by Kim Joseph and Ashley Anderson
Malcolm X once said in his speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” “Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.” Here he was mostly speaking about Democratic politicians (who had control of the House at the time) and the black voters who put them there, only to watch those politicians filibuster and take little action in the way of civil rights legislation. At that time, he remarked, half of the African American population in the Southern United States couldn’t vote because of Jim Crow legislation that was implemented following the Civil War.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices, banning literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes. By the 1990s, African-American voter turnout rates in the South were identical to those seen in the rest of the country. Akin to the ways in which the implementation of Jim Crow only altered the ways in which African Americans were marginalized, racial discrimination has cropped up in myriad new ways since the dismantling of Jim Crow. Take, for example, the US’s recent midterm elections.
In Georgia, midterms elections are finished, and Brian Kemp is to be inaugurated as the state’s Governor on Monday, January 14th. Kemp, a Republican, won over Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of Georgia’s House of Representatives. Abrams is also a Democrat who would have been the first black female governor in the nation–had she won. The race was once deemed to be nearly neck and neck, yet Kemp still came out on top. His victory has been questioned in light of some of his endeavors during the election. His actions resulted in the reduced capability of Georgia’s African-American population to get out and vote.
How did Kemp achieve this? Throughout the election, Kemp, acting as Georgia’s Secretary of State and thus the chief executive of the state’s election system, aggressively enforced the “exact-match” law. He used the law to suspend 53,000 voter-registration applications: many applications were suspended for identification errors as minute as hyphens missing from surnames on official documentation. Seventy percent of suspended applications were those of African Americans, who make up thirty-two percent of the state’s population. Abrams has called Kemp “an architect of suppression.”
Years ago, Kemp investigated Abrams’ voter-registration initiative, the New Georgia Project. This project, aimed at getting the state’s 600,000 unregistered African-American voters into the electorate, has been hailed as a ’holy grail’ for the Democratic party. It makes sense that Kemp would seek to undermine this initiative, since reports indicate that, as of 2016, only eight percent of African Americans considered themselves Republicans. Around seventy percent reportedly considered themselves Democrats, and a whopping eighty-eight percent of African Americans voted for Hillary Clinton.
Kemp claimed Abrams sought to let undocumented people vote in Georgia. Kemp’s accusations are a tactic visible elsewhere in national politics, with Donald Trump and other Republicans potentially exaggerating voter fraud in order to justify voter suppression. In 2013, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Shelby v. Holder that voting laws had indeed resulted in voter suppression and discrimination, but that this suppression and discrimination were not significant enough to warrant action on par with something like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Tell that to the 37,000 African Americans denied the right to vote in Georgia’s midterm election. It was close enough that those votes might have made a difference; it was close enough that it might have kept the one person who denied them the right to vote out of a new position with even greater authority.
What difference does a hyphen make? Clearly, a substantial one. And what message is Brian Kemp sending when he uses unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in order to investigate efforts to empower minorities and marginalized racial groups? He reinforces the message that Malcolm X was right. Fifty years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the dismantling of Jim Crow, according to Brian Kemp, African Americans are still not American enough to vote.
Kim Joseph and Ashley Anderson are students in English 291: What Is Racial Difference?