By Robert Azzi
Martin Luther King Jr. told us in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”
MLK was too generous, I believe, letting many white Americans off the hook.
Today, in America, there are too many immoral groups trying to deny freedom to too many Americans. Most of those groups are white, peopled by individuals who might believe in racial reconciliation and harmony in America but want to do it on their, white, terms so they’re absolved of any white guilt.
Lamentably, the moral arc of the universe embraced by Dr. King, which was first described by Unitarian Universalist minister Theodore Parker, is being checked in its trajectory by groups of unholy racists, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and Republican senators on one side and holier-than-thou individuals like Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin on the other; people seemingly more interested in sustaining privileges of power than liberating fellow Americans from oppression.
Lamentably, this week, a proposed bill entitled the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, that would make Election Day a national holiday, ensure access to early voting and mail-in ballots and enable the Justice Department to intervene in states with histories of voter interference and suppression, among other changes, which has passed the House of Representatives, was blocked from passage by filibustering Senate Republicans.
Used a filibuster in order for Republicans to remain complicit with what has already happened in over 19 states and proposed in many others: new limits on voting rights and attempts to politicize vote tabulation and manipulate election results primarily targeting urban centers, minority communities and people of color.
Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema joined the Republicans’ successful filibuster which was led by Republican Senators Mitch “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans” McConnell and John “I am not a racist” Thune, to kill the measure.
To Mitch McConnell, as Toni Morrison wrote, “In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
Sinema and Manchin, acting in privilege and craven self-interest, chose to be complicit with immoral Republicans wishing to sustain white privilege and supremacy in America, abdicating their responsibilities as senators elected to exercise judgment in defense of American Democracy.
Complicit with Republicans who wouldn’t for a moment hesitate to change the filibuster rules if they were in power and it was in their interest, as it was in McConnell’s interest to change in order to get Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Supreme Court.
Jubilant Republicans, for whom being white isn’t really a question of color but a worldview in alliance with protestors in Charlottesville, Proud Boys, Three-Percenters and Christian nationalists, shook hands with Sinema as they left the chamber.
Senator Angus King, referencing a failed 1890 attempt to pass a Federal Elections Bill sponsored by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts to protect the voting rights of Black Americans, told “The New Yorker,” “The result [of that vote] was seventy-five years of egregious voter suppression in the South. That was a mistake made by a few senators. I honestly feel that we may be at a similar moment… I’m afraid we’re making a mistake that will harm the country for decades.”
It has already been harmed.
“It is true that the filibuster was not inherently racist in its origin,” Kevin Kruse, a Princeton University history professor told the “Washington Post.” “But it has become a tool for segregationists, white supremacists, and racists because they can use it to their end — to limit who can participate in that full democracy. Maybe the racism of the past is no longer spewed, but even today it is accomplishing the same ends.”
Used that way most viciously by Kentucky’s Senator Mitch McConnell to limit who can participate in that full democracy, who swore that America’s first Black president would serve only one term; who denied President Barack Obama a Supreme Court Justice, holding the vacancy open until a white privileged male of suitable political persