World Press on Gender-Based Violence, Impeachment of Trump and Ancient Women Warriors: New Age Islam's Selection, 5 January 2021
By
New Age Islam Edit Desk
5 January 2021
• The
Impact Of Covid-19 On Child Marriage And Other Gender-Based Violence
By
Saeda Bilkis Bani
• Why
Congress Should Impeach Trump Again
By
Neal K. Katyal and Sam Koppelman
• A Better
Normal For Women And Girls After Covid-19
By
Bambang Susantono and Anita Bhatia
• What
New Science Techniques Tell Us About Ancient Women Warriors
By
Annalee Newitz
• To
Defend Democracy, Investigate Trump
By
Michelle Goldberg
• Supreme
Leader Of Voter Suppression
By
Charles M. Blow
-----
The
Impact Of Covid-19 On Child Marriage And Other Gender-Based Violence
By
Saeda Bilkis Bani
January 04,
2021
I recently
visited rural areas of Bangladesh amid the Covid-19 pandemic and returned to
Dhaka with a new understanding of the impact that Covid-19 is having on child
marriage, a harmful practice that is a global challenge. The fundamental shift
that I saw was that child marriage, which has typically been encouraged by
struggling parents, is now being encouraged by struggling girls. This worrisome
trend underscores a new burden of the pandemic on the poor.
Marriage
before the age of 18 is a fundamental violation of human rights. Yet Unicef
reported in April that the number of girls married in childhood stands at 12
million per year worldwide.
According
to the United Nations Population Fund's State of the World Population 2020
report, Covid-19 threatens to make even that stunning number worse. The agency
estimates that Covid-19 will disrupt efforts to end child marriage, potentially
resulting in an additional 13 million child marriages taking place between 2020
and 2030 that could otherwise have been averted.
The
challenge is not only the disease but the response to the disease—especially
the impact of school closings, which have been in effect nationally since
March. The transition from in-school to online learning can easily seem like a
mechanical one, but it creates new challenges for remote and poor communities.
What I
witnessed in visiting rural communities was girls totally bored and home-bound
by school closings. They typically lack Internet access, television, and
smartphones. Analogue phones are the only readily available means of
communication, and too often the parents are not able to maintain any sort of
schooling at home. The girls are home-bound because, unlike the boys, they are
generally forbidden by their parents from leaving the home unnecessarily.
School closings thus become confining as well as limiting.
All too
often the girls whom I saw had a glazed look in their eyes. They saw no future
for themselves. Without school, they were deprived of possibilities. The daily
effect was crushing. The only escape seemed to be marriage.
The shift
to girls pursuing child marriage instead of their parents is a devastating one
that could drive the numbers even higher. It could limit the prospects and
potential of girls worldwide.
School
closings also affect boys, but boys have more to do. They are freer, more
mobile, outside more. In some areas, that may increase child labour, drug
addiction, and gambling, but boys are not confined as girls are.
The
situation is also different in urban areas, where there is greater access to
the Internet, television, and smartphones. Internet access has its own
liabilities, but it is available for educational purposes.
For girls
and women, the response to Covid-19 has other implications, too. Lockdowns have
left many men out of work and, therefore, at home during the day, often making
demands of one kind or another. The burden on women—to prepare more food, do
more cleaning, maintain the home life—only increases. Financial stress creates
domestic stress, and the potential for violence grows, especially as husbands
demand more money from wives' families—a major cause of domestic violence.
Brac is
working to prevent child marriages and other forms of violence against women
and children and to defend victims of such violence. Brac's Community
Empowerment Programme supports Polli Shomaj, the community-based women's groups
that are active in 54 out of 64 districts in Bangladesh in combating
gender-based violence. Brac also operates 410 Legal Aid Clinics, whose cases
typically involve gender-based violence. But for prevention to be maximised a
cultural shift is needed.
Men and
women are equal in Bangladesh's Constitution and law, but not in its culture.
And with 3 million cases backlogged in the court system, the law has limited
effect.
Bringing
about that cultural shift requires economic empowerment alongside social
empowerment for girls and women. It requires life skills for negotiation,
partnering in decision-making, and goal setting, among other things. It
necessitates occupational skills training to enable girls and women to connect
with the job market and to earn their own income. It also requires microfinance
so that women can get loans, and mentoring so that women can see a future that
they can impact.
