Category: Racial Inequality

Women staking a claim

While the extent to which the reversal of Roe v. Wade has influenced the big increase in women running for statewide and Federal office may not be clearly known, the rise in and of itself is remarkable.

The post-primary landscape reveals new records set for the number of women running both for Congress and for Governor:

U.S. House: 776

U.S. Senate: 84

Governor: 86

The 168 Black women represent new records set for number of Black female candidates for all 3 offices.

The 95 Hispanic women represent new records set for the number of House and Gubernatorial candidates.

While these numbers are encouraging, a steep slope remains:

  • Only 24% of current House members and 28% of Senators are women
  • Only 18% of Governors are women
  • There are 19 U.S. states that have never elected a female governor
  • Only 58 women have ever served in the U.S. Senate…none before 1932

Under-representation of women on the Senate and Gubernatorial ‘benches’ from which Presidential candidates are most often drawn continues to limit opportunities for women to achieve national visibility on the political stage. 

Although third parties have run women for the presidency far more often than men, women have appeared on the national tickets of the two major parties only four times, and only once as President:

  • Geraldine Ferraro (1984)
  • Sarah Palin (2008)
  • Hillary Clinton (2016)
  • Kamala Harris (2020)

The numbers leave little doubt that partisan divide is not only the biggest obstacle to racially-balanced representation, but also to one that is gender-balanced.

A staggering 71% of female candidates ran as Democrats this year.

And while White and Latina candidates were distributed almost evenly between parties, 70% of Black candidates ran as Democrats.

In House races, Black women running as Democrats outnumbered those running as Republican by almost 3:1.

In Senate races, the number of Black women running as Democrats outnumbered those running as Republicans by almost 4:1.

The cracks in the political glass ceiling are spreading, and2022 is shaping up to be the year that it finally shatters.

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Voting rights at risk

Voter discrimination and other manipulations of the electoral process are nearly as old as the republic itself, but such abuses were dealt a decisive blow by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which barred jurisdictions with evidence of voting discrimination from changing their voting procedures without “pre-clearance” from Federal authorities.

And – not unlike Roe vs. Wade – the 1965 act was the law of the land for 50 years until 2013, when the Shelby County v Holder ruling released counties with histories of voter discrimination from Federal oversight.

Since then, states have been ramping up discriminatory voting practices.  Many of these, taken individually, may appear to have limited impact, but applied in combination they have a game-changing effect on electoral outcomes.

A Brennan Center analysis of data released by the Federal Election Assistance Commission found that nearly 11 million voters were purged from rolls between 2016 and 2018, overwhelmingly led by counties with a history of voter discrimination.

The telltale signs of discriminatory efforts to disenfranchise are many:

Registration

The simple failure to process voter voter registrations received prior to deadlines renders them void.  Many states also impose severe restrictions on – and its officers even harass – voter registration groups.  Other states mandate prejudicial qualification requirements for Deputy Registrars.

Voting

Attempts to restrict voting are far more insidious, and fall into two categories:

The first is the creation of logistical obstructions such as reducing and/or eliminating early voting dates. The most blatant, though, is gerrymandered consolidation/positioning of polling places to relocate them away from public transportation stops, and to reduce or eliminate them on Native American lands and college campuses.

Other election boards will – in selected precincts – reduce both the numbers of polling place staff and the amount of training that staff receives.  In those same selected precincts, they may also fail to assure adequate numbers of functioning voting machines, optical scanners, or electronic polling books, or alternatively to stock an insufficient number of paper ballots.

Another obstructive tactic is language discrimination both in the selection of polling place staff and wording of election documents.  Other blatant discrimination against minorities can include failure to accommodate voters with disabilities including barring assistance by family members.

Shortened deadlines for absentee ballot returns combine with complicated absentee ballot requirements to further deny access for those with mobility issues or irreconcilable schedule conflicts.

The second is the creation of administrative obstructions, among which the most prominent is excessive purging of voter registration rolls.

