Behind the democratic façade
Racism's role in U.S. elections
Based on a talk by Dianne Mathiowetz at an Aug. 13
Workers World Party meeting in New York City.
The airwaves and newspapers are filled with talk about the
upcoming elections. Voting in them is presented as the highest
form of democracy.
No matter how corrupt or unrepresentative the process of
candidate selection and election is, the result will be
heralded as the will of the people, the only legitimate and
effective avenue for popular participation.
In analyzing the role of elections under capitalism and
developing a strategy to overturn the rule of the few and the
weal thy, understanding the struggle against racism and white
supremacy is key to building the requisite unity for
victory.
Revolutionaries in the United States, the epicenter of
racism and imperialism, have to be ever conscious of
history.
When this country was founded on the basis of
bourgeois-democratic principles, voting was the exclusive right
of white property-holding men. It wasn't even considered that
women or slaves would have a political voice.
Despite the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which
extended suffrage to former slaves after the Civil War, and the
19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote in 1920,
African American men and women faced overwhelming obsta cles in
exercising that right, especially in the South.
In addition to poll taxes, literacy tests and other
bureaucratic measures designed to prevent Black people from
voting, there was the very real threat of physical violence and
economic reprisals from the racist power structure and its
armed goon squad, the Ku Klux Klan. Black people literally
risked death to register to vote.
Reality of Jim Crow
The reality of "Jim Crow" segregation, with its separate
water fountains, bathrooms, train cars, hotels and schools, is
less than 40 years in the past.
Just decades ago it was standard practice for Black people
to be forced to sit in the back of the bus; to stand aside for
a white person passing on a sidewalk, eyes cast down; to labor
long and hard for pitiful wages for "Mr. Charlie" as a
sharecropper; and to have beatings and lynchings and rapes go
unreported and unpunished.
The social, political and economic reality for millions of
African Americans and other people of color remained separate
and apart from the bourgeois principles of "all men are created
equal" and "liberty and justice for all."
In the 1950s and 1960s a powerful civil-rights movement,
fueled by the shared experience of every kind of racial
indignity and oppression, swept through the small towns and
cities of the South. Many tens of thousands of women, men and
young people defied water cannons and snarling dogs,
fire-bombings and bullets to force certain concessions from the
government.
This movement created a different national social climate. A
series of laws were passed, including the 1965 Voting Rights
Act, which furthered the ability of Black people and others to
participate in electoral politics.
Throughout the South and the whole country, there are now
Black mayors and judges, city council members and sheriffs, and
members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Currently, the
Senate and the presidency remain an exclusive white
millionaires' club.
Yet, as the recently released report "The Long Shadow of Jim
Crow: Voter Intim idation and Suppression in America Today" by
People for the American Way and the NAACP details, the
bourgeois-democratic right to vote has still to be completely
won for Black people and other oppressed peoples in this
country.
Florida: an ongoing struggle
Many are aware that in the 2000 presidential election in
Florida, thousands and thousands of people, mostly African Amer
ican, Haitian or Spanish-speaking, were denied the right to
vote because their names were wrongly deleted from the
register. George W. Bush's election was only possible because
of this massive voter fraud.
But the mainstream media have paid little attention to the
ongoing struggle in Florida to prevent a similar purge from
taking place again.
The administration of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has delayed
instituting the many changes in voting procedures that were
mandated as a result of investigations into the 2000
election.
So hundreds of poll watchers are being recruited from around
the country to prevent the disenfranchisement of seniors, the
disabled, people of color and non-English-speaking voters in
2003.
According to the report, recently in the Orlando area, armed
plainclothes officers from the Florida Department of Law
Enforce ment questioned elderly Black voters in their homes. It
was supposedly part of an investigation into voting
irregularities in a mayoral election, but the clear intent was
intimidation.
In 2000, police set up barricades and conducted
identification stops around voting locations in the Black
community in Miami and other Florida cities.
Many other instances of the use of an obvious and intrusive
police presence around polling places in African American and
immigrant communities are cited in the report, in places from
South Carolina to Pennsylvania to California.
Another common device has been directed mailings to
communities of color giving false information about election
dates, voting requirements and polling locations.
Case of Cynthia McKinney
The 2002 re-election defeat of U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney of
Georgia is still another example of the ongoing attempt to
stifle electoral participation from the Black community.
McKinney represented her majority Black constituency by
addressing issues of racism and reparations, women's and labor
rights for five terms from 1993 to 003.
She earned the unrelenting enmity of the right wing by
supporting justice for Palestinians and challenging the Bush
administration after Sept. 11, 2001, during its build-up to war
on Iraq.
She was defeated in her re-election bid two years ago when
millions of dollars from groups such as the American Israel
Political Action Committee filled her opponent's coffers--and
some 40,000 Republican voters crossed over and voted in the
Democratic primary.
However, in July, in a stunning reversal, McKinney won the
Democratic primary. Now she is virtually certain to win back
her seat in the House of Repre sentatives come November.
McKinney's primary campaign galvanized hundreds of
volunteers who went door to door to motivate people to go to
the polls.
The denial of voting rights is one of the many forms of
inequality that stem from this racist system. The racial
disparity in unemployment, wages, the prison population, death
sentences, child mortality, incidence of disease, life
expectancy and education--all reveal the blatant discrimination
that prevails in this "democracy."
The election of any capitalist politician will not solve
these deep-rooted contradictions. However, there can be no
question that all workers should defend against racist attack
the right to vote and hold office, like the right to a job and
decent housing, heath care and education.
Throughout its 45-year history, Workers World Party has
expressed, in word and action, its solid support for the
struggles of oppressed peoples against racism, white supremacy
and discrimination. Every ploy devised by the ruling class to
divide and confuse workers must be exposed and fought. And that
means defend ing oppressed people's right to vote and hold
office without incurring a racist backlash.
Workers World Party's election campaign is another way to
give an independent voice to the needs and aspirations of
working and oppressed people. Capita lism has failed to meet
its own definitions of equality. By presenting socialism as a
viable and necessary alternative, WWP candidates unmask the
charade of bourgeois electioneering.
All the millions who are disenfranchi sed, marginalized and
alienated by this political system--prisoners, the homeless,
immigrants, youths--are included in the struggle for a
socialist future as critical par tners in the working-class
movement.
Reprinted from the Sept. 9, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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