Last Thursday, the rabidly anti-immigrant and racist Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado Congressman, delivered the opening remarks at the national “Tea Party” convention. Like a deranged, gun-totting border-patrolling Minuteman, Tancredo declared: “…..First, we should have a ‘civics literacy test‘ before people are allowed to vote. Second, ‘People who could not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House whose name is Barack Hussein Obama.’”

Notes: A literacy test, in the context of United States political history, refers to the government practice of testing the literacy of potential citizens at the federal level, and potential voters at the state level. The federal government first employed literacy tests as part of the immigration process in 1917. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process as early as the late nineteenth century.

As used by the states, the literacy test gained infamy as a means for denying suffrage to African-Americans. Adopted by a number of southern states, the literacy test was applied in a patently unfair manner, as it was used to disfranchise many literate blacks while allowing many illiterate whites to vote.

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The literacy test, combined with other discriminatory requirements, effectively disfranchised the vast majority of African-Americans in the South from the 1890s until the 1960s. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to do so by federal legislation in the 1960s.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided that literacy tests used as a qualification for voting in federal elections be administered wholly in writing and only to persons who had not completed six years of formal education.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended the use of literacy tests in all states or political subdivisions in which less than 50 percent of voting-age residents were registered as of 1 November 1964 or had voted in the 1964 presidential election.

In a series of cases, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the legislation and restricted the use of literacy tests for non-English-speaking citizens. Since the passage of this legislation, black registration in the South has increased dramatically.

The Tea-Party “Terrorist” Movement Analyzed

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Meghan McCain Lashes at Tea-Party Nut-BAGS

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   [ By: Melissa Harris-Lacewell ]
Joe Biden once remarked that Barack Obama was “clean” and “articulate.” He is now Vice President. During the Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton invoked Robert Kennedy in a way that implied Barack Obama’s assassination was imminent. She is now the Secretary of State. It is foolish to suggest Senator Harry Reid should step down as Senate majority leader because of his 2008 assessment that Barack Obama’s election was more likely because he is “light-skinned” and free from “Negro dialect.”

If President Obama has demonstrated anything at all, it is that he unperturbed by the racially awkward outbursts of his fellow Democrats.

Republicans hope that reports of Reid’s old gaffe might derail his leadership of the health care reform package. But watching Michael Steele go after Reid is more bizarre than convincing. Steele seems to pride himself on the liberal use of black discursive patterns. It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage of a self-professed “hip-hop Republican” who explains his tenure as GOP chairman saying “brother still here.”

President Obama may be unconcerned and the GOP may be transparently race baiting, but Reid’s comments did create a legitimate queasiness among many Americans that is worth exploring.

President Obama is a forgiving, beer summit kind of leader, but I am less likely to give Democrats a free pass on issues of racial bias. As I wrote a few months ago here on The Notion, any implication that racism is the sole purview of the Right obscures the continuing and troubling realities of racism within the Democratic Party and progressive political movements.

Still, I remain entirely uninterested in a racial McCarthyism that plays “gotcha politics” with elected officials public utterances. Yes, public officials should be particularly careful when talking about race to media (on or off the record). The opportunities for misunderstanding, divisiveness and assumption of ill intent are heightened in this area of political discussion.

But let’s be honest, if we weeded out every public official guilty of racial insensitivity, the halls of Congress would echo with utter emptiness. The point is not so much public gaffes as it is the creation, support, and maintenance of systemic and structural inequalities. This is why Trent Lott’s wistfulness about a Strom Thurmond presidency is in a different class than Reid’s comments. Lott was longing for a bygone era when structural barriers and entrenched inequality were the norm. Reid was enthusiastic that the same barriers were lessening and that America was ready, albeit with caveats, for a new racial reality.

