Various people have said that what states like Georgia are doing is just Jim Crow voting practices—setting in place laws that keep Black people from voting, or from having their vote count as much as the votes of white people. The pro-GOP media sphere (and a shout-out to getting your people in line with repeating the talking points!) are saying that what Georgia did to restrict the ability of people to vote was not going back to Jim Crow because Jim Crow was racist, and this is not racist. It’s political. It’s about keeping Democrats from voting.
They say it’s fine to make it hard for Democrats to vote because they believe that Democrats don’t have a legitimate political position that should be represented in our democracy. They believe that Democrats are all dupes, and so Democratic-prone groups of people should be treated differently from how they want GOP-prone groups treated (thus, they’ve made rural voting easier, but urban voting harder).
I have to say that we’re at the point when it’s openly okay for the GOP to say that they want a one-party nation, while they accuse Dems of being fascist and authoritarian. You might quibble whether a one-party state is truly fascist, but it certainly isn’t democracy.
[There’s a long passage I deleted about how what the GOP is doing in regard to voting rights is a violation of what Jesus very clearly said, but I’m deleting it because it’s naive to pretend that the GOP cares about what Jesus said.]
But, back to the argument. We have a deliberately false narrative about the history of race in the US. That deliberately false narrative says that there were people who got up in the morning, looked themselves in the mirror, and said, “I hate Black people, and every day and every way I will make my hatred of them obvious.” And that is what racist people did. So, “Jim Crow” was racist people engaged in actions that they said were racist that they knew came out of hate. And, therefore, as long as we don’t feel hateful toward others, and we aren’t deliberately trying to hurt a race we know we hate, we aren’t doing something racist.
That’s a racist way to think about race. It’s racist because it’s a way of thinking about racism that enables racism.
In addition, there’s a lot of deliberate muddling of what segregation was and how it worked. “Jim Crow” is used in a broad manner to mean all the ways that various states (not just “Southern”) ensured that African Americans and other non-white groups were held to second-class citizen status.
Most people I know who live in segregated states don’t actually know what the culture of segregation meant. They have images of water fountains or food counters, and of lynchings on the part of toothless rednecks done in the dark who bragged about their racism, and far too many of them believe that most ministers opposed segregation.
Conservative Christians supported segregation as not just allowed by Scripture, but actively required—segregation was Christian, they argued, and opposition to segregation was godless communism. Segregation was also, Southern conservatives argued, necessary to prevent the downfall of civilization because, they believed, all other great civilizations decayed when they allowed “race-mixing” to happen. This unmitigated bullshit was popularized by Madison Grant’s incoherent Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s tremendously popular Rising Tide of Color (1920) and, although completely discredited by its importance to Nazis (the one good thing Nazis did), it was referenced in Virginia’s argument for prohibiting “miscegenation” in 1967 in their brief for Loving v. Virginia.
Most people I know who live in segregated states don’t actually know what the culture of segregation meant. It meant displays of the power of white supremacy, such as setting up statues to people who were traitors to the US and lost the pro-slavery insurrection they’d started. It meant deliberately reminding non-whites of the power of white supremacy, ranging from lynchings (which were often in public, and often had a pastor present to give a sermon) to separate water fountains or separate entrances to movie theaters (which you can often still see). It meant ensuring non-whites had deliberately inferior schools, health care, social services. It meant that the police were committed to protecting white supremacy, and the whole justice system was oriented toward the principle that the government should protect and not restrict white people, and restrict but not protect non-whites.
Non-whites (meaning African Americans in most places, but including other groups in many states) had to be prevented from voting since they would put in place political leaders who would undermine segregation. Restricting voting was the means to protect racism.
If white supremacists had believed that non-white voters would have voted to support white supremacism, they would have been in favor of non-whites voting.
The prohibitions and restrictions on non-whites voting weren’t advocated, enacted, and enforced by people who thought of themselves as racist. They were advocated, enacted, and enforced by people who thought of themselves as keeping people from voting whose political beliefs were not legitimate, people whose views were un-Christian, communist, and a threat to America. That was Jim Crow voting practices, and that is exactly what the GOP is openly advocating and doing.
That a policy is oriented toward the hegemony of a particular political party—the whole goal of segregation-era voting laws—doesn’t mean that policy gets a “get out of racism free” card. If a group is trying to prevent a party coming to power because that marginalized party would enact anti-racist policies, then trying to restrict the power of that party is trying to protect racism. It’s racist.
In theory, the poll tax wasn’t racist—it didn’t mention race. In practice, it was disparately applied, and it was all about race. It was all about white people believing that non-white people aren’t really citizens whose views on politics should have the same power as the beliefs of white people.
In the Jim Crow era, all sorts of laws were passed that didn’t explicitly mention race, but that were intended to make sure that non-whites couldn’t have the same political power as whites. That’s what Jim Crow voting did.
That’s what the GOP is doing. It’s racist.