Welcome to The Breaking Point, a weekly newsletter that explores the historical legacies of injustice based on the news cycle to understand what in the world is going on.
Roughly a year ago, Americans were still trying to decide among a dozen presidential hopefuls. Now it’s just 13 more days until the crucial presidential election, in which we’re down to the final two candidates (well, three if you include Jo Jorgensen): Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And who knew then we’d be having it in the middle of a deadly global pandemic?
In many states, early voting has already begun — and early-voting counts already suggest a record level of participation before Election Day. During the weekend, my partner and I mailed out our absentee ballots. We were extra cautious, not because of the virus, but due to recent efforts by the Republican Party to suppress votes. In California, Republican officials have placed private ballot drop boxes, which they claim isn’t illegal, at various locations including gun shops, shooting ranges, and churches.
In states such as Georgia, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Florida, Texas, Michigan, Iowa, and Oklahoma, Republicans have made voting much more difficult by creating “complicated absentee ballot processes, strict voter ID rules, obstacles for voters returning from prison, objections to the broad distribution of ballots and logistical obstacles to early voting,” according to The Washington Post. All this, as President Trump continues to publicly attack and destroy trust in mail-in ballots on the debate stage and at his coronavirus super-spreader rallies.
As much as racism is embedded in the social and political fabric of the United States of America, voter suppression is a major symptom. It’s nothing new. At the third annual “Lynching in Maryland” virtual conference, speakers actually tied the historical legacy of lynching to voter suppression of Black folks. In interviews with The Washington Post, Black voters — who are turning out in large numbers — said 2020 is the most important presidential election of their lifetime with some even calling it “more consequential” than when Barack Obama ran to be the country’s first Black president.
“There is no group of Americans who are more vested in this democratic experiment, historically, than the Black person in the United States of America,” Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher told The Post. “Black people are literally voting like their lives depend on it.”
Figure of the week: 31.4 million
The number of American people who have already casted their votes nationwide ahead of Election Day on November 3. (Source: The Washington Post)
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Historically, it’s no secret that people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous folks, did not have equal constitutional rights as the white majority. Soon after enslaved people were freed as a result of the bloody Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1868, granting Black people citizenship rights. But when they finally visited the voting polls, they were systematically turned away. As a result, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which prohibits each state from denying citizens the right to vote based on their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
But with white people at the time still powerfully inducing fear and committing fraud at the polls, voting continued to be a challenge for people of color. The fight against the historical legacies of racism and injustice raged on for decades. Black people were violently arrested and lynched. People marched and protested for years. All in the name of equality.
The movement led to an ultimate victory: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws any discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” Later, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a federal law that banned racial discrimination in voting nationwide. Before the law, only an estimated 23 percent of Black folks of voting-age were registered nationally. By 1969, the number skyrocketed to 61 percent.
Although Black folks today exercise their right to vote in striking numbers, the existing systemic injustice of mass incarceration of the Black population still suppresses a huge part of that representation. Not to mention the lack of access to voting polls in predominantly Black communities.
The lack of citizenship rights Black folks experienced in the 19th century perfectly mirrors what four million Americans in US territories in the Pacific and Caribbean are facing right now. After years of oppression and colonization, the people born in these five territories — Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa*, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — despite being United States citizens, can serve in the military, but cannot vote for their commander-in-chief.
When you really look at it, this is history repeating itself. Think about them in the days leading up to the election.
*American Samoans are U.S. nationals, not citizens.
Book on my radar📖
“Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts” by Jessica J. Lee
Story breakers 📰
The census doesn’t count Arab Americans. That leaves some Texans feeling invisible by Yasmeen Khalifa, The Texas Tribune
'Solastalgia': Arctic inhabitants overwhelmed by new form of climate grief by Ossie Michelin, The Guardian
The Racist History of Single-Family Home Zoning by Erin Baldassari and Molly Solomon, KQED
After Trump's Covid-19 diagnosis, anti-Asian tweets and conspiracies rose 85%: report by Kimmy Yam, NBC News
The World’s Largest Tropical Wetland Has Become an Inferno by Catrin Einhorn, Maria Magdalena Arréllaga, Blacki Migliozzi and Scott Reinhard, The New York Times
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