In a new and exciting twist on voter suppression, women voters are targeted by Texas:
Texas’s new voter ID law got off to a rocky start this week as early voting began for state constitutional amendments. The law was previously blocked as discriminatory by the federal courts under the Voting Rights Act in 2012, until the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the VRA in June. (The Department of Justice has filed suit against the law under Section 2 of the VRA.) Now we are seeing the disastrous ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Based on Texas’ own data, 600,000 to 800,000 registered voters don’t have the government-issued ID needed to cast a ballot, with Hispanics 46 to 120 percent more likely than whites to lack an ID. But a much larger segment of the electorate, particularly women, will be impacted by the requirement that a voter’s ID be “substantially similar” to their name on the voter registration rolls.
“What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote,” 117th District Court Judge Sandra Watts said.
Watts has voted in every election for the last forty-nine years. The name on her driver’s license has remained the same for fifty-two years, and the address on her voter registration card or driver’s license hasn’t changed in more than two decades. So imagine her surprise when she was told by voting officials that she would have to sign a “voters affidavit” affirming she was who she said she was.
“Someone looked at that and said, ‘Well, they’re not the same,’” Watts said.
The difference? On the driver’s license, Judge Watts’s maiden name is her middle name. On her voter registration, it’s her actual middle name. That was enough under the new, more strict voter fraud law, to send up a red flag.
“This is the first time I have ever had a problem voting,” Watts said.
The disproportionate impact of the law on women voters could be a major factor in upcoming Texas elections, especially now that Wendy Davis is running for governor in 2014.
Getting a valid photo ID in Texas can be far more difficult than one assumes. To obtain one of the government-issued IDs now needed to vote, voters must first pay for underlying documents to confirm their identity, the cheapest option being a birth certificate for $22 (otherwise known as a “poll tax”); there are no DMV offices in eighty-one of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to the closest location. Counties with a significant Hispanic population are less likely to have a DMV office, while Hispanic residents in such counties are twice as likely as whites to not have the new voter ID (Hispanics in Texas are also twice as likely as whites to not have a car). “A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote,” a federal court wrote last year when it blocked the law.
Texas has set up mobile voter ID units in twenty counties to help people obtain an ID, but has issued new IDs to only twenty voters at the sites so far.
Is anyone surprised that Texas’s law also harms women voters, in addition to all the other targeted groups? To predict where voting restrictions are going, look to whatever group might be drifting away from the GOP. Gender gap? Check!
We’ve seen a judge and a justice admit they got a voter ID case completely wrong. What are the odds the conservatives on the SCOTUS admit they got the VRA case wrong?
pharniel
0 – unless one of them thinks it’ll damage their ‘legacy’ then they’ll find a mealy mouthed way of correcting some of it. maybe.
Frankensteinbeck
I doubt that it is meant to restrict women voters, because women voters do not lean particularly Democratic. On the other hand, I doubt that the people who passed the law consider this a negative, because to them women aren’t people, so who cares?
maya
SATSQ – Zero. This is precisely what they had in mind. Only white males could vote when the Consta2shun was invented. So there.
LanceThruster
DMD! (i.e. Die Motherf#ckers, Die!)
Lurking Buffoon
If voting made a difference it would be illegal!
…. Oh wait.
/Emoprog
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck:
What do you base that statement on? There are scads of polls indicating a fairly large and consistent gender gap in favor of the Dems going back for decades. Here’s one.
Kay
@maya:
I loved that Justice Ginsburg came out immediately with “I told you so”
You have to put down the marker or they’ll weasel out of it.
Omnes Omnibus
The upside of this is that the law is so bad and Texas’s implementation of it is so bad that courts should have an easy time striking it down.
Napoleon
@Betty Cracker:
In just Texas?
Napoleon
@Betty Cracker:
And PS, keep in mind it would most likely hit married woman or woman who were married and maintain there married name after divorice. My guess is that group in TX is not very likely to lien Dem.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
I hope so.
I was thinking of Pennsylvania ’12, the incompetence factor, but that was a state court and that was pre-election. They’re voting (or not voting, as the case may be) in Texas right now.
Mike E
Now, THIS is like the invasion of Iraq! The bouquet on this clusterfuck is quite odoriferous. Mission Accomplished, TX GOP!
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
Interesting, and thank you! Goes to show how you can misremember things. I was sure I remembered that non-minority women voters leaned very slightly Republican. Guess not!
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Is it too late to give Texas back to Mexico? We can sweeten the deal by throwing in Mississippi, Alabama and South Dakota.
