“Detroit pastor says Black people have gone from ‘picking cotton to picking presidents’”
“In short, DNA is a long molecule that contains each person’s unique genetic code. It holds the instructions for building the proteins that are essential for our bodies to function. DNA instructions are passed from parent to child, with roughly half of a child’s DNA originating from the father and half from the mother.” Medical News Today Written by Tim Newman on January 11, 2018
Voter Suppression is in America’s DNA. The founding fathers’ so-called worry that people who are not qualified to vote will overcome and undo what the fathers had built from its founding. In the original 1787 U.S. constitution, the prerequisite of voter eligibility was to be white, a male, and a land owner. Therefore only 6% of America’s population voted in the first presidential election of George Washington.
James Madison was concerned that non-property owners might oppress property owners’ rights if given the right to vote. Instead of including all, the decision was made to favor property owners. This detail disregarded the potential of non-property owners to become victims of oppression. The decision was by all accounts a value judgment based on “Republican” political theory (not the political party). In short, this political theory was to bring about organization, method, and structure to the potential for disorder in an actual one person one vote democracy.
However, in the context of America’s tainted history of inequality, these structures can ensure the same turmoil they are supposed to prevent. Oppression can multiply into a permanent underclass. Over history, voting laws were passed to enfranchise many more people.
However, the original intent to restrict voting to an imaginary responsible few would allow the voter suppression mentality to become the rule rather than the exception. An unchecked reality indoctrinates the powerful. This reality is passed on from one generation to the next; first from the founding fathers and Republican Motherhood (not the political party) the same way one receives genetic DNA instructions from their biological father and mother.
Add in the 3/5 of a person slave population and their ancestors, the art of voter suppression has nuanced into a whole industry. People were so shocked by the George Floyd video, but that kind of event is all too familiar in the black community. The reprehensible act of voter suppression in a so-called free society is also all too regular in communities of color.
The fight against voter suppression is as old as the first footprint of African lives upon the western hemisphere’s shores when a black face gave license an expanded rationale for voter suppression. All of the dehumanizing racial stereotypes gained a persona. Voter suppression could protect the white women’s (Republican motherhood) lives from the black Mobs, and the 21st-century slave master of systemic racism could keep his stock in line.
In the view of some of the powerful, voting was a miscalculation. In their quest for a racialized plutocracy, the voting enfranchisement mistake is one that they have repeatedly tried to correct. Soldiers in the fight for voting rights must not grow weary and must never retreat.
Kevin Robinson Executive Director of Accord1
Three-Fifths 