Politics and Race News Round Up – Native Voter Disenfranchisement, Jeff Yang on Sharron Angle, Juan Williams, Obama Skips Temple Visit
by Latoya Peterson
Long form links today, since so much is heating up.
Condoleeza Rice was on the CBS Early Show discussing her memoir of growing up in the segregated South:
Most interesting part? Close to the end, she mentions that her father joined the Republican party due to the segregation politics of the Democrats, but also because he is a social conservative. Still, he was very interested in black radical politics, and had Stokely Carmichael over to the house. But that’s the end of the interview, so will have to investigate this a bit more.
Spirit Lake Reservation is facing possible voter disenfranchisement, after a county voting board in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota chose to remove three polling locations:
Tribal citizens are no stranger to having their rights trampled on. Now, members of the Spirit Lake Reservation say their right to vote is also being taken away – to the alarm of some state and federal policymakers.
The Benson County Board of Commissioners, which oversees the county that includes reservation lands, decided this election season to close three polling places in the tribe’s three-precinct vicinity.
Commissioners rationalized their decision, saying there is a high cost to operating the polling places, including training and paying staff.
In response, tribal leaders offered to provide funds to recruit and train workers, and said the county could use facilities that would be rent-free.
The commission refused the tribe’s offer, saying that costs would still be too high, and that mailed ballots would be cheaper.
This column on Sharron Angle’s “First Asian American Legislator” comment reminds us of why we love Jeff Yang:
In a slate of recent attack spots, Angle had claimed that her Democratic opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, favored “open borders” and “amnesty” for illegal aliens — actions that would allow insidiously perilous elements into the U.S. The commercials were illustrated with pictures of scowling, bandanna-clad men with dark complexions and footage of sinister figures sneaking around fences.
Attempting to soft-pedal the impact of the ads to a clearly hostile audience, Angle suggested that the students had “misinterpreted” them — that the images might not represent Latinos, and the border being discussed might not be the one between the U.S. and Mexico. “Our northern border is where the terrorists came through — that’s the most porous border that we have,” she told them.
The students were obviously skeptical that Angle’s primary immigration concern was the nonexistent boundary between Nevada and Canada, so the candidate chose to press the issue using a different tack — stating that, in our diverse country, it’s difficult to even tell races and ethnicities apart: “You know, I don’t know that all of you are Latino,” she said. “Some of you look a little more Asian to me. I don’t know that. What we know, what we know about ourselves, is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that” — her daughter-in-law is Latino — “and I’m evidence of that. I’ve been called the ‘first Asian legislator’ in our Nevada state assembly.”
An enterprising young member of the audience who’d been capturing cellphone video of Angle’s talk immediately uploaded footage of Angle’s weird self-assessment to the Web. A thunderous clacking could be heard as jaws across the nation dropped to the floor. The Asian American blogosphere unfurled a giant virtual banner bearing the letters W, T and F. And an already chaotic race, in which unqualified and deeply unusual state legislator Angle has been running mostly ahead of her high-profile opponent, Reid, was thrown into even further turmoil. [...]
that’s the fundamental racial hypocrisy of the populist right. Like their rising star Angle, they espouse the notion of the “melting pot” — of chocolate and caramel swirled into and subsumed within America’s vast vanilla social fondue. But however much people of color assimilate, most of us still “look” Latino, “look” Asian, “look” black. And that means when we’re pulled over by Arizona troopers, or we hang out in the wrong Detroit bar, or we force the jammed door of our own home in Cambridge, Mass. — we instantly unmelt from the pot.
Obama skips the Golden Temple, Florida GOP’s Racist email fallout, Juan Williams, the hidden history of women in the Civil Rights movement, and talking voter disenfranchisement and tea partying after the jump.
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