Napoleon
@Omnes Omnibus:
Why is it that the Rep can not seem to do ANYTHING withoug going over the top with it?
cleek
@Omnes Omnibus:
… eventually.
in time for 2014?
Omnes Omnibus
@Napoleon:
Because they are assholes and that’s what assholes do. If they had any real grasp of nuance and proportion, they wouldn’t be who they are.
Omnes Omnibus
@cleek: The Justice Department has already filed suit. All that is is needed for 2014 is an injunction.
Kay
@cleek:
You’d think someone could sue under state law. State constitutions and statutes have voting protections, too.
Obviously, they lack lawyers in Texas :)
Mike in NC
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Change that last one to South Carolina and it’s a deal.
Frankensteinbeck
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep. It’s built in. Their policies are based on the same personality traits that make them overreach. Selfish, short-sighted thinking slathered heavily with petty spite and actual hate is the inspiration for all conservative thought.
Boudica
I voted in Texas yesterday. My DL shows my maiden name as my middle name and my voter registration shows my real middle name. I had no trouble……so is there no consistency, or are some poll workers being dicks?
Mnemosyne
@Frankensteinbeck:
I, too, was remembering that married white women tended to be Republican voters, but it looks like that mainly holds true for 65+. Married white women under 65 lean Democratic.
But no one ever said Republicans weren’t willing to throw their own voters under the bus in the hope that the other side’s voters would be hurt even worse.
MattR
@Frankensteinbeck:
They do. White women went for Romney 56-42 nationwide. In 2008, women in Texas went for McCain 52-47.
OTOH, women are more likely to vote Demcratic than men overall and when breaking it down by race.
Geeno
Nil
Matt McIrvin
@Lurking Buffoon: Strangely enough, when Emma Goldman said that, it actually was illegal for her. She was opposed to the women’s suffrage movement, because she figured voting was a scam anyway.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
Me, too. It’s just funny how narrow it could get: “married white women over 65” it’s still a pretty big group, but they’re getting there!
Belafon
@Napoleon: They like to use shotguns and automatic weapons, or at least unload their entire clip. Firing randomly and hoping to hit their target once is part of their nature.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Frankensteinbeck: It’s a little bit more complicated than that but I essentially agree with you that, while the ways this hinders women voters is egregious and should be fixed, it won’t hurt Democrats as much as it might seem. That’s because the Democratic advantage among women voters is almost entirely an advantage among single women voters; married women tend to vote more like men. And from what I can tell, the way it’s going to disproportionately hurt women voters is because of changes in name connected to marriage.
Obviously there are divorced women for whom this will also be a problem and I have no idea how their voting patterns break down. But among the most prominent Democratic cohort, young women who have never married, it should just cause the problems it causes to people in general.
Mike E
@Boudica: You hit the nail on the head…I suspect the new challenge leeway given to zealous poll workers is a feature, not a bug. NC ’14 will be fun like this. (Not.)
Tokyokie
You only have to renew your driver’s license every 10 years in Texas, and because people generally want to avoid the hassle of going to the DMV office (I was nearly arrested the last time I went, for being impolite with a DMV clerk), they tend not to do so until it’s necessary. So if you change your name through marriage or move, your driver’s license isn’t likely to reflect that. Not that a driver’s license is proof of citizenship anyway. But I think the law’s effect on women is largely unintentional. A lot of suburban, GOP-leaning, stay-at-home moms are going to be disenfranchised if, because of their maiden/middle names, their IDs and voter registration cards don’t match up, and if the utilities were taken out in the husband’s name, and that’s what’s on the electric bill, such women have little recourse.
The dumbshits can’t even competently construct an apartheid regime.
MattR
@Mnemosyne:
This is essentially it. They don’t mind obstructing the group that votes for them 55-45 if the remaining voters who are not obstructed vote for them by a 65-35 margin. (all number approximated)
KG
@maya:
This is something that bothers me. The vote wasn’t limited to white men when the constitution was ratified. The right to vote was left to the states. The right to vote was typically extended to citizens who owned real property and by some accounts that limited the vote to half of white men. Because of how property laws worked at the time, this usually meant that married women didn’t have the right to vote (because they could not own property), though unmarried women who owned property would have the right to vote. New Jersey allowed married women to vote at first (it was later repealed because of alleged voter fraud). The idea of not allowing married women the right to vote was that they would vote the same way as their husbands (which is blatantly stupid, for anyone who has ever been in a relationship, but hey, there you go). As for blacks, originally, many states allowed them the right to vote too – in 1789 only Virginia and Georgia didn’t allow blacks to vote. Over the next 20 years, the right was restricted for a variety of reasons but mostly because of partisanship and, yes, racism (in a lot of northern states, blacks supported the Federalist Party, when the Jeffersonians (the Anti-Federalists) started winning, they sought to cement their hold on power).
