of civilisation. They must be defended.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Incite, smear, divide: why are the Tories and Labour copying the tactics of America’s vilest strategist? | Nels Abbey

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      Will 2024 be a repeat of 1992 or 1997, is the (binary) question people ask: a repeat of Neil Kinnock’s shock defeat to the Tories in 1992 or Tony Blair’s triumphant landslide victory in 1997.But while we are talking about the what will happen next time, we had better discuss the how. The means matter. The means help shape society. They impact how cohesive we are, how we treat each other. The means last longer than victory or defeat. And by many current indications, the means suggest we are looking at neither 1997 nor 1992, but at a mirror image of the 1988 US presidential election.The name might not mean much, but the brutal political genius of Lee Atwater looms large over today’s British politics – to such an extent that even he would not believe it. Atwater was a highly influential strategist who helped shape modern presidential campaigning for the Republicans. Perhaps the foremost part of his legacy was the ruthless, nihilistic mainstreaming of dog-whistle racism into political campaigning. He explained how that worked.“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.” Atwater’s crowning achievement, having advised President Ronald Reagan, was masterminding Vice-President George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential election victory against the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis. And to do so, he leveraged the most reliable of western tropes: the Black bogeyman. Atwater conceived and created the now notorious Willie Horton ad. The advert offered a simple juxtaposition: George Bush, a tough-on-crime Republican who believed in the death penalty for murderers, or Michael Dukakis, a wet liberal who allowed murderers to have weekend passes to get out of jail.And then came the money shot: a menacingly scary black-and-white mugshot of William Horton (his name was altered by Atwater from William Horton to Willie Horton; the intended effect is self-explanatory), a Black man who had been convicted of murder and rape in Dukakis’s Massachusetts, yet was granted a temporary release from prison pass (otherwise known as a furlough). While out on furlough he carried out even more horrific crimes. The advert did what it intended: to make Horton and Dukakis look like an inseparable couple, the Democrats and the black felon as running mates: a racist signal to rally the vote.Intentional or otherwise, I see a clear link between the Willie Horton advert and Labour’s “soft on paedophiles” attack advert on Rishi Sunak. Sadly, given the chance to pull back from his Willie Horton moment, the Labour leader stood “by every word”.But then, looking across the divide, Atwater would see much to admire in Tory politics as well. Last week the home secretary, Suella Braverman, pointed at Pakistani Muslim men with the message that she would not let “political correctness” get in the way of apprehending grooming gangs – despite the fact that her own department had found it was overwhelmingly and disproportionately white men who constituted grooming rings. But why stop there? Atwater wouldn’t. There goes Braverman apparently upholding a landlord’s decision to display golliwogs in his pub.There she goes, telling some of the world’s most desperate people that, should they dare to show up here, they’ll end up on prison barges. Just the place for the political scapegoat. Atwater would have loved those barges.In his pomp, he would have loved the intolerance, the viciousness, the very British race struggle in our politics right now: the tussle of one side to out-racist the other, to make complexity and decency look weak, often leveraging polite and innocent sounding substitutes and subtleties for race along the way – think: wokeness, political correctness, virtue signalling. Call it Atwater signalling perhaps, make a dead man happy. But ultimately we must decide if we are happy with politics conducted like this.Because the next election will have a victor and a vanquished, and the victor will feel the means justified the ends. But if both parties continue down this dark and dirty path, what will the following election be like, and the next? And what kind of country will emerge from them?Look at what devil-take-the-hindmost politics has done to America. We know it can work – that’s the tragedy. And we know where it ends.
      Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of the satirical book Think Like A White Man

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      How Ron DeSantis waged a targeted assault on Black voters: ‘I fear for what’s to come’

