Denying the GOP’s deadly appeals
Surge in hate crime proves voting rights vital
There is a trend in the GOP of well-educated politicians impersonating buffoons. At a March 18 House Judiciary Committee hearing on the rise in anti-Asian violence, scheduled prior to the March 16 murders in Atlanta, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) spouted anti-Asian bigotry, equated justice with lynching, and complained (on live television) about an imaginary effort to silence him. He is not some random clown, but a former chief of staff of Sen. Ted Cruz.
When only people who look and think like you are regarded as legitimate citizens, when insurrectionists are treated as patriots and Russian disinformation infuses your worldview, the voices and safety of those not on your team cease to matter. Performance replaces argument, and “democracy” is applied to a Senate where the filibuster is used to impede the rights of millions of voters.
The horrific violence last week in Georgia is what happens when one population group feels entitled to dominate, abuse, and scapegoat others at will. As Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) should not have had to say to Rep. Roy, “I am not a virus.”
After Robert Aaron Long was arrested for killing eight people including six Asian women, the spokesperson for the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, Captain Jay Baker, said Long “was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him.” Long denied racial bias, claiming he had a sexual addiction and had acted to remove the temptation. Baker’s apparent solicitude for a mass murderer recalled police buying food from Burger King for Dylann Roof after he murdered Rev. Clementa Pinckney and eight parishioners at a Bible study class in Charleston in 2015.
Murdering Asian women because they tempt you, then claiming non-racist motives, is like invoking the “gay panic defense” after murdering a man you propositioned, then insisting you’re not anti-gay. It’s like killing the workers at a bakery because the pastries on display are too delectable. Resisting temptation does not require deadly force. If you have a drinking problem, the proper response is to join a 12-step program, not shoot up a liquor store. A man who is troubled by his attraction to trans women is not entitled to use them as a battleground for his warring fears and desires.
Dehumanizing entire portions of our population has a long pedigree. In Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch’s housekeeper, Calpurnia, takes care of his two children. The movie version offers no hint that this strong black woman has a life and family of her own. In the novel, Jem and Scout Finch visit her church. The only remnant of this in the movie is when they sit in the courtroom’s “colored balcony” with Reverend Sykes.
Now at least more Americans of color are speaking for themselves in our halls of power. On March 17, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, delivered a stirring defense of voting rights in his first speech before the Senate. “As a man of faith,” he said, “I believe that democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea: the sacred worth of all human beings.”
This wisdom is lost on Republicans. They seek to lock their own minority power in by locking racial minorities out of their voting rights. That is no more a democracy than South Africa under apartheid. As Sen. Warnock states, voting rights are foundational. We cannot let Senate rules be used to deny them.
Oscar Hammerstein II in 1949 wrote lyrics against anti-Asian racism for the musical South Pacific. He and composer Richard Rodgers insisted the song stay in despite charges of indecency and Communism:
“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”
Hateful teachings have been supplanted in some places by population shifts. In Georgia, an African American and a millennial Jew now hold Senate seats that were held fifty years ago by segregationists Herman Talmadge and Richard Russell. Voter suppression efforts are designed to silence new voices in places like the 21st congressional district of Texas, whose representative gleefully invoked an old tradition of hanging people from trees.
The question is not whether America will prevail, but whether one part of America can erase the rest. A vote denied is a life devalued. Standing together is the only response.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at rrosendall@me.com.
Copyright © 2021 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.