Voting rights have always been a complicated thing in the US. Those with power have always attempted to hold it by most any means necessary (including civil war). If it meant expanding the vote, that’s what they’d do. If it meant restricting the vote, that’s what they’d do. There is nothing new under the sun.
RobertDSC-iPhone 4
@LanceThruster:
I’ll amend it to Die Repubicans Die.
All day. Fuck these goddamned terrorist bastards.
Keith G
The voting wars is perhaps the most important place where progressives (aka lefty types) need to commit their time, money, and plain old physical exertion.
Feeling smarter than Palin will not help. Snarking on Cruz will not help. Being the purest Obot in this galaxy will not help.
What will help is hooking up with whichever group of liberal voter/activists are operating in your neck of the woods and getting your precious little ass to their next meeting/training session.
As an example, for me it’s Battleground Texas. The GOP will build up obstacles and we will use people power to overcome them.
A story from the BT website about a young student volunteer:
Edit: I forgot to add the Battleground Texas link
eric
So, you can vote for or against a Cooch in VA, but you cant vote with a cooch in TX. gotcha.
Belafon
@Boudica: Where did you vote?
Kay
@Tokyokie:
They successfully argued in the OH legislature that that situation was unfair and a poll tax for women, because they’d have to get a new driver’s license specifically for voting. It helped Democrats to add amendments that made other types of ID acceptable, utility bill, etc.
But the laws get stricter and stricter, so now these sorts of problems will appear. The Texas law is extremely restrictive, even as an ID law.
These laws started as “ID”. Then they went to “photo ID”. Then they went to “very specific photo ID”
I think it’s why judges are expressing alarm and misgivings. It’s a slippery slope that actually happened. We all watched.
KG
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: more fun, and mostly to fuck with them, let’s give Texas back to France instead (that’s one of the “six flags” right?)…
IowaOldLady
It looks to me like local election clerks have a great deal of discretion as to whether the names on the rolls and the ID are “substantially alike.” You can already see how the discrimination will work and how it will only be provable by statistical studies that will be hard to carry out in time to do any good.
Boudica
@Belafon: Suburb of Ft Worth
j
@Frankensteinbeck: It definitely is designed to suppress the vote of the “little ladies”. How would they be able to vote for either Hillary or Wendy Davis if they can’t vote for anyone?
This was planned.
Mnemosyne
@MattR:
It’s always so weird to me to realize that I’m an anomaly for my generation. I’m a married white woman between the ages of 40 and 49 and I voted for Obama. Twice.
And my husband is even more of an anomaly since the Romney-voting numbers for married white men between 40-49 are even higher than women’s.
Though I suspect we need to get a look at Texas-specific numbers before we definitively decide if this hurts Republican women more than Democratic women in that state.
ETA: Also, too, I think some of the disparity between age/race/gender for women is explained by age — older voters tend to be Republican voters, and there are more of them. So white women under 40 tend to vote Democrat, but they’re drowned out by the over-40s who vote Republican.
Boudica
It’s actually six years for DL renewal in Texas, but you can renew by mail once, so you only have to go the DMV once every twelve years.
Omnes Omnibus
@IowaOldLady: I would say that the data provided by the Texas itself is enough for a court to issue an injunction. Half a million people don’t have the requisite ID and it appears that there is no real attempt being made to get it to them.
GregB
Perhaps the answer is to start registering every Democrat in a red state for a handgun permit.
Tokyokie
@Kay: Well, if their concern really was restricting voting to citizens, then the only forms of ID that should be required are either a U.S. passport, a certificate of naturalization or a birth certificate. That state-issued IDs (which legal residents can obtain) are required instead, is the tip-off that the stated rationale is not really in play.
Boudica
I’ve got fellow women coworkers who identify as “independent” (code word for embarrassed Republicans) who are already committed to voting for Wendy Davis for guv!
Kay
@IowaOldLady:
It’s a great point and it’s also a no-brainer, or should be for someone drafting an election law.
Every time you introduce a discretionary element where there wasn’t one before you open the door to discriminatory actions in practice because people will make decisions based on their particular bias and use the fuzzy rule to justify doing that. We had a big battle over “government document” when the first Ohio law went in, because it wasn’t defined and I can justify just about any form as a “government document”.
