The 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees universal adult suffrage but it also allows disenfranchisement for committing a crime. Southern states seized on that loophole post-Reconstruction to round up African Americans, charge them with bogus crimes, inflict punishment by public whipping and take away their votes, as Pema Levy noted in Mother Jones.
“Freed from federal oversight after Reconstruction, most Southern states by the 1900s had rewritten their constitutions to deny Black people the vote through nominally race-blind provisions, including expanded criminal disenfranchisement,” Levy reported. “These measures, alongside poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, fraud, registration restrictions, and vigilante violence, were part of the toolkit used by white supremacists to maintain a system of racial subordination.” Continue reading
U.S.A: Spa mass shooting puts spotlight on anti-Asian bigotry — By Mohamed Hamaludin
It took the killing of six Asian American women – and two others — at the spas to spark national outrage, the killer’s motive notwithstanding. And the full picture finally emerged. Stop AAPI Hate, an advocacy group for Asian American and Pacific Islanders, said it received more than 3,750 anti-Asian hate crime reports since the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic started early last year. News reports drew a direct link to then President Donald Trump’s penchant for referring to the virus as “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” and “Kung Flu,” most likely sparking the attacks. Continue reading →
Share this: