Reparations for Slavery, Reparations for Jim Crow, Reparations for Today

When people say dumb fucking shit like “I never owned slaves.” to me, I ask them. “What’s the longest you’ve ever stood in line to vote?” If you are white the answer is typically maybe a half hour. I’ve never waited longer than ten minutes. If you are black the answer could be “all day and into the night.” American mistreatment of slaves has never ended. We’ve run a “war on drugs” as a pretext to mistreat the grandchildren of enslaved Africans. We put heavy industry in the neighborhoods of African Americans. And now we are closing polling places where the decedents of slaves reside.

The 2013 Supreme Court decision nullifying federal “preclearance” requirements for states and local governments with a past history of discriminating against minority voters continues to have widespread repercussions as those same discriminatory states and counties methodically undertake efforts to once again make voting a more cumbersome and restricted process. A new Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights report once again seeks to quantify those acts, and once again finds that jurisdictions freed from prior preclearance requirements are shutting down their own polling places at an accelerated pace.

Updating a prior 2016 study, the Leadership Conference was now able to collect data for 757 of the 860 counties previously subject to preclearance. Those counties collectively shuttered nearly 1,700 polling places since the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder decision; most were justified under claims of “consolidating” polling locations.