February 2021 – Mindful Mama

For the people and by the people?

Can you remember the celebration and fanfare surrounding the 2008 election as so many first-time Black voters came to the polls to elect the first Black man to the presidency? Can you remember 2012 when the Black voter record was broken again? Can you remember wondering what happened to all these Black voters in 2016, as their turn-out at the polls dipped for the first time in over 20 years, and by over 7%? Did you think that maybe the Black population just wasn’t that excited about Hillary? Or maybe worse, that they were being complacent after a double Obama victory? Ashamedly, that thought crossed my mind.

What I didn’t realize was that in 2013 the Supreme Court essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an act which gave the federal government the role of supervising voting in parts of the country known to have practiced racial discrimination in voting via acts of violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, knowledge and understanding tests as well as good character tests. The protections offered by the Voting Rights Act helped boost Black voter participation, which had been negligible in the South since post-Reconstruction when the Southern States adopted regulations such as those outlined in the Mississippi Plan which worked, according to Virginia representative Carter Glass, “to discriminate to the very extremity … permissible … under… the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.” The laws were quite successful. In Louisiana, for example, there were more than 130,000 blacks registered to vote in 1896 and in 1904, after the adoption of the Mississippi plan, that number dropped to 1,342. These stats are from Carol Anderson’s book, One Person, No Vote.

The Supreme Court decided in 2013 via Shelby County v. Holder that the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required the US DOJ to approve any changes in voting procedures before they could be implemented, was unfair and was unneeded because since the time of its inception Blacks were voting in record numbers and were winning plenty of elections. It is true that the Voting Rights Act and the involvement of the federal government increased Black voter turnout and civic engagement tremendously,— in Dallas County, home of Selma, Black voter registration increased from 2% in 1965 to 67% in 1972 (Lewis and Allen 1972).

Not coincidentally, the decreased Black voter turnout for the 2016 election was the first presidential election in over fifty years held without federal oversight to protect Black, minority and poor voters from voter discrimination. Without needing to get pre-clearance from the federal government for new voting regulations, 14 states, Nebraska included, adopted new voting restrictions. Poor and minority voters faced strict Voter ID laws, found themselves purged from the voting rolls and showed up to closed or relocated polling places. No wonder the Black voter numbers were down. In Wisconsin, which enacted both Voter ID law as well as decreased and restricted hours voting hours (Brennan Center for Justice), Black voting rates decreased from 78% in 2012 to 50% in 2016. In Milwaukee County alone, which is majority African American, fifty thousand fewer votes were cast in a state that Donald Trump won by only twenty-seven thousand ballots.

I asked my friends on Facebook to share with me what democracy meant to them, and I heard varying versions of the phrase “government for the people by the people.” I think this idea of a democracy being a government in which the populace participates is pretty widely shared, but upon taking a close look at our nation’s (very recent) history, as well as history in the making, it appears the government may not be for or by all people.

Here in Nebraska Senator Slama has proposed a constitutional amendment, LR3CA, that would require poll workers to review a photo or digital ID to verify voter eligibility. While this doesn’t sound crazy to many, for lots of people getting to a DMV and locating a birth certificate are difficult. It requires flexible daytime hours, money (which essentially equates to a poll tax) and transportation. Because this amendment is not needed – we have never had a single conviction of voter impersonation in the state of Nebraska- this requirement can only have been born out of a desire to suppress the votes of those who are already less privileged, those of minorities, differently-abled, elderly and rural voters.

If you value democracy as a government for all the people by all the people, I encourage you to reach out to your Nebraska state senator and let them know you don’t support poll taxes or voter suppression.

the tax of racism

Reading Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted has left me feeling nauseous and discombobulated. Thanks to a recent reading of Palma Strand’s article “’Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall…’: Reflections on Fairness and Housing in the Omaha-Council Bluffs Region as well as viewing of the Open Sky Policy Institute’s Policy and Equity Webinars, I had recently become aware of the effects of 1930’s redlining practices on Omaha’s current situation via statistics like these:

Half as many Black households own homes as white households.
Due to middle class wealth being accumulated by home-equity, the wealth of Omaha whites is 20 times that of Blacks.
Due to our city custom of annexing private neighborhoods built by private developers, we have a severe lack of affordable housing in Western Omaha as well as a city-wide shortage. (There is affordable housing available for only 19% of households eligible for it).
Our city’s Western-most school district is 88% white with 6% of students receiving free or reduced lunch while our Eastern-most district is 29% white with 74% receiving free and reduced lunch.
Renters living in non-white census tracts are evicted at a rate of 41 per tract, per year compared to 17 for those living in white census tracts.
Most of these evictions are in properties with open code violations, meaning the renters are awaiting the landlord to fix a roof, toilet, hole in the wall, etc. (the average critical code case is open 672 days in Omaha).

I wasn’t prepared for the above stats to be made flesh and blood through the stories of those affected by federal, state and local policies in Evicted. To witness trauma upon trauma being compounded by a complex system of access and denial, I was left frustrated and dismayed. The people I met in Desmond’s work are from Milwaukee, but I am sure their stories echo those of Omaha’s most unfortunate renters: not calling the police on domestic violence due to fear of being evicted for “nuisance calls”, deciding between utilities, food or rent, taking sponge baths with boiled water for lack of a functioning shower, five school transfers during middle school alone due to evictions and moves, sleeping five to a bed-less room, having to take what’s available because there are twenty other families who would happily take the apartment with a hole in the roof and a busted out window…

Why aren’t landlords being held to the standard of making sure apartments are habitable? Why isn’t local, state and federal government doing something to address the problem of evictions for the short-term? And long-term, why isn’t there enough affordable housing to keep the market competitive? Desmond provides options to address the affordable housing crisis:

Provide legal counsel for all those going to eviction court. Studies have shown that evictions decrease up to 90% when legal counsel is provided. LB419, discussed last week in committee, addresses just this.
Create federal housing vouchers to subsidize renters so that no one pays more than 30% of their income on housing. (Some pay up to 70% of their minimum wage income on uninhabitable shelter.) This would require a statute making it illegal for a landlord to discriminate based upon income level. LB196, also discussed last week, addresses income discrimination.
Create more Affordable Housing. This will require brainpower, creativity and heartfelt intention.

I can already hear the complaints about subsidies, taxes and the need for hard work, but did you know that of the $190 billion the federal government spent in 2015 to help Americans buy or rent homes, the seven million households with incomes of more than $200,000 received more than the 50+ million households with incomes of less than 50k?

The rich are getting subsidies that far exceed those of the poor.

Of course they are, they have the means to lobby for their interests. They have access to health, wealth and education to keep the status quo, or to improve it in their favor. But is a growing divide between have and have-nots what we want as a nation? What does it mean to be American? Are our fates not entwined?

British- Nigerian author Nels Abbey says,

Racism is such a tax. It’s a burden on you. It’s a financial tax, it’s an emotional tax, it’s a spiritual tax, it’s a political tax.

I lobby to dump the energetic tax of racism and to increase our wealth taxes so that we as a united America can transform the structures skewed to advantage the already advantaged.

*photo credit to Philip Montgomery

grammar matters

Today’s contribution to Black history month (something we will celebrate and uplift until having a separate month isn’t needed) will focus on the education of white people. As I asserted in my latest blog, Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?, white people need some educating around race because it’s not something we’ve been required to study.

Another thing I pointed out in the blog is the need to have relationships with white people who may be further along the path toward creating racial equity who can help steer our way to growth and understanding. Luckily for me, I am in relationship with numerous kind souls who are more immersed than I in anti-racism work and who can gently point out when I may be committing micro-aggressions of which I am unaware,

such as capitalizing both Black and white.

I admit to being reluctant to the first suggestion. We all matter, I thought. (That should have been a heads up!)

When the second suggestion came, I thought this may really need to be considered, but I felt strong commitment to create white culture dedicated to creating an equitable world, and didn’t want to off-put potential learners by seeming to be anti-white.

Not one to believe in coincidences, the third suggestion really got my attention. It helped that it came with a link to more education.

Turns out this grammatical suggestion was put in motion by W.E.B. Du Bois back in 1926. Almost 100 years later, we are still working out how to respectfully acknowledge our Black brothers and sisters to show them that they are seen and heard and that they matter, that we see Black as a culture.

It also turns out that there is a history of capitalizing white among white supremacists, a group I’m not looking to imitate.

For now I’ll capitalize Black and leave white as is, and I’ll dream of a time when exerting energy thinking about the capitalization of a color is a thing of the past, a time when we are all more concerned with capitalizing American and when being American means automatic inclusion and equal access to resources.