Fuzzy
I think we should force Texas to leave the United States for being a scourge to the general public by using so many tax dollars and general stupidity of politicians. The new nation state could have many names. Suggestions?
Omnes Omnibus
@Tokyokie: Voter ID is generally supposed to do two things. First, it is supposed to establish you are who you claim to be. Second, it is supposed establish that you are eligible to vote in that election – citizenship, residency in the precinct, etc.
There is no single document that can accomplish both of these goals completely. A passport establishes identity and citizenship but is useless to show residency in the state, county, city, etc. A driver’s license establishes identity but little else. And so on.
Belafon
@Boudica: Rockwall, here. From what I’ve seen and read, it depends on the people behind the table. Which has meant that it depends on what they think of you. The last time I voted, people behind me got far more questions than I did.
Woodrowfan
it was exactly that sort of discrepancy (maiden name on voter id, middle name on driver’s license) that drove the little old Republican poll workers nuts last election at the precinct where I work. Not to mention the 2 part Hispanic names.
Sergio
The law also has a large impact on the Latino population. In Latin American countries the Father’s last name is placed where the middle name is in English speaking countries. That’s why I hyphenated my name when I moved here from Puerto Rico. Birth certificates may reverse the names from driver’s licences
LanceThruster
@RobertDSC-iPhone 4:
And I like the sound it now makes – Durd!
catclub
@Mike in NC: Deutschland for the Deutsch, Tejas for the Tejanos
David Hunt
@Boudica: Good for those ladies re: Davis.
And yes: “Independent” these days is often a codeword for Republican who is too embarrassed to admit their real affiliation. It’s why Romney did so well among “independents.” If you look at how he did with self-described Moderates on the other hand…
West of the Cascades
@Fuzzy: the congressional resolution annexing Texas in 1845 provided for up to five states to be carved out of the new territory — I propose that we create states called “Austin,” “San Antonio,” “Inner Houston,” “Inner Dallas,” and “Rest of Texas.” Rest of Texas is then free to secede, if it wants.
catclub
“Texas has set up mobile voter ID units in twenty counties to help people obtain an ID, but has issued new IDs to only twenty voters at the sites so far. ”
So a much more incompetent clusterfuck than the ACA website.
burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
DOJ should be in the District Court TODAY with an amendment to its motion for preliminary injunction and a request for an expedited hearing. This is bullshit.
Omnes Omnibus
@burnspbesq: I am guessing that they will be in by next week at the latest.
piratedan
@catclub: TRMS had their opener on this issue last night. Texas opened up a “help desk” of sorts to help people get ID since the advent of the new law, so far they’ve managed to generate 50 entire ID’s over the last few months…. 50… for the entire state.
KG
@catclub: yeah, but it’s at the state level, so therefore it’s a much better clusterfuck as far as conservatives are concerned. Now, if they could get it down to the county or city level… that’d be ideal
piratedan
@burnspbesq: my guess is that North Carolina is also on the clock, so to speak.
Matt McIrvin
@KG:
Free blacks, that is. It probably goes without saying that slaves didn’t vote.
That was the whole dynamic underlying the three-fifths controversy: if slaves were counted as population when assigning representation in Congress, the slave states were getting extra representation on behalf of people who couldn’t actually vote. The free states didn’t want them counted; the slave states did.
Even today, the population counts used to determine representation in Congress and in state legislatures include people who can’t vote: minors, undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens, incarcerated felons, etc. The people who can vote are effectively getting extra influence on behalf of these people.
burnspbesq
@piratedan:
There are two private suits on the docket in the Middle District of NC (Greensboro). The state filed motions to dismiss yesterday. My guess is that DOJ would already have filed but for the shutdown.
Tommy
I will just say this. My mom is 67. Republican. Dad a Republican. My mom runs elections in her district. She knows I am a hippie far left liberal. After almost every election she calls me in tears that more folks don’t vote. Voting where my mother runs things and directly across the state where I live it is faster to vote them order a Big Mac at lunch time. We got it down.
It pains her people don’t vote. It pains her she knows I feel the same.
Years and years ago I started to send her pictures and links to stories of folks in lines that went for blocks. Took hours to vote and she was confused. As I am when I see them.
My mom and I don’t agree on much in this world, but we agree it should be fast and simple to vote. If we lose an election, then we lose an election. But to win an election, making it hard for some to vote ….. well we don’t have words for that.
