RE: FW: Racial Blind Spot Continues to Afflict Greens

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> sawicky@xxxxxxxxxx 12/01/00 12:13PM >>>
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Beal wants RN to tail the Democrats, who get no
criticism in this column, in
making an issue of efforts to thwart African American
voting.  I guess I'm the only one who sees this as
grossly opportunistic and hypocritical, in view of the
fact that the Dem protest is solely premised on helping
to put Al Gore over the top in FL.  Beal says:

(((((((((((((((

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This Message Is From: Fran Beal <FBeal@xxxxxxxxxx>
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Here is my column of Nov 22nd in which I say Black chickens come home to
roost for dems:

Elections 2000:  Racial Politics Take Center Stage
By Frances M. Beal
	While political pundits and public relations firms slug it out in
Florida about who will be the next president of the United States, African
American communities across the country are still reeling from the exposure
of egregious violations of the Voting Rights Act in that southern state.  We
all know it happens.  Blacks in the south have for years been complaining
about voting irregularities, including broken voting machines, running out
of ballots and absentee voting fraud among whites.  What was not so clear
was that the systematic disenfranchisement of as many Black voters as
possible was to be a conscious campaign policy and what Gov. Jeb Bush meant
when he promised delivery of Florida's 25 electoral votes to his brother,
George W.
	While the media concentrated on the butterfly ballot in W. Palm
Beach and the fight over whether to recount the ballots, stories began to
emerge about the systematic attempt to diminish the Black turnout.  However,
these offenses came under national scrutiny when the NAACP held hearings and
heard testimony that taken as a whole, amounts to a policy of systematic
black vote denial.  These tactics included police roadblocks near voting
precincts that stopped Black men demanding identification, issuing tickets
for driving without a taxi license to get out the vote workers driving
carloads of people to vote, not picking up ballots at several black
precincts until the Friday or Saturday following the election, turning
Blacks away from the polls claiming they were not registered voters, closing
Black precincts early or running out of ballots, the denial of voting rights
to students at Florida A&M University and Bethune-Cookman College. In
addition, first time Haitian voters were not permitted translation
assistance, a five minute voting limit was imposed and voters who made
errors were illegally refused a second ballot, some Blacks were turned away
because they were falsely accused of being former felons.
(Disenfranchisement exists for one in three adult African American men in
Florida, or 200,000 males who can not vote because of a prior felony
conviction.)
	And then there is the Electoral College and its racist history.
	Many of us didn't realize when we punched our ballots on Election
Day that we were not voting for a president, but for a mysterious elector
who would in turn select the next U.S. president, who currently needs 270
electoral votes to be proclaimed president. Gore leads Bush in the popular
vote by 200,000 but this number is not taken into account, only the
electoral vote is determinant.  How could such an undemocratic procedure be
embedded in the U.S. Constitution?  Once again, the U.S. history of racism
is at the root of this anachronism.
	After the 13 colonies defeated the British king, the Electoral
College was created to appease the slave owners in the new federal
arrangement.  Vastly under populated because of the dependence upon slave
labor, the Southern planters demanded that the slaves be counted as
three-fifths of a person in determining congressional representation and in
the selection of the U.S. president.  After the Civil War, Black access to
the voting booth was wiped out by the rise of the KKK and state sanctioned
violence until the mass movement won the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
	But in some minds, election 2000 will also be known as the year that
black chickens came home to roost for the democrats.  For eight years the
conservative forces in the Democratic Party neglected their most loyal base,
African Americans, in favor of a strategy of appealing to the white suburban
voter by adopting the policies of the Republican Party, including a
reactionary welfare reform policy, the criminalization of social issues and
a trade policy that furthered the emiseration of Black workers at home.  The
ideological face of this strategy has been the rise of racism in the form of
assaults not only on affirmative action and propagating racist juvenile
justice schemes, but a tepid defense of fundamental democratic liberties
like voting rights.
	Gore's silence on racism and white supremacy fit all too neatly with
the GOP southern strategy of tacit (and explicit) appeals to white
chauvinism in Florida.  The dems were thus ill-equipped to counter the
Republican web of conspiracy to steal the election by the systematic denial
of voting rights to the Black population.

Frances M. Beal is a columist for the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and
National Secretary of the Black Radical Congress: fmbeal@xxxxxxx