Underground railroading
by Tom Sullivan
On Friday, we were in Greensboro, NC when the International Civil Rights Center & Museum was open. We'd been meaning to stop in for years. We even managed to get through the tour of the old F. W. Woolworth lunch counter without crying. (OK, barely.) The word unequal kept coming up in the tour. That and the funeral earlier of a black friend had me mulling over how many white people still resent sharing the country with Others they consider unequal.
Demographic shifts are bringing them kicking and screaming to the realization that they must.
Losing power is very personal for people on the right. Both left and right talk about taking "their country" back, but it seems much more personal for conservatives. In their America, it seems, there is no we, just i and me.
One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it "steals your vote." Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?
The Others they suspect of this heinous activity are people who do not believe as they do nor vote as they do. Voter fraud itself is a code word, the way Lee Atwater used "forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff." It's "much more abstract," as Atwater said. The issue is not really whether the invisible "those people" are voting illegally or not. It is that they are voting at all. Sharing in governance, sharing power, is a privilege for deserving, Real Americans, not for the unwashed Irresponsibles. That Others do so legally is just as much an affront. Right now they're targeting the invisible Others. Restricting voting to Real Americans comes later, I guess.
Being a racist in the South in 1954 may have been de rigueur, but as Atwater said about the N-word being unacceptable by the late 1960s, being racist today is terribly unfashionable. Not even racists want to see themselves as racists.
Racism itself might not be as dead as conservative pundits insist. It has just been driven further underground. Some have so thoroughly convinced themselves that political animus towards the poor and minorities is not racist, that if liberals even raise the subject, it must be liberals who are the racists. I guess it is a kind of progress that people work so hard at painting themselves as anything but.
During early voting here, a Republican electioneer got into my wife's face and accused her of being a racist for offering sample ballots and Democratic materials to black voters.
In a conversation overheard recently, two conservative men were discussing their dislike for Barack Obama. It wasn't that he was black, no. They had no problem with a black president even. It was that Obama's actions as president were so radical, so in your face and overreaching. One got the distinct impression that his doing anything at all made him radical.
So it goes.