However, even a duly registered voter can be denied the right to vote by stricter photo ID laws, combined with gerrymandered closings of the DMV offices which issue them. This ID challenge tactic may imnclude failure to accept student ID’s issued by state universities, and/or Native American tribal IDs.  It also may include barring Native American voters living on reservations through “no P.O. Box” residential address requirements.

“Exact match” signature requirements are another ID challenge tactic to deny voters access to polls.

Practices less widely employed are:

  • Requiring the payment of outstanding civil fines/fees as a voting pre-requisite.
  • Failure to assist or accommodate voters displaced by natural disasters, and failure to inform formerly incarcerated persons of their voting rights.

The U.S. is unique among Western democracies placing the burden of voter registration upon the individual.

In Canada, a voter is automatically added to Federal election rolls at age 18, and remains registered even after a move. It is unsurprising that 93% of Canadians are registered to vote vs. only 68% of Americans.

These increasingly frequent abuses leave little question that after decades of progress toward universal enfranchisement, many states are rolling back voting rights in an echo of Jim Crow.

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Racial inequality: Peeling the onion

It is unsurprising that Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to believe that Blacks experience racial discrimination on every dimension surveyed… but the contrast in partisan perceptions is truly staggering.

Reality seen through a fractured lens

Democrats are 4 times more likely than Republicans to believe that Blacks experience racial discrimination in employment.   The data suggests that the more than 1 in 3 Republicans who deny employment discrimination believe that affirmative action has actually given Blacks an unfair advantage.

It is of note, however, that – perhaps as a result of the BLM movement – the partisan gap is significantly narrower on the issues of discrimination within “the criminal justice system” and “dealing with police”.

Republicans, however, exhibit their greatest denial of discrimination on the issues of “healthcare” and “voting rights”.

Blaming the victims

When it comes to the causes of racial inequality, Democrats assign greater weight than Republicans to external factors including the influence of access to good schools and jobs, and systemic discrimination.

Republicans are far more likely to blame the victims, attaching far greater significance to family instability, lack of good role models, and laziness.

An atmosphere of bigotry

Ever since Trump was elected in 2016, both Blacks and Republicans have believed that the expression of racist views is both both more common and more widely accepted.

Government action

It has been as long documented that awareness of racial inequality increases with education as it has been that American education has been faltering.

In fact, a voter with a high school education or less is twice as likely as a college graduate to believe that government has done too much to address racial inequality, a view shared by:

  • 1 in 5 of those aged 65+
  • 1 in 4 of those aged 50-64

In stark contrast – and on a hopeful note for the future – those 18-29 years of age believe that that government is doing too little by a staggering 5-to-1!

NOTE: All data presented in this post was generated by Pew Research.

Racial stereotyping and prejudice are proving far more deeply rooted and resilient than many imagined.  It is a cancer that will only grow without elected representatives who will stand up to reactionaries for the protection of equal rights.

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Inequality by the numbers

More than one hundred fifty years have passed since after passage of the 15th amendment and over 50 years since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and it is painfully obvious that America cannot simply legislate its way out of racial discrimination.

Three in five Americans believe that Blacks still remain the most frequent victims of racial discrimination.

The numbers suggest that even this perception understates the reality. Median income for Blacks is 58% of median income for Whites and 20% lower for Blacks than for Hispanics.

Unemployment among Blacks is nearly 20% higher than for Whites.

Abortion bans deny all women the opportunity to plan families, and the marked decrease in abortion-related deaths among Black women while Roe v. Wade was law makes it clear that abortion bans disproportionately impact Black women. Before Roe v. Wade, women who died as the result of illegal abortions were typically Black, and had self-induced in their own communities.

Blacks are 2.3 times as likely to be shot by a police officer as Whites.

A monumental amount of work still remains to realize the dream… and there is an opportunity to jump-start the effort by electing a like-minded Congress in November.

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