Turtle Mountain Reservation, North Dakota
Maybe there will be postcards?
by Tom Sullivan
Turtle Mountain Reservation, North Dakota
Purveyors of the voter fraud myth have expanded their palette. Retromingent Jim Crow tactics for preventing darker-skinned, not-really Americans from voting are still barely too gauche for the president's party, or too messy. Everyone knows how squeamish Mr. Tough Guy is about the sight of other people's blood, no matter where he thinks it's oozing from. Don't expect the red hats to be. During Jim Crow, people posed for postcards in front of human trophies.
Logistical shenanigans more arcane than beatings and literacy tests have been deployed to stop Others from voting this election. But stealing elections in broad daylight is likely in beta testing. Driving the sabotage of democratic process is demographic shifts and the emergence of what Atlantic's Adam Serwer sees as identity politics for white people. Those who claim to oppose identity politics, of course, apply the term exclusively "to efforts by historically marginalized constituencies to claim rights others already possess."
Serwer explains:
Underlying the American discourse on identity politics has always been the unstated assumption that, as a white man’s country, white identity politics—such as that practiced by Trump and the Republican Party—is legitimate, while opposition to such politics is not. For Americans whose Americanness is considered conditional, accepting this implicit racial hierarchy is the only praiseworthy or acceptable reaction.For millennia, one supposes, people who gave it thought assumed the world was flat because their senses reinforced that assumption daily. So too with assumptions about America's formation as a bastion of whiteness and Protestantness and maleness. For questioning the heliocentric model of the universe, the Holy See convicted Galileo of heresy. Because Others challenge how things are and ought to be, white America elected Donald Trump.
Decades ago, amid the most overt privations of Jim Crow, African-Americans used to tell a joke about a black Harvard professor who moves to the Deep South and tries to register to vote. A white clerk tells him that he will first have to read aloud a paragraph from the Constitution. When he easily does so, the clerk says that he will also have to read and translate a section written in Spanish. Again he complies. The clerk then demands that he read sections in French, German, and Russian, all of which he happens to speak fluently. Finally, the clerk shows him a passage in Arabic. The professor looks at it and says, “My Arabic is rusty, but I believe this translates to ‘Negroes cannot vote in this county.’ ”These days, however, making America great again means pickaninny caricatures in racist robocalls in Florida. It means bringing back Jim Crow voting restrictions that put Them back in their proper places, as Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp, means to in putting "a white thumb on the demographic scale" (emphasis mine):
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ninety-nine bills designed to diminish voter access were introduced last year in thirty-one state legislatures. Many of the recent Republican-led efforts stem from the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder. In an opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that discrimination still exists, but not sufficiently to warrant the “extraordinary” remediation measures that the act imposed on the states of the former Confederacy. That argument is roughly equivalent to saying that a decline in the prevalence of an infectious disease means that we should stop vaccinating against it. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced a strict new voter-I.D. law. Mississippi and Alabama shortly afterward began enforcing similar laws that previously had been barred.Jim Crow 2.0 is already a national crisis, Cobb writes, appearing even in North Dakota which did not become a state until decades after the Civil War. North Dakota is insisting tribe members have identity cards with street addresses for voting. With a tight senatorial election pending, tribal identity cards suddenly are not enough.
The decision added a layer of severity to a voter-access crisis precipitated by state laws that prohibit six million Americans with past convictions from voting. In three Southern states—Florida, Tennessee, and Kentucky—this means that at least twenty per cent of eligible-age African-Americans cannot vote. Meanwhile, North Carolina enacted restrictions on early voting, a policy that particularly affects African-Americans, who are likely to be hourly-wage workers and cannot always get to the polls on Election Day. Last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to reinstate a voter-I.D. law in North Carolina that a federal court had found targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.” In effect, the question posed by Roberts’s ruling is how much discrimination there has to be before you can justify protecting voters.
Yesterday morning I drove from the Fort Berthold Reservation to the Spirit Lake Reservation. It's around a 3- to 3.5-hour drive. I didn't have enough cell service to use Google maps, so I was using an actual physical GPS unit. 3/
— Maggie Astor (@MaggieAstor) October 24, 2018
I plugged in the Spirit Lake tribal office, which is in Fort Totten, ND. The GPS took me to the city limits of Fort Totten. And then it stopped. It told me I had reached my destination. I had not. I was in the middle of a highway with a lake on one side and fields on another. 4/
— Maggie Astor (@MaggieAstor) October 24, 2018
I pulled over. Fiddled with the GPS. Re-entered the tribal office. GPS couldn't find it. I had enough cell service then to make a call—very lucky, because for most of my time in ND I didn't have that—so I called OJ Semans of Four Directions, who I was meeting at the office. 5/
— Maggie Astor (@MaggieAstor) October 24, 2018
So I'm on the side of a remote two-lane highway, on the phone with OJ. He names landmarks GPS might be able to find. A hospital, a nearby office, etc. GPS can't find them—because none of them have addresses. They just are where they are, and tribe members know where they are. 6/
— Maggie Astor (@MaggieAstor) October 24, 2018
So here's what we did: I told OJ the lake was on my left, which told him which direction I was facing. And then he went to a spot where he could see the highway, and he described the cars I was going to see coming in the opposite direction. "Yellow flatbed truck." "Blue SUV." 7/
— Maggie Astor (@MaggieAstor) October 24, 2018
The amount of time that elapsed between him describing a car and me seeing it told us how many minutes away I was. I put my flashers on to identify my own car. And when he finallyu saw it, he told me to turn left. And there, up a hill, was the office. 8/
— Maggie Astor (@MaggieAstor) October 24, 2018
When Astor left for the Turtle Mountain Reservation an hour and a half away, same problem again. Even the tribal headquarters, the largest buildings on the reservations, do not have street addresses. Daily Kos last week raised $450,000 to help the tribes produce updated tribal ID cards with residential addresses. First People had better be able to read them in Arabic.
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