Over the last few years, the narrative about voting rights has drastically changed. We know that the history of who can and cannot vote in the U.S. is fraught with discrimination against women, the poor, and people of color. Some fifty years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer decided to risk her livelihood (to whatever extent sharecropping can be considered a livelihood) and her very life to fight against voter suppression. It was people like Hamer who saw the transformative possibilities attached in simply exercising one’s right to register to vote, and this is what eventually helped secure the Voting Rights Act. For some readers, the reminder that radical black folks have jeopardized their lives so that future generations could fully participate in this nation’s democracy is a fact that should be celebrated and honored—and these posts will serve as a reminder that, by and large, voter suppression still largely targets people of color. For others, who might feel a detachment with establishment politics, we’ve taken this project on in order to help generate what we feel should be a natural concern for social justice activists.
We’re attentive not only to legislation and bullying tactics that confront people of color, but other communities who are often left out of the analysis. When we read about the Latino vote, we often read about immigration and deportation—but what about those immigrants who are now naturalized citizens? In Florida, immigrant voters have filed suit to protect their right to vote after being made to show proof of citizenship, yet were not provided with any written guarantee that they would be eligible to participate in the upcoming election. As in previous elections, we’ve also read that women may decide the next election, yet working women may soon realize they won’t have the time to jump through all the necessary hoops in order to vote. And although we don’t often read about transgender people in relation to the presidential election, more than 25,000 of them may lose their right to vote—more than a quarter of those live in battleground states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. This is what voter suppression looks like in 2012: yes, it still targets black and poor voters, but it’s also an immigrant, gender, and transgender rights issue.
While the Voting Rights Act was crafted to guarantee rights on a national level, we’ve found that the attacks against voting rights are numerous and decentralized, designed to keep activists on the defensive. We felt we wanted to provide these watchdogs an offensive outlet. For that reason, we’ll soon be joined by a team of community journalists who will tip us to and report about mechanisms of harassment that we might otherwise miss. We feel this kind of crowdsourcing will help explain the smaller details that make up the grander scale of voter suppression.
Full Article: Fannie Lou Who? Why Voting Rights Still Matter – COLORLINES.