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      Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.He was born in Midway, a small town that’s part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.There was jubilation when he was elected.“Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration,” Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. “People saying: ‘Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy – I really wish they could see this.’”In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.Lawson’s loss was nearly entirely attributable to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor went out of his way to redraw the boundaries of Lawson’s district to ensure that a Republican could win it. It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive – and successful – efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.“Governor DeSantis has really targeted Black folks in his efforts to strip, restrict and suppress our vote in the state of Florida. That has been his number one mission,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, the founder of Equal Ground, a nonprofit that works to register voters.As DeSantis prepares to launch a run for president, his war on voting rights is a dangerous omen for what he could do in the White House. Several states have already passed similar voting restrictions and implemented their own units dedicated to prosecuting election fraud, which is extremely rare. DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.“At the end of the day, this is all about his blind political ambition,” said Angie Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker who led a sit-in on the floor of the state legislature in protest of DeSantis’s attack on voting rights. “I fear for what’s to come.”A new Republican voting mapLawson’s election was a big deal in Gadsden county, the only majority-Black county in Florida. Near the stately old courthouse in Quincy, the county seat, Brenda Holt, a county commissioner, can quickly point out the tree that was used to lynch Black people.“We needed a Black congressman. We needed one simply because he would come to all these little places and help us with things. He understood about raising hogs and he understood about being out there in the tobacco fields,” said Holt, who has also served as the chair of the county Democratic party. “When he walked in the room, you didn’t have to say nothing. We didn’t have to explain ourselves so much to him. Because he lived it.”Lawson’s election was no accident. In 2015, the Florida supreme court ordered the state to draw a district that stretched across northern Florida, from Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Such a district was legally required, the court said, to preserve the ability of Black voters in that part of the state to elect the candidate of their choosing.When it came time to redraw Florida’s congressional districts last year, the Republican-controlled legislature offered up a plan that kept Lawson’s district intact for at least another decade.Then DeSantis stepped in.On Martin Luther King weekend last year, the governor submitted his own proposal for Florida’s 28 congressional districts. His plan chopped Lawson’s district into four different ones, all of which favored Republicans. DeSantis took issue specifically with the idea that the state was required to draw an irregularly shaped district to benefit Black voters. Such an approach, he said, was unconstitutional.The legislature did not back down. It passed a map that kept Lawson’s district in place. But it also passed a backup map which broke up the majority of Lawson’s district, but kept Jacksonville contained in one congressional district. It was a compromise.DeSantis rejected that plan too, saying it was dead on arrival.Eventually, the legislature caved and invited DeSantis to draw a congressional map.“I served in the legislature for 17 years and never in the history of the legislative body have we turned over the redistricting to the governor. Never heard of that – never,” said Tony Hill, a former Lawson staffer who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year.Lawson was blindsided. Some top Republicans in the state, he said, including Senator Rick Scott and Ted Yoho, privately told him they were surprised by what DeSantis was doing.DeSantis, who had already been working with top Republican mapmakers, proposed a plan that sliced up Lawson’s district and heavily favored Republicans in 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats, a bump up from the 16 GOP seats that the legislature proposed. DeSantis’s map also cut the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two.The legislature passed his map. Last November, white Republicans won all four seats in northern Florida.“This is a lynching,” Holt said. “You’re treating us like a dog. They treat dogs better than us. We’re pissed off.”It’s now harder for Jacksonville residents to access federal resources to address issues like housing affordability, food deserts and crime. Several residents said they have not yet seen any town halls or events from Aaron Bean, the new GOP congressman who represents the area. A Bean spokesperson did not say whether he had held any events in Jacksonville. “Congressman Bean has been enthusiastic about seeing all corners of this newly drawn congressional district. From town halls to chamber of commerce events, from groups of thousands to groups of one, he has made it his mission to engage with as many residents of north-east Florida as possible,” she said.Ben Frazier, an activist who leads a nonprofit called the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, emphasized the need for federal assistance as he drove around the city’s 33209 zip code – one of the most dangerous in the city – pointing out boarded-up businesses and houses.“It is unfortunate that [DeSantis] has chosen to operate like that because he’s not only a danger to Black people and people of color,” he said. “He’s a danger to democracy.”