points by scoofy 9 hours ago | 0 comments
The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.
Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.
Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing. You are making the same argument as mid-century racist policymakers that were defeated by the VRA. Back then you would argue that Poll taxes and voter tests aren't illegal, they just prevent the indigent and uneducated from voting. Well those policies were the beating heart of Jim Crow, which the VRA intended to defeat.
You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities". Well we've been there. It's been illegal to make laws directly against racial groups since reconstruction. This is why much of Jim Crow was built on a foundation of targeting adjacent traits rather than race specifically, and why many lament the defanging of the VRA.