To Be Clear
The attempt by this group of Republican members of the US Congress to overthrow the recent presidential election is an act of white supremacy. The states, and more specifically the voting precincts in those states, whose votes they want to throw out are ones which were flipped from the last election because of Black votes, and these people don’t believe Black votes are as important as white ones.
Since the Supreme Court in 2013 overturned parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring federal oversight of certain, mostly southern, states regarding changes to their election laws, Republicans have fought tooth and nail to reimplement processes specifically designed to make it harder for Black people to vote. They’ve argued the measures are needed to curtail voter fraud, but in a preview of what’s going on right now with the Yam in Chief, they’ve never been able to prove fraud on the scale needed to change the outcome of an election exists or is even possible.
It could be argued this is just politics. They’re not trying to disenfranchise Blacks specifically, but Democrats in general, and it’s not their fault Blacks tend to vote Democratic. Except that it is.
Black support for the Democratic party is not due to ignorance or even how well Democrats have taken care of them, because they haven’t, but because the Republican party goes out of its way to ignore the needs of Black Americans and instead continue to actively perpetuate forms of cultural, political, and legal segregation. The Democratic party may not be a very good ally, but at least they aren’t an active enemy.
That Supreme Court case from 2013 gets to the heart of this white fascist rebellion. The Voting Rights Act understood enough of the south still didn’t view Blacks as legitimate Americans and were prepared to continue to deny them any say in politics, culture, or law, and that such an attitude was anathema to who they claimed to be as a larger country. The Federal Government had a responsibility to protect Black citizens from legal implementations of white supremacy.
In 2013, though, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court decided the nine constrained states had evolved enough to no longer require oversight. Texas immediately enacted a voter ID law previously blocked as racially disenfranchising by the Federal Government. Most of the other nine states followed suit.
The attitude which was curtailed and now re-energized is one of value and ownership. Whites own the power, whites have the highest value, and Blacks should mind their place.
For some of these treasonous representatives that calculus may be subconscious and not fully realized, others, more aware, try desperately to dress their reasoning up in something, anything, other than racism, but leave their slips showing. Then there’s the group who just don’t care. I’d put Ted Cruz in that group.
They hold to a holy ideology which is directly tied to white paternal power and the disenfranchisement of anyone who doesn’t fit their model, and they believe anything allowing them to accrue the power needed to hold off their feared social, political apocalypse is acceptable. They see it as part of their job to criminalize Blackness, keep Latinx people as a low paid shadow labor class, and to eradicate the presence of the LGBTQ+ and Islamic American communities.
These attacks against non-“white”, non-“Christian”, LGBTQ+ people is not a byproduct of this part of the Republican Party; some side effect of their pursuit of capitalism, free market, and limited government. It is central to what they believe they were elected to do and what they’re trying to do now: protect the supremacy of Whiteness in America.