“It’s people of color that all of this redistricting is concerned about,” said Lee Harris, the senior pastor at Mt Olive Primitive Baptist church in Jacksonville. “If you notice, as long as they think they have control and the majority, they will push whatever law is beneficial to them.”DeSantis’s attack on Black representation appears to have aims far outside Lawson’s district.The governor has waged a legal battle over a 2010 constitutional amendment, overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters, making it illegal to draw districts that reduce political access for racial minorities. Getting rid of Lawson’s district would seem to violate that provision.“It was a performing, crossover district where Black voters had long successfully elected their candidate of choice. And in dismantling it, it raises all kinds of indicia of discriminatory intent,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.If DeSantis succeeds in dismantling districts like Lawson’s, it could ultimately provide legal cover for other states to do the same, Li said. In the federal courts, DeSantis’s approach joins a long line of conservative cases that have been pushing to raise the bar for when race can be considered in redistricting.“It’s basically trying to divorce any consideration of race or racial impacts in a redistricting map from the actual drawing and construction of a redistricting map,” said Chris Shenton, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is challenging the Florida maps.“That’s a distinction that only makes sense on paper and only makes sense if what you’re trying to do is prevent the Voting Rights Act from working.”‘Fear’ and confusionBeyond redistricting, one of the key elements of DeSantis’s crackdown on voting has been his use of a law enforcement unit to pursue charges of voter fraud.One morning last August, Ronald Lee Miller, a Miami man in his late 50s, heard a knock on his door and answered, still in his underwear. When he opened the door, he saw that police had surrounded his home, some with their guns drawn and pointed at him. They put him in handcuffs and told him he was under arrest.A few hours later, DeSantis appeared at a press conference in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers, and announced Miller was among 19 people with prior criminal convictions being arrested for voter fraud and would “pay the price”. They were charged with multiple counts of third-degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The arrests were the first made under the office of election crimes and security, a new $1.2m office DeSantis had created a few months earlier.Many saw it as a thinly veiled effort to keep Black people from voting (14 of those arrested were Black). And records showed that many of those charged believed they were eligible to vote. Even though they all had prior convictions that resulted in a lifetime voting ban in Florida, none of them had been warned they couldn’t vote. All of them, including Miller, had received voter registration cards before casting a ballot.Ahead of the arrests, DeSantis and Florida Republicans had also made the rules for voting with a felony conviction in Florida extremely confusing.In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved one of the largest expansions of the right to vote in the modern era. They approved a constitutional amendment that allowed people with most felony convictions to vote. Those convicted of murder and sex-related offenses – as the 19 people in the arrests had been – were excluded.DeSantis and the GOP legislature followed up by passing a law that required people with felony convictions to pay off outstanding fines and fees before casting a ballot. But Florida has no central mechanism for people to check how much they owe and state officials quickly became backlogged.“They want to put fear, the same type of spirit, fear into people so that you won’t vote,” said Rosemary McCoy, a Jacksonville activist who had her voting rights restored in 2019.Miller and his lawyer, Robert Farrar, eventually got his case dismissed on procedural grounds, successfully arguing that the statewide prosecutor didn’t have the authority to bring the case.But DeSantis did not let it go. In February, the legislature passed a law that expanded the power of the statewide prosecutor, bolstering their authority to go after cases like Miller’s. DeSantis has also requested increasing the office of election crimes and security’s budget to $3.15m and nearly doubling the number of personnel.Now the governor and the legislature could cause more confusion. An election bill unveiled last week would make it so that all voters receive a warning that they may not be eligible to vote when they receive their official voter registration card.“This has all become nothing more than political theater. It’s a waste of time, waste of money, waste of judicial assets,” Farrar said.The office of election crimes and security also targets groups that register voters.In Florida, Black and Hispanic voters are five times more likely than white voters in Florida to register through a third-party group. But in its first year, the office of election crimes and security levied $41,600 in fines against these voter registration groups. Those fines came after DeSantis and the legislature passed sweeping new voting restrictions and raised the maximum fine that could be levied from $1,000 to $50,000.Burney-Clark said her nonprofit Equal Ground registered 10,000 voters in the lead-up to the 2020 election. But since then, it has scaled back and only registered a handful of voters – the group can’t afford the risk of high fines.‘We’re going to silence you’Cecile Scoon, president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, sees a clear through-line in all of DeSantis’s efforts to attack voting rights.“It’s all connected to ‘we don’t care what you vote,’” she said. “‘We don’t care what you say. We know better and we’re going to silence you.’“We are not in the land of the free any more in the state of Florida.” More