Fortunately,
Brac has those tools in place. Brac Microfinance has 7.1 million clients, 87
percent of whom are women. Brac's Skills Development Programme has equipped
84,581 people with training and knowledge needed for employment, and 83 percent
of those learners—50 percent of whom are women—secured jobs after graduation.
Together these tools create a comprehensive package that can enable girls and
women to see a vibrant future and escape gender-based violence.
But the
scale of the problem is greater still. According to a 2015 survey by the
Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and the United Nations Population Fund, more
than 70 percent of married women or girls in Bangladesh have faced some form of
intimate partner abuse; about half of whom say their partners have physically
assaulted them. And the problem is global.
Covid-19
has revealed that girls and women need to be able to see a future of
opportunity for themselves. In combating Covid-19, the world must awaken to
this revelation. Covid-19 should now become the catalyst for the world to make
possible a future of opportunity for girls and women—a future without
gender-based violence.
-----
Saeda
Bilkis Bani is a Programme Manager in the Community Empowerment Programme at
Brac.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/the-impact-covid-19-child-marriage-and-other-gender-based-violence-2021813
------
Why
Congress Should Impeach Trump Again
By Neal
K. Katyal and Sam Koppelman
Jan. 4,
2021
The
emergence of an audio recording of President Trump pressuring the Georgia
secretary of state to overturn the results of the election is a harrowing
moment in the history of our democracy. And though the number of his days in
office is dwindling, the only appropriate response is to impeach Mr. Trump.
Again.
Whether he
acknowledges it or not, President Trump is leaving the White House on Jan. 20 —
but right now, there is nothing stopping him from running in 2024. That is a
terrifying prospect, because the way he has conducted himself over the past two
months, wielding the power of the presidency to try to steal another term in
office, has threatened one of our republic’s most essential traditions: the
peaceful transfer of power.
Fortunately,
our founders anticipated we would face a moment like this, which is one reason
Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution entrusts Congress with the power not
only to remove a president but also to prevent him or her from ever holding
elected office again. Mr. Trump’s conduct over the past two months has left our
legislators with no choice but to use it. That impeachment inquiry would take
time, far more than Mr. Trump has left in office. But it would be well worth
it.
Since the
election was called in favor of President-elect Joe Biden, Mr. Trump has been
relentlessly fomenting doubts about its legitimacy — even as many federal and
state courts, including ones whose judges were appointed by Mr. Trump himself,
have ruled against his claims. He has reportedly inquired about the idea of
enlisting the help of the military to keep him in power.
Most
recently, on the phone with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state,
he said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” He
added: “We won this state,” even though he didn’t. In a democracy, you don’t
find votes. You count them. Most strikingly, Mr. Trump threatened the Georgia
officials with criminal prosecution if they didn’t comply, saying leaving the
vote counts intact would be a “big risk.”
This kind
of threat may sound familiar, because an eerily similar abuse of power led to
Mr. Trump’s impeachment just over a year ago. Senator Susan Collins of Maine
explained her vote to acquit him by saying she thought he had learned “a pretty
big lesson.” Clearly, Mr. Trump learned a different lesson — that he was above
the law. It’s just as William Davie from North Carolina, discussing the
position of the presidency at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia,
predicted: A president who viewed himself to be unimpeachable, he said in 1787,
would “spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected.”
It’s time
for Congress, once and for all, to put an end to this.
No one
wants to put the country through the turmoil of another impeachment. But we
also can’t afford to look the other way — for several reasons.
For one, we
must establish a precedent that a president who tries to cheat his way to
re-election will be held accountable. Sure, this attempt may not have
succeeded, but a failed coup should itself be alarming enough. And who is to
say there won’t be a closer election in the future, with a more competent
authoritarian candidate — whose party also has control of the House of
Representatives? We need to make sure that Congress has ensured that candidates
cannot strong-arm their way into re-election.
We also
need to set a precedent that a lame duck president can still be held
accountable. If an incumbent, say, threatened to nuke Iran unless the Electoral
College sided with him, we would want to have a mechanism by which we could
remove him from office. In our Constitution, impeachment is that mechanism, but
it is worthless if we never use it.
And last,
we cannot risk Mr. Trump’s becoming president again — or for that matter, even
running again with a chance of winning. This isn’t a point about ideology; it’s
a reflection of the fact that our system may not be able to withstand this
lawless man returning to the highest office in the land. Emboldened by our
failure to hold him accountable for abusing his power in his first term, who
knows what he would do in a nonconsecutive second term? The damage to our
institutions from his first four years in office will take generations to undo.
