Civilization gap.
Racism began in the West as a biological explanation for a large gap of civilizational development separating blacks from whites. Today racism is reinforced and made plausible by the reemergence of that gap within the United States. For many whites the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization. If this is true, the best way to eradicate beliefs in black inferiority is to remove their empirical basis. As African American scholars Jeff Howard and Ray Hammond argue, if blacks as a group can show that they are capable of performing competitively in schools and the work force, and exercising both the rights and the responsibilities of American citizenship, then racism will be deprived of its foundation in experience. If blacks can close this civilization gap, the race problem in this country is likely to become insignificant.
—Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism
Greg Palast: In the year 2000, 1.9 million votes were cast and not counted across this country—1.9 million votes. And of those 1.9 million votes, about a million were cast by African-Americans. This investigation was conducted by Harvard and the Civil Rights Commission, and I grabbed the material. There’s a 1965 Voting Rights Act that gave black people the right to vote, but not the right to have their votes counted.
All this came out of my first investigation in Florida. I brought it to the attention of the Civil Rights Commission that the so-called “spoilage rate” seemed to be different among black people than with white people. What that means is that, if you make a mistake on a ballot, or if there’s some problem with reading your ballot, your vote doesn’t count.
In Florida, the researchers went precinct by precinct and determined that if you are a black person, you are 10 times more likely to have your vote marked spoiled and voided than if you’re a white voter—10 times! And what’s disgusting is that that is the national average. So we basically have a big black thumbprint on the electoral scale in our election, and it’s going to be worse in 2004.
BuzzFlash: You’re saying that the Florida 2000 election was just the tip of the iceberg and that there is essentially a national epidemic of erasing or not counting African-American votes?
Greg Palast: There are several things. First, there is the big story I broke last time. As it turns out in Florida, 90,000 mostly African-American voters—which is the latest official number from the courts—were illegally targeted for removal from the voter rolls. Those people were not allowed to even register to vote and therefore didn’t cast a ballot in the election.
But for those African-Americans who did get to vote, their votes were far more likely not to be counted than other votes. I saw this in Florida, and it is deliberate. When it’s 10 to 1, as any statistician told me, unless lightning strikes seven times in one spot, how can it not be deliberate?
—BuzzFlash interview with Greg Palast
via the Sideshow
With less than six months to go before the presidential election, thousands of Florida voters who may have been improperly removed from the voter rolls in 2000 have yet to have their eligibility restored.
Records obtained by The Herald show that just 33 of 67 counties have responded to a request by state election officials to check whether or not nearly 20,000 voters should be reinstated as required under a legal settlement reached between the state, the NAACP and other groups nearly two years ago.
Some of the counties that have failed to respond to the state include many of Florida’s largest, including Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach.
Those counties that have responded told the state that they have restored 679 voters to the rolls so far—more than enough to have tipped the balance of the 2000 election had they voted for Al Gore. President Bush won Florida and the presidency by 537 votes.
—”Many voters not yet back on rolls”
by Gary Fineout, the Miami Herald
via the Suburban Guerilla
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But, yuh see, Dinesh has Bill Cosby in his corner. Yuh see? Nothing backs up a conservative argument about racism like the corroboration of a black millionaire dissing poor black folk while slurping on a Jello pudding pop. Yuh see?
American Fascism at work #2 : Voting while black
Long story; short pier: Civilization gap....