Rather than being worked up about Reid’s awkward assessment of these barriers, we should be asking whether these structural biases actually make academic and political accomplishments easier for light-skinned African Americans. NC State University historian Blair LM Kelley makes this argument in her piece on Salon.com. She points out skin color bias in the 21st century should alarm us. It shouldn’t be a matter of breezy acceptance, as many Sunday morning pundits seemed to suggest. “Accepting this as a matter of course degrades the quality of our democracy.”

Reid’s assertions about “Negro dialect” also should raise structural justice questions far more important than his offensive use of an antiquated term for black Americans. Because of generations of lower class status and legal barriers to quality education, black children are far more likely than their white counterparts to be raised by parents with inadequate literacy skills. But rather than acting as a leveling ground, many public schools only reinforce these disadvantages. These are the same children relegated to schools with fewer expert teachers, larger classroom sizes, fewer educational resources, and fewer literacy support tools.

This is the racism that should worry us: millions of black American children attend and graduate from public schools that leave them utterly unqualified for public office for their entire lives. As adults these children will always be second-class citizens, unable to participate as rule makers rather than simply rule followers in their own country. Not only does this deprive whole group from full participation in government, it also deprives our country of the skills, talents, and ideas that these citizens might have offered, had we not initially deprived them of the capacity to communicate their ideas effectively in the public realm.

Political theorist Nancy Fraser’s describes imagines justice as “a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price for equal respect.” Creating that world is an important task for combating racism.

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Politico: In a direct address to black America, President Barack Obama said that while “there’s probably never been less discrimination in America than there is today… the pain of discrimination is still felt” by Latinos, Muslims and gays, as well as African-Americans.

In New York on Thursday to mark the centennial of the NAACP, Obama delivered a sweeping speech outlining his domestic policy, and recalling America’s journey from slavery to freedom. He praised civil-rights activists, saying, “because of what they did, we are a more perfect union.”

Yet, he said, in spite of the many strides, there is still work to be done in ending discrimination and closing the racial gaps in employment, education, health care and incarceration rates. [ READ MORE ]

FULL SPEECH

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NATIVIST Patrick Buchanan has “no problem” with legacy systems, says “working class whites” are “the ones discriminated most today“. He declares white firefighters victims of “Jim Crow liberalism,” admits he “may have” opposed 1964 civil rights act

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Michigan is among states leading in new home foreclosures. A record 9 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of June, as damage from the housing crisis continues to mount, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Friday, September 5, 2008.

Detroit, a city with a heavy minority population has the highest home foreclosure rate in United States.

Last week it was reported that Republicans plan to use home foreclosure lists to block voters from the polls. James Carabelli, chair of the Macomb County Republican Party, told Michigan Messenger that on election day Republican volunteers will “have a list of foreclosed homes and make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.” The Republican party will use returned mail to challenge voters based on residency.

Macomb County is part of the Detroit metropolitan area.

The Obama campaign general counsel Bob Bauer said Tuesday that the “lose your home, lose your vote” strategy, even if the challenges are unsuccessful, “creates an atmosphere of intimidation that could drive voters from the polls.” He said even people who aren’t challenged may leave without voting because lines move slower at polling places.

Obama is challenging these Republican goons. In their suit, the Obama team contends that GOP has a history of voter “caging.” The 24-page filing incorporates Michigan Messenger’s report last week that a GOP official in Macomb County cited plans to use such lists to challenge voters in November into a broader narrative based on decades of Democratic complaints about how Republicans seek to limit turnout among low-income and African American voters by compiling information about their mailing addresses.

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Intimidation, lies, distortion and blatant racism — is the Republican “Modus operandi.“

You can bet this scheme to steal the election from the Democrats will be going on in every “nook and cranny” of GOP strongholds, all over the United States.

These morons cannot win FAIR — They have to STEAL because they have no message, just RACIST Innuendo and loads of SHIT!

They must be stopped!

….Read More: | “Jim Crawford” Republicans Working Hard To Keep Blacks From Voting | GOP Election Theft | Republican Election Theft |

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann discusses Eartha Melzer’s report, “Lose your home,
lose your vote” with Allen Raymond, author of “How to Rig an Election.”

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