Our democracy might not be able to handle another four.
Senator
Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, was able to protect Mr. Trump the last
time — no doubt because he was afraid of what a truly rigorous trial might
show. But he may no longer be able to do so. For one thing, Mr. Trump will soon
lack the power of the presidency to dole out favors and punish his enemies. For
another, the Senate composition will be different. Already, Democrats have
flipped seats in Arizona and Colorado. Republicans who voted to acquit him,
like Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, have shown signs they are finally willing to
stand up to him.
And
Georgians will go to the polls to decide who will represent them in the Senate.
Mr. Trump’s preferred senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, would no doubt
try to block an inquiry into his misdeeds. But if these senators lose their
seats, a full and robust inquiry in the Senate could be the result, with Chuck Schumer
as majority leader.
In 2008, a
young member of the Judiciary Committee said, “The business of high crimes and
misdemeanors goes to the question of whether or not the person serving as
president of the United States put their own interests, their personal
interests, ahead of public service.” That congressman’s name was Mike Pence —
and he was exactly right.
We need to
convict President Trump and make sure he can never call the White House home
again.
-----
Neal
Katyal (@neal_katyal), a law professor at Georgetown and a former acting
solicitor general of the United States, and Sam Koppelman (@SammyKoppelman), a
principal at Fenway Strategies, are the authors of “Impeach: The Case Against
Donald Trump.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/opinion/trump-georgia-impeach.html?
------
A Better
Normal for Women and Girls after Covid-19
By
Bambang Susantono and Anita Bhatia
January 05,
2021
2020 was synonymous with the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented crisis it brought across economic, social, and health dimensions. 2021, on the other hand, is already being associated with the promise of the next normal.
For the
Asian Development Bank (ADB) and UN Women, our new year's resolution is that we
see more Covid-19 recovery strategies that prioritise the needs of women and
girls in order to create a better and more egalitarian normal.
The Asia
and Pacific region is providing some inspiring and concrete lessons on how a
new normal can be more effectively achieved when gender equality is fully
integrated into strategies, policies, and investments.
Governments
across the region have shown that taking decisive and proactive actions can
mitigate short-term effects and pave the way toward a better normal for women.
An ADB-UN Women high-level ministerial event held in fall 2020 for ministers of
finance and gender, and other senior representatives from Fiji, India,
Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Philippines, Samoa, and Thailand, shared
good practices and policies to ensure women remain at the centre of Covid-19
response and recovery.
The
Indonesian government's approach to implementing direct cash transfers
encourages families to use maternal health and nutrition services, and
motivates them to send children to school and focus on financial management.
Similarly, in the Philippines, psycho-social support and specialised training
for health sector workers include recognising and treating domestic violence,
and providing referral advice.
In India,
the government's investments in digital infrastructure over the last six years
have enabled 400 million citizens to open a bank account for the first time in
their lives. Those bank accounts were leveraged during the pandemic to ensure
direct cash transfers to the accounts of 220 million women. This principle
reminds us to "leave no one behind" as we look to rebuilding our
economies.
Still,
there is a great deal of work to be done. A UN Women survey found that more
women in the region were likely to have experienced job loss and reduced paid
hours than men. This is in line with other data indicating that women are
concentrated in the most hard-hit sectors of the pandemic, such as tourism,
manufacturing, textiles, and garments. In some countries in the region, nearly
half of women working in the particularly vulnerable informal sectors have lost
their jobs since the outbreak began—more than double the rate of men.
Women's
difficulty maintaining their paid work is further exacerbated by the increased
time they are spending on unpaid care work, such as caring for their families
and households. Before the pandemic, the International Labour Organization
estimated that men in Asia and the Pacific performed the least amount of unpaid
care work globally (average of 64 minutes per day). As a consequence, women in
the region worked the longest hours in the world when their paid (262 minutes
per day) and unpaid work (201 minutes per day) are combined.
Women spent
an average four times longer than men on unpaid care work like taking care of
children and family members and domestic chores. With the Covid-19 lockdown,
the volume of unpaid care work has exponentially increased for both women and
men, however, women still shoulder most of the burden.
