If you choose to ignore the smell, to turn your back on the evil you are a part of it.
If you sense a putrid bone-deep stink coming off Republicans you pass these days it’s because they’ve been digging in the graveyard of the Confederacy and what they have dug up is the evil rot of slavery, of an entire peoples’ denied humanity. The smell comes off them in waves, and no amount of dime store perfume can cover it.
This past week the U.S. Supreme Court turned back the clock to the darkest days in our nation’s history and said loudly and clearly “this is who we are.”
By basically gutting the Civil Rights Act the court majority turned black folks back into three-fifths of a person. But wake up. What they did also consigns brown people, red people, yellow people, gay people, women and before it’s all done, a hell of a lot of white folks to the back seats of the bus.
If you were asleep or just didn’t give a damn, the court said that any, and let’s stress “any” remedy to a problem that exists because of racial injustice cannot be considered. Period. The case involved the drawing of Congressional districts to ensure that white folks could not isolate and negate black folks. The court ruled that yes, districts can be drawn to do just that a flurry of states, mostly those clad in the butternut gray of the Confederates, did just that.
Back in the times of Lyndon B. Johnson and a Congress with a sense of what this country should and could be passed sweeping civil rights legislation, and later the Voting Rights Act, that would make reality of what before had been a myth of equality. The current Supreme Court majority tarred and feathered that bit of legislation and road it out of town on a rail, straight to the hangin’ tree.
We should have seen this coming. The Republicans quietly started their march to destroy the Civil Rights and Voter Rights Acts almost as soon as they passed. It took them fifty years of putting their hands on levers most Americans weren’t paying attention to – winning local and state races. They had their moment in the sun when Ronald Reagan was elected president but the mottled, fetid corpse of the Confederacy was not given new life until Donald Trump came on the scene.
But don’t think Trump did all this. He is the useful stooge, the front man. The architects are behind the scenes and they are as foul as anyone Hitler ever drew into his entourage. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts cut his teeth as a young lawyer in the Reagan Administration and in memoranda he wrote criticized the Voting Rights Act.
There will be immediate consequences. All across the Old South, where the live oak trees used to come with ropes, they’ve quit singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and replaced it with “The Day We Dug Old Dixie Up.”
These are the states that already have begun redistricting efforts that, if they stand, would almost eliminate every southern representative of color. And, northern, western Trumper states won’t be far behind.
Start with Louisiana, where this month’s case was based. Add in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Viriginia. Others could appear between this year and the 2028 presidential election. Democrats are fighting back in some states but that is to protect states that in many cases are already going blue. The states where minorities still need protection are firmly in the hands of the Confederate corpses.
I’m reminded of an old joke, the sort of joke political correctness says we can’t tell any more but it’s appropriate. It goes back to when southern states used things like poll taxes and literacy tests to exclude black voters. If a white voter who could not read or afford the tax showed up, well, “wink-wink.” So, in 1950s Mississippi, Uncle Bert, an elderly black man, decides to go down to the town building and vote.
When he gets there the polling worker says “step right over here, Uncle Bert. Before you vote you’ve got to read this paragraph just to be sure you got enough learnin’ to cast a smart vote.”
Uncle Bert looks at the paragraph, which is in Latin. He scratches his chin and ponders. “Can you read it, Uncle Bert?” the poll worker asks. “Sho can,” Uncle Bert replies, to the shock of the poll workers. “Well, then, what’s it say?” the poll worker asks.
“It say they ain’t no colored folks gonna vote in this here election,” Uncle Bert replied.
What we have now is a modern version of this old joke, which in its reality was truth. In today’s version, Uncle Bert doesn’t have to know Latin. He can cast his ballot. It just won’t count. No black folks are going to Congress from his district.
It’s time to take the gloves off. We are facing evil. Reeking, stinking and brutal evil. This evil is doing what it always does. It’s coming for the “others,” assuming a lot of the rest of us will figure it doesn’t affect us. And just when we nod off to our peaceful nap in the lap of apathy, they will gut all our rights.
The Confederate States of America are not dead. They are brought back to life by Republicans and their freedom-hating legions of knuckle dragging racists, homophobes, sexists, xenophobe and religious fanatics. They are reaching out to other states, zombies on the march.
It’s time to go into the streets, to support every effort to fight back legally and through the ballot box. We either put this rotten corpse back in the unblessed grave from which it has risen, or we will be consumed by it. We’ve seen it coming over the past few years and too many have turned a blind eye or assumed it would just go away. It won’t.
I know where I am. Where are you? If you can’t answer that question then you are a part of the evil.
Jordan Jackson is a retired journalist and journalism professor.
I just don’t understand how, in the so-called land of the free, people can be so intolerant of fellow Americans. It’s more than disgusting; it’s criminal or at least it should be. 😡