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      in US Politics

      Removing Black lawmakers is voter suppression – and the US has done it for centuries

      by

      When Tennessee lawmakers expelled two Black legislators from the state’s Republican-dominated house of representatives, pundits described the decision as “stunning” and “historic”. Joe Biden called it “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent”. The New York Times characterized it as “an extraordinary act of political retribution”.Sorry, have you met America?This tragic comedy always has the same theme: Black voter suppression vs white power. In the comparatively short arc of this country’s political history, this display of unapologetic whiteness is as unusual as water being wet and fire being hot. It is the most preposterous narrative to say the partisanship that defines this political climate is new or even remarkable.In 1869, the Georgia supreme court ousted Chatham county’s Black superior court clerk Richard W White from office. The three-judge panel noted that White “received a majority of the votes” and was “eligible, and qualified by law for said office”. Nevertheless, White was removed. Theconstitution didn’t matter. Votes didn’t matter. All that mattered was whiteness. So, instead of naming their decision White v Clements, the Georgia supreme court rejected the usual naming conventions and opted instead for the more candid title Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia?On 10 January 1966, Georgia’s house of representatives refused to seat the civil rights activist-turned-legislator Julian Bond after he signed a statement opposing US involvement in the Vietnam war. Bonds’ majority district went without representation until the US supreme courtunanimouslydecided that the first amendment protected Bond’s right to speak out on public issues.The fact that Justin Jones has been reinstated by a vote of Nashville’s council and Justin Pearson probably will be by a similar vote doesn’t mean the opposition party will stop using tricks from which democracy, common decency and even the rule of law offer no shelter.The decision to subvert the will of the voters and evict state representatives is not unprecedented – it is a great American tradition. And when placed in the context of white history, the theme that emerges has more to do with America’s racial binary than it does two-party politics.All politics is about power and there can be no real conversation about American politics that ignores the single, most common characteristic of the people who wield it. The weaponization of white power is a poltergeist that has haunted every significant political decision ever made, from the drafting of the constitution to the picking of presidents. It defined American citizenship, catapulted a toddler country into an economic superpower and created the bloodiest war in the history of this continent. In fact, racism might be the most bipartisan part of politics.Republicans whose historical knowledge is limited to eighth-grade social studies books love to tout that they’re the party of abolition and Reconstruction. They therefore blame the totality of the post-civil war racial terrorism on “the Democrats”.Even though it would be more accurate to attribute this political and social violence to southern conservatives still wistful about the lost cause of the Confederacy, these history buffs conveniently forget how the success of Black Republican candidates outraged the party’s white members, sparking the “Lily White Republican movement” that lasted for half a century, until the 1930s. This anti-Black GOP movement began in Texas, but soon Republican committees in North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and nearly every southern state banned Black candidates from running for office. Lily White Republicans were willing to sacrifice their party’s political power to preserve the racial hierarchy.While Julian Bond, Black Republicans and the Tennessee Three may have lost their elected positions, there is a far longer list of Black officials who were murdered in order to remove their authority.Returning to 1868, Georgia’s Black voters had already registered to vote in droves. Buoyed by a turnout rate (74.8%) twice that of their white counterparts (38.4%), the newly freed electorate sent 30 Black state representatives and three African American state senators to the Georgia legislature in that year’s election.By 1869, every one of the duly elected Black lawmakers known as the “Original 33” had already been ousted from the state assembly and a quarter of them had already been killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. Hundreds of African Americans had been massacred by terrorist groups. By the time the state’s highest judicial body determined, in the Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia? case, that state law “does not confer upon the colored citizens of this State the right to hold office”, white conservatives had already gained control of state politics and reasserted the government-sanctioned system of white supremacy.This story repeats and repeats.In 1898, a lynch mob unseated Lake City, South Carolina’s new postmaster, Frazier B Baker, by shooting Baker and his two-year-old daughter Julia dead. White vigilantes shot the South Carolina state representative Simon Coker in the head as he prayed – he was one of at least two dozen Black Republicans murdered in his state on that day. The civil rights attorney Robbie Robertson won his seat on the Savannah, Georgia, city council with 80% of the vote and lost it to a 1989 mail bomb.Murder of Black representatives is the purest form of voter suppression. It exposes the myth that there is a conservative “pro-life” movement that doesn’t believe in “cancel culture”.And to be clear, the historical effort to suppress Black political power has nothing to do with ensuring the supremacy of the white race. If the powerful white people in the Tennessee legislature were truly concerned about the collective wellbeing of white people, they would have protected white children by helping the legislators they ousted to pass gun control laws. If they truly wanted white kids to succeed, they wouldn’t condemn their constituents to perpetual ignorance with a whitewashed version of history.More than 160 years ago, the Tennessee state senator William H Barksdale, speaking from the same building Pearson and Jones were removed from, exposed the entirety of this strategy. “Our slaves are true and faithful, we fear not them,” he said, defending a bill “for the expulsion of Negroes from this state” in 1860, “but this free, combustible material, this fire brand, let us prepare for the future and hurl it out of the camp.”They do not care about white people; they care about white power, and anti-Blackness will continue to be the most reliable tool for maintaining their authority and control. More