There are
many other negative pandemic effects on gender equality, including increased
rates of domestic violence, maternal and infant mortality, and more girls
dropping out of school, to name just a few. Female morbidity rates are lower,
but the pandemic's socio-economic impacts seem to be affecting women and girls
more, with both short and long-term consequences.
Development
partners like ADB and UN Women play a critical role in supporting governments
to achieve a gender equality-focused recovery. For this reason, ADB and UN
Women are recommitting to strengthen our existing partnership in key areas needed
to build back better.
This
includes sex-disaggregated data collection to better inform national and
regional recovery policies; gender-responsive budgeting to ensure
accountability and transparency toward gender goals; gender-responsive
procurement to enable more women-owned businesses to access markets, working
closely with both private and public sectors to develop tools and knowledge to
prioritise gender equality in business and investment decisions; and combating
increased gender-based violence, one of the pandemic's most destructive
consequences.
Many Asia
and Pacific countries are showing that setting strong targets for women and
girls in response and recovery programmes, and developing specialised
activities to mitigate Covid-19 effects are both realistic and necessary. In
all of ADB's emergency Covid-19 pandemic response packages, gender targets have
been integrated across health, economic resilience, and social protection
domains, reflecting the reality that recovery is not possible if half the population
is left (further) behind.
We
encourage all governments and development partners to make similar New Year's
resolutions to put gender equality front and centre of their Covid-19 recovery.
Let's make sure that 2021 really does usher in a better normal for women and
girls.
----
Bambang
Susantono is the Vice-President for Knowledge Management and Sustainable
Development of the Asian Development Bank.
Anita
Bhatia is the Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Entity for Gender
Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women).
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/better-normal-women-and-girls-after-covid-19-2022465
-----
What New
Science Techniques Tell Us about Ancient Women Warriors
By
Annalee Newitz
Jan. 1,
2021
Though it’s
remarkable that the United States finally is about to have a female vice
president, let’s stop calling it an unprecedented achievement. As some recent
archaeological studies suggest, women have been leaders, warriors and hunters
for thousands of years. This new scholarship is challenging long-held beliefs
about so-called natural gender roles in ancient history, inviting us to
reconsider how we think about women’s work today.
In November
a group of anthropologists and other researchers published a paper in the
academic journal Science Advances about the remains of a 9,000-year-old
big-game hunter buried in the Andes. Like other hunters of the period, this
person was buried with a specialized tool kit associated with stalking large
game, including projectile points, scrapers for tanning hides and a tool that
looked like a knife. There was nothing particularly unusual about the body —
though the leg bones seemed a little slim for an adult male hunter. But when
scientists analyzed the tooth enamel using a method borrowed from forensics
that reveals whether a person carries the male or female version of a protein
called amelogenin, the hunter turned out to be female.
With that
information in hand, the researchers re-examined evidence from 107 other graves
in the Americas from roughly the same period. They were startled to discover
that out of 26 graves with hunter tools, 10 belonged to women. Bonnie Pitblado,
an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, told Science magazine
that the findings indicate that “women have always been able to hunt and have
in fact hunted.” The new data calls into question an influential dogma in the
field of archaeology. Nicknamed “man the hunter,” this is the notion that men
and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles: Men hunted, and
women gathered. Now, this theory may be crumbling.
While the
Andean finding was noteworthy, this was not the first female hunter or warrior
to be found by re-examining old archaeological evidence using fresh scientific
techniques. Nor was this sort of discovery confined to one group, or one part
of the world.
Three years
ago, scientists re-examined the remains of a 10th-century Viking warrior excavated
in Sweden at the end of the 19th century by Hjalmar Stolpe, an archaeologist.
The skeleton had been regally buried at the top of a hill, with a sword, two
shields, arrows and two horses. For decades, beginning with the original
excavation, archaeologists assumed the Viking was a man. When researchers in
the 1970s conducted a new anatomical evaluation of the skeleton, they began to
suspect that the Viking was in fact a woman. But it wasn’t until 2017, when a
group of Swedish archaeologists and geneticists extracted DNA from the remains,
that the sex of the warrior indeed proved to be female.
The finding
led to controversy over whether the skeleton was really a warrior, with
scholars and pundits protesting what they called revisionist history. Although the
genetic sex determination thus was indisputable (the bones of the skeleton had
two X chromosomes), these criticisms led the Swedish researchers to examine the
evidence yet again, and present a second, more contextual analysis in 2019.
Their conclusion again was that the person had been a warrior.
