Posts Tagged ‘voting rights’
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”*
How do we make sense of the world? How do we make our ways through it? Venkatesh Rao cautions against both of the currently-dominant narratives that shape our perceptions and actions: the “helpless witness,” as evinced in the quote above, and the other dominant lens, the “blind builder”…
It is hard to make sense of events these days because we feel constantly forced into a false choice between blind builder narratives and helpless witness narratives. Stories told by people so enthralled by new agencies they don’t notice their insensibility to current realities, or the poverty of their future visions driving their excited building. Or stories told by people so lacking in agency of any sort that their visions, while richer, are uniformly bleak and framed by their own sense of utter helplessness and doom.
The fundamental inadequacies of these frames, much more than the right/left political leanings usually associated with them, is perhaps the real reason for my refusal to ally with any of the narratives on offer. I don’t want to be either blind or helpless, or move along a tradeoff curve between them.
An interesting pattern that’s popped for me as a way out of this bind, and a possible stance from which to narrate and inhabit more powerful sorts of stories, is working with media that are simultaneously about seeing and doing...
Eminently worth reading in full: “Not Just a Camera, Not Just an Engine,” from @vgr.bsky.social.
* Christopher Isherwood, “Goodbye to Berlin” (in The Berlin Stories)
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As we reframe, we might recall that, on this date in 1872, Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for voting.
In 1863, she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had founded the Women’s Loyal National League. In 1866, the pair initiated the American Equal Rights Association which campaigned for equal rights for both African Americans and all women. In 1869, they created the National Woman Suffrage Association and on this day in 1872, Anthony attempted to vote in her hometown of Rochester, New York– and was fined $100 for doing so. She refused to pay the fine and the authorities declined to take further action against her. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton presented Congress with an amendment giving women the right to vote. It became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. In 1979, the United States honored Anthony by placing her image on the one-dollar U.S. coin.
“Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less”*…
At the time of the 2016 US presidential election, stationery shops did a brisk trade in entirely blank books, with covers bearing such titles as The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump and Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration. A year later Michael J. Knowles topped the Amazon charts with his Reasons to Vote for Democrats, comprising 200 blank pages. It’s an old joke, as this precursor from 1880 shows, and this one from the same year. One of the finest examples of the genre, and at a welcome remove from the petty political-point-scoring mood of many others, is this tiny publication from circa 1917.
Despite its novelty angle, this little book from the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company (the publishing arm of the National Woman Suffrage Association) was born from a very serious place: the struggle to gain women the right to vote in the United States. The N. W. S. A. published a range of agitprop, not just comedy items. Virginia Commonwealth University has a collection of texts from the New York-based organisation, including the Headquarters News Letter, an A-B-C of Organization, a guide to fundraising, and information brochures on the proposed changes to the Constitution. There are leaflets targeting specific audiences too: teachers, farmers’ wives, Catholics, Southern white women concerned about “the Negro Vote”. More general-audience books, such as Why Women Should Not Vote also found their way to specific targets. A copy was left on the desk of anti-women’s suffrage Rep. Sherman Berry who decried it as “another sample of … the detestable and cheap politics practiced in this State. Gentlemen, that little book carries no more weight with it than does the picketing of the White House in this time of crisis and peril to this nation and the heckling of our President….”
Two years on from the publication of the book (and presumably to Berry’s dismay) the legislative battle for women’s suffrage was won in 1919, with ratification of the 19th Amendment from the required number of states following in 1920: it was prohibited to deny citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was a huge victory, but not the end of the struggle…
Agitprop at it’s best: “Why Women Should Not Vote (1917)“
* “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union… Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” – Susan B. Anthony
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As we remember that politics is supposed to be about people, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a young Swiss chemist at Sandoz, Albert Hofmann, while researching the medicinal plant squill and the fungus ergot in a search for compounds useful in pharmaceuticals, first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). As it wasn’t immediately promising, he put it aside. But he revisited his formulation several years later, on April 16, 1943; handling it, he accidentally absorbed a bit through his fingertips and realized that the compound had psychoactive effects. Three days later, on April 19, 1943 (a date now known as “Bicycle Day”) Hofmann intentionally ingested 250 micrograms of LSD, then rode home on a bike– a journey that became, pun intended, the first intentional acid trip. (This is not to be confused with the UN’s World Bicycle Day.)
Hofmann was also the first person to isolate, synthesize, and name the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin.
“That’s all we’re asking for: an end to the antidemocratic and un-American practice of gerrymandering congressional districts”*…
Though a substantial majority disapprove of the practice, the Supreme Court recently refused to address the issue of partisan redistricting– gerrymandering…
The Supreme Court will not end extreme partisan gerrymandering. In a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the court ruled Thursday that partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts cannot be limited by federal courts. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, writing that “what the appellees and dissent seek is an unprecedented expansion of judicial power.”
Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent was scathing. “For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” she wrote in her opening sentence. She argued that imposing limits on gerrymandered districts is not beyond the scope of the court: “The partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”
The ruling almost certainly would have been different if Anthony Kennedy were still on the court. Before retiring last year, Kennedy had been the swing justice on previous gerrymandering cases. He had said that partisan gerrymandering was within the purview of the court but that the justices should hold off on ruling any particular gerrymander unconstitutional until a manageable standard for measuring gerrymandering emerged. Since he took that position in 2004, reformers had been attempting to find such a standard. Legal scholars and statisticians developed various measurements to try to win over the court, but without Kennedy, those efforts turned out to be futile…
FiveThirtyEight considers the possible impacts of the Court’s abnegation and explores other paths to a remedy: “Partisan Gerrymandering Isn’t The Supreme Court’s Problem Anymore.”
See also: “Electoral map bias may worsen as U.S. gerrymandering battle shifts to states” and “The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them.”
* President Ronald Reagan (in 1988, illustrating on the one hand that this is an issue of long standing [see here for earlier history]; and on the other, that shoes have a way of moving from one foot to the other…)
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As we recall that the American Revolution was, in part, about the lack of fair representation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress.
Use it or lose it.
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