I wish more people were like my mom!
kc
What are the odds the conservatives on the SCOTUS admit they got the VRA case wrong?
I’m sure Scalia will come right out and apologize.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Or (and) as Peirce said last week, perhaps they’ll take a return, even if we have to pay a 15% restocking fee.
I can only hope it’s so egregious that it will not survive a court ruling, but once burned, as they say.
Kay
@piratedan:
It’s probably because they don’t have the underlying documents, so they have to start there. I bet people are going up to those mobile units and asking for voter ID, and they’re sending them away to go get ID to get the ID.
Pennsylvania was an absolute disaster. I had to figure it out to write a post here. I was peering at various websites for an hour. You’d click on a link at one and it would send you to another where you’d have to find the new link. Finally, a court just shut the whole thing down and said “get better at this or forget it” (paraphrasing!)
bobbo
Conservatives on SCOTUS would be just fine with poll taxes and literacy tests. And requiring voter to own real property.
aimai
@Mnemosyne: I think the entire idea of a generic “white woman voter” is absurd–its totally regional. Like you I’m over 50 and have voted a straight democratic ticket my entire life so of course I voted for Obama twice. As did most other white women in my state. Not all of them, of course.
Older, Married White women are simply voting the same way they have always voted, for the party that the majority of people like them vote for in their region. The most significant trend to look at would be to study what (if anything) causes any older voter to abandon their previous party ID and vote for the other party. Did a significant number of older white married women abandon the democratic party over Obama or did they continue to vote dem?
Belafon
This will be a great starting point in tonight’s discussion of “Who has it worse: Blacks or Women, Episode 3.” Maybe we can actually get it through his head that both groups that suffer.
C.V. Danes
I wonder how many people in Texas who were indifferent because they thought the law only affected those “others” have found themselves caught up in this net?
Roger Moore
@Boudica:
At a guess, middle and upper class white women whose names don’t match will be given a pass, but poor and minority women whose names don’t match will be given the once over. If the law is being applied inconsistently, you can bet it’s being applied discriminatorily.
Sad_Dem
@Matt McIrvin: Didn’t a Diebold e-mail also say that? Kinda fitting.
raven
A gunman shot several people near a U.S. Navy base in Millington, Tenn., authorities say.
Fox13 reports that an employee of the base was relieved of duty today and is suspected of shooting at random people after going to his car. The suspect, an Army National Guardsman, is in custody, the Navy reported in a press release. Two National Guard soldiers were treated for non-life threatening injuries, and NBC News reports that one was shot in the leg and another was shot in the foot.
handsmile
@Belafon:
But do they suffer “intersectionally”? And from “microaggressions”? Slogging through Episodes 1 and 2, I’ve come to believe that assent is the only acceptable response to the exposure of our moral and intellectual shortcomings.
If you’ve not had a chance to read through it, the thread from Tom Levenson’s post last night, “For a Good TIme in Cambridge” convinced me that a “discussion” was not really desired nor would it be a mutually satisfactory. aimai’s righteous conclusion there is an added bonus.
https://balloon-juice.com/2013/10/23/for-a-good-time-in-cambridge-take-two-hendrik-hertzberg-ta-nehisi-coates-edition/#comments
Cacti
@Belafon:
I had no idea that “Blacks” were a distinct group from “Women”.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
Only assuming that the goal was to accomplish something rather than to appear to accomplish something. If the goal was to keep up appearances while doing nothing, it’s a roaring success.
piratedan
@Cacti: it was strange watching folks extending themselves trying to find common cause or even a similar point of reference and have him reject each and everyone as not having sufficient merit while espousing his POV as the only valid one that should be accepted. For someone supposedly attempting outreach and change, it had a preachiness tone to it.
raven
@piratedan: Guilty ass liberals. The dude is a douche any way you slice it.
Josie
@handsmile: Poor Tom. All he did was invite us to a nice chat and he got all that dumped on him. I wish I didn’t live at the end of the earth down here in south Texas because I would love to hear his program with TNC.
David Hunt
@C.V. Danes: The people that you described will find a way to blame any problems of liberals of “Those People.”
schrodinger's cat
Website glitches are front page news but voter disenfranchisement elicits a meh from the Beltway media, shows you where their priorities lie.
gwangung
What are the odds the conservatives on the SCOTUS admit they got the VRA case wrong?
Slim and none, and slim just left town…
piratedan
@schrodinger’s cat: marching to the narrative tone set by those program directors, we all had our fun with our bout of truthiness with the GOP intransigence, now we have to go back to selling the phoney narrative to secure their phoney baloney jobs…..
schrodinger's cat
Every Democrat needs to talk about this issue when they are in front of the cameras.
Matt McIrvin
@Sad_Dem: I think the belief that Diebold was rigging everything probably suppressed Democratic votes more than Diebold ever actually did.
Omnes Omnibus
@handsmile: Good god. I missed that one. Whew.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: You did???? I thought it was priceless when you went out of your way to be nice by saying “thanks for the link”. You’re a better man than I Gunga Din!
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Drex was on two threads last night. I didn’t see the second one.
Glidwrith
@Tommy: My ‘rents are just as old. Dad already called me a communist because he didn’t understand how taxes are progressively stacked and was frustrated, Mom called me a traitor because I dare let my daughter learn Spanish. And definitively declared that it should be hard to vote…..
Omnes Omnibus
@Glidwrith: God, you guys make me pleased to have my parents.
Glidwrith
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s really the hell of it. They raised me, taught me to be independent, to leave the world a better place than you found it, said there isn’t a lot of black and white but lots of shades of grey. About the only thing in common now is that family is everything and you never use credit when you can save up to pay cash.
eemom
@raven:
best part was when he allowed as how he’s been lurking here since he was a TEENAGER!
In other words, not only insufferable and longwinded, but a know nothing smugass brat. And all that energy invested in arguing with him. Unbelievable.
johnny aquitard
@Kay:
Been said before but, goddamn these judges were fucking stupid not to see this coming.
They’re actually surprised their rulings made it possible to disenfranchise entire groups of people. It’s apparent they had no idea how this voter id shit would play out in the real world.
Every damn judge who OK’d this shit should resign. It wasn’t just blatant bad judgement, it was bad judgement on the viability itself of the legal system of the society they supposedly serve to maintain.
Jebediah, RBG
@eemom:
When I see so much jargon in a general-discussion setting like this, I tend to assume the jargoneer is not really looking for real discussion. And I have plenty of opportunity IRL to be lectured at by people who think I am a moron, so I am less interested in it in a comment thread.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: I thought the best part was when anyone offered a differing point of view and the response was along the lines of “I am not interested in having that discussion/That framing is not useful to me/etc.” IOW I want to have exactly the conversation I want in exactly the format I want it.
Botsplainer
@Boudica:
Let me guess – you’re white?
Betty Cracker
@eemom: That’s when my bullshit detector red-lined. What teenager would lurk at Balloon Juice, ferchrissakes?
The Other Chuck
@Betty Cracker: I’ve been hanging around here since I was, uh, thirtyfive-teen.
shortstop
Given that this story has been bandied around for several days by some of my more privileged white Anglo female friends (accompanied by the appropriate outrage), I say good on Texas for enacting a voter ID law that finally gets more than a few non-minorities’ attention.
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker:
One who desperately missed his cranky, anti-social grandfather who had passed on?
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: Drunk uncle.
Drexciya
@Belafon:
You’re misstating the rationale for my dissent. It wasn’t a denial that both groups suffer, it was a denial of the sense that power dynamics can be discussed without assessing how racialization affects gendered responses. Suzanne wanted a clear agreement that black men have a privilege that her, as a white woman, was capable of acknowledging (regardless of how such privilege isn’t reflected in a way she’ll ever experience). Mnemosyne wanted to universalize a gendered experience and narrow the areas of concerns to the kinds of oppression that she could relate to. There’s nothing remotely intersectional or racially aware about either of these arguments and the inclusion of racial awareness adds a complication that I don’t think either party reacted favorably to. Not only is this a basic point, it’s one many of the POC feminists I read are aware of. And that’s not even going into how forms of white feminism and forms of cross-racial patriarchy-identification have been racist in function and effect – in ways that speak over and misidentify the sexism that black women face from black men.
The problem here isn’t that I failed in a discussion feminism, it’s that I responded to various flavors of white feminist and white feminist supportive arguments/narratives in a way that acknowledged the complication of those power dynamics and where I stand within them. Now, I could also respond to aimai’s post since many of you seemed to agree with it, but I’d kind of rather for her to be here, and this was an unexpected area for a cross-thread discussion. Would any of you care to move this discussion elsewhere?
Drexciya
gendered responses meaning…how society responds to, caters to, oppresses, relates to and elevates your ethnic/gender combination*
In case that’s unclear.
Corner Stone
@Drexciya:
Yes, I would. Do you happen to have a newsletter I could subscribe to?