The
naysayers raised fair points. In archaeology, as the researchers admitted, we
can’t always know why a community buried someone with particular objects. And
one female warrior does not mean that many women were leaders, just as the
reign of Queen Elizabeth I was not part of a larger feminist movement.
Challenges
to “man the hunter” have emerged in new examinations of the early cultures of
the Americas as well. In the 1960s, an archaeological dig uncovered in the
ancient city of Cahokia, in what is now southwestern Illinois, a
1,000-to-1,200-year-old burial site with two central bodies, one on top of the
other, surrounded by other skeletons. The burial was full of shell beads,
projectile points and other luxury items. At the time, the archaeologists
concluded that this was a burial of two high-status males flanked by their
servants.
But in 2016
archaeologists conducted a fresh examination of the grave. The two central
figures, it turned out, were a male and a female; they were surrounded by other
male-female pairs. Thomas Emerson, who conducted the study with colleagues from
the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois,
alongside scientists from other institutions, said the Cahokia discovery
demonstrated the existence of male and female nobility. “We don’t have a system
in which males are these dominant figures and females are playing bit parts,”
as he put it.
Armchair
history buffs love to obsess about mythical societies dominated by female
warriors, like Amazons and Valkyries. Let’s be clear. These findings don’t
reveal an ancient matriarchy. But neither do they reaffirm the idea of
societies in which men dominate completely. What they indicate is a lot more
mundane and relatable: Some women were warriors and leaders; many weren’t.
There was inequality, but it wasn’t absolute, and there were a lot of shifts
over time. When it comes to female power, and gender roles, the past was as
ambiguous as the present.
------
Annalee
Newitz, a science journalist and a contributing Opinion writer, is the author
of the forthcoming “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/opinion/women-hunter-leader.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
-----
To
Defend Democracy, Investigate Trump
By
Michelle Goldberg
Jan. 4,
2021
According
to Title 52, Section 20511 of the United States Code, anyone who “knowingly and
willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents
of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” for federal
office can be punished by up to five years in prison.
Donald
Trump certainly seems to have violated this law. He is on tape alternately
cajoling and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to
“find 11,780 votes,” enough to give him a winning margin in a state that he
lost. He may have also broken federal conspiracy law and Georgia election law.
“This is
probably the most serious political crime I’ve ever heard of,” Michael Bromwich,
a former inspector general for the Department of Justice, told me. “And yet
there is the high likelihood that there will be no accountability for it.”
At this
point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a
brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer
without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as
illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the
time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s
political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner
ineligible for the presidency.
Now Trump
and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials
to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their
allies in Congress to reject the results.
It isn’t
working this time for several reasons. Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory
wasn’t close. Republican state officials like Raffensperger behaved honorably.
Democrats control the House, and some Senate Republicans retain a baseline
commitment to democracy.
None of
those conditions are likely to be permanent, though. Minimally decent
Republicans are particularly endangered. Expect Trumpists to mount primary
challenges to them and replace them with cynics, cranks and fanatics.
True
democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If
Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what
political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections
still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.
Some are
trying to constrain Trump’s lawlessness. Two Democratic members of the House,
Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice, asked the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to
open a criminal probe. In Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney has
expressed openness to bringing a case, saying, “Anyone who commits a felony
violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.”
But there
is little appetite in the House for impeaching Trump again, though he
transparently deserves it. (“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking
forward,” Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said on
Monday.) Joe Biden doesn’t seem to want his attorney general to investigate
Trump, though he’s also said he wouldn’t stand in his or her way. And experts
point to numerous reasons federal prosecutors might decline to bring a case.
The first
is what we might call the psychopath’s advantage: Prosecutors would have to
prove that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong. “You’re not dealing
with your ordinary fraudster or your ordinary criminal or even your ordinary
corrupt politician,” said Bromwich. “He seems to believe a lot of the lies that
he’s telling.”
There’s
also the sheer political difficulty of prosecuting a former president. “My
guess is that in the weeks and months that a prosecutor takes to develop a case
like that, they’re at the end of the day going to say, ‘The guy’s not in office,
nothing happened, we’re not spending our resources on it,’” the Republican
election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told me. “Which doesn’t take away from the
really immoral nature of the call.”
