COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is best digested by opening its links using your "Open Link in New Window" option in your browser. --Ed.]
SLAVERY TIME - I alluded in my last editorial to the controversy over the Black vote in Florida in the last election here in the United States by providing you this URL about Newsweek and CNN suppressing the rumors coming out of Florida, Georgia, Texas and Tennessee.
I have tried to remain neutral on the part of that that has to do with Black people being barred from voting. But it's getting harder every day.
Just this morning, I received an email which included this story from the United Kingdom on the same issue and I was disturbed. I was disturbed because I went to sleep last night asking myself: "Why is no one saying more about Black voters being excluded from this election? Did this crap ONLY happen in Florida, or where Republicans and their fellow-travelers doing this nationwide?"
You can understand my avoiding the rumors if you know anything about journalism. You get conspiracy theories all the time. Then you fact-check. You look at what other organs are publishing and ask yourself if there is only smoke there but no fire.
Still, when I went to bed last night, I couldn't keep myself from recalling the stories my paternal grandmother used to tell me about what life was like during "Slavery Time."
There is a whole well of memory and reminiscence from "Slavery Time" in my family, as I'm sure there is in other Black families in this country. And reading more and more of these stories out of Florida smacked of both what I had learned from my grandmother about Slavery Time, the Jim Crowe era, and the lynchings of the early part of this century: Terrorism used as a weapon against us.
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And no one wants to hear that until the Johnson administration, a scant thirty-some years ago, there was NO nationwide right to vote for Black Americans. Instead there were barriers in Deep South states, like Florida, to voting for Blacks with tricknology like "literacy tests," etc. Why the Hell did I have to bring that up?
I have to bring that up because if State Troopers where stopping cars with Black people in them only blocks away from polling places the stink in Florida --- and the stink of this Presidential election --- is worse than Hamlet's rotten fish in Denmark!
And, sadly, tragically, it can't but remind me of Slavery Time.
And I have to ask why I found three or four stories at the Guardian in the UK and only one here in the USA -- at a self-described "alternative" Web site. Nothing in the New York Times. Nothing in the Washington Post. Nothing in USA Today. Et cetera ad infinitum.
I have to ask these questions because, if you're Black, you might have to question the validity of your citizenship in the United States. You might have to wonder if second-class citizenship was becoming the Rule of The Day again and if "the rule of law" applied to everyone EXCEPT YOU, DARKIE.
I won't go to how the skewed criminal justice system, which is documented to be biased against Black people --- thus eliminating our right to vote by a new means of tricknology --- has been in effect ever since the Voting Rights Act was passed.I won't go into how the "kinder, gentler" face of the "New South" has been used for nearly as long to gloss over a continuing feudal system in most of the former Confederate States of America.
But I do have to say something about this media-blackout on the rights of Black voters in the Deep South again.
Between you and me, I'm exhausted with the election shenanigans of both parties. I didn't and don't want either man as President. I swore to myself that my last editorial on this botched election would be the last word here at the G21.
But the e-mails on the new Black disenfranchisement kept coming in.
"You People have organizations to defend your rights," some might say. "What is the NAACP doing?"
Well, they've appealed to Janet Reno to look into it. Janet Reno, the US Attorney General from.... Florida.
A person known for her sensitivity to Humans Rights issues. Uh-huh.
I expect the best.... Just like I'd expect Torquemada to give an Agnostic a fair hearing during the Inquistion.
The last of my questions on this mess is: Black people, why do you continue to support the Democratic party when that party fails, again and again, to support you? Doesn't Al Gore's silence say something about your attempting to give him your vote? Where's Al now?
And finally: Shouldn't the Florida Model give you some idea of what to expect from Mr. Bush?
As the latest joke circulating around the Internet goes: The last time anybody took the word of a Bush, they wandered in the desert for forty years.
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RDR RECOMMENDED SITE OF THE DAY: Rod's former assistant, Tom O' Branovich, launched his own Web site on 5 December and our publisher said we would link to him. So we will. Check out MechanicalKings.com!