Taken on
their own, most excuses for not investigating or prosecuting Trump make at
least some sense. Launching an impeachment less than three weeks before Biden’s
inauguration might appear futile. It could even feed right-wing delusions by
creating the impression that Democrats think Trump might be able to stay in office
otherwise. Both the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress will be
fully occupied dealing with the devastation to public health and the economy
that Trump is leaving behind. Beyond its legal challenges, a federal
prosecution of Trump would maintain his toxic grip on the country’s attention.
Yet if
there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The
structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and
rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield
national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not
so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the
majority.
During
impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct,
but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his
behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is
refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish
attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s
inconvenient.
----
Michelle
Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several
books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that
won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace
sexual harassment issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/opinion/trump-georgia-call.html?
-----
Supreme
Leader of Voter Suppression
By
Charles M. Blow
Jan. 3,
2021
Regardless
of what has happened since the election two months ago, or what may happen in
the next few weeks, Joe Biden will almost assuredly be inaugurated the
president on Jan. 20, and Donald J. Trump’s official reign of presidential
terror will end that day.
But, that
is cold comfort, as we have trudged through these last months of President
Trump trying, at every turn, to overthrow the will of the people by overturning
the election he lost in November. Even if his ultimate loss is inevitably
secured, it seems as though he is burning down the village as he retreats.
Trump has
essentially claimed that fraud occurred during the election in large
swing-state cities within counties that have large African-American populations
— cities like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. But there’s a problem with
that implicit theory, as The New York Times pointed out in November: “All three
cities voted pretty much the same way they did in 2016. Turnout barely budged,
relative to other areas in these states. Joseph R. Biden Jr. saw no remarkable
surge in support — certainly nothing that would bolster claims of ballot
stuffing or tampered vote tallies. Mr. Trump even picked up marginally more
votes this year in all three cities than he did four years ago.”
Trump
didn’t lose this election in the cities, he lost it in the suburbs. But that
thought is antithetical to the war Trump wants to wage in America between the
suburbs and what he deems problematic “inner cities” and “Democrat-run cities”
— code for where concentrations of Black people and other people of color live.
That prevailing racialized perception in conservative politics is part of the
danger that Trump’s campaign to undermine the election poses: It threatens to
strengthen efforts to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color who
disproportionately vote for Democrats in the future.
Trump has
contended that his challenge to the election is about “ensuring that Americans
can have faith in this election and in all future elections.” As Jay Willis
pointed out in The Washington Post, “Even after Trump’s presidency ends, that
message will pave the way for G.O.P. politicians and judges to further one of
their party’s and the conservative movement’s most important ongoing projects:
restricting voting rights.” He continued: “Trump lost this election, but he can
still help Republicans win in the future.”
Conservatives
in America — whether they were acting under the banner of Democrats a hundred
years ago or under the Republican one today — have engaged in a campaign for
racial exclusion at the ballot ever since Black people — only Black men at
first — gained access to the franchise.
Trump not
only attempted to erase Black votes after they were cast, he attempted to
suppress them before they were cast. This is nothing new among conservatives,
but Trump has dragged the practice out of the back rooms and into the light of
day once again, giving it a telegenic, digitally contagious persona.
And the
Republican Party, or at least large portions of it, seems to have embraced
Trump’s approach of making voter suppression a front-and-center,
out-in-the-open central tenet of their electoral strategy.
As Eric
Levitz pointed out in New York Magazine: “The G.O.P. is now a party that has no
compunction about nullifying the voting rights of its opposition to retain
power. And once a party has liberated itself from the shackles of respecting
its detractors’ rights, much else becomes permissible.”
We have
heard much talk about how Trump’s bogus battle weakens democracy by causing
people to lose faith in elections. But we don’t talk enough about how for Black
people and other racial minorities, this isn’t only about faith. For them, it’s
about being able to participate in elections at all.
Now Trump’s
battle moves to Congress, where a group of Republicans plans to challenge the
counting of state Electoral College votes. This effort, too, is expected to
fail. But it will provide yet another spectacle on a grand stage for the lie
that Trump and his sycophantic courtiers have sown: that the political machine
in liberal cities full of Blacks, hipsters, gays and gangs stole elections from
the real Americans in the hinterlands.
What we are
seeing unfold before our eyes is not about building trust in elections, it is
anti-patriotic. It is not about ensuring that every legal vote is counted. It’s
about attempting to legally limit whose ballots can be counted.
Trump is
attempting to drag Jim Crow into the Twitter era.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/opinion/trump-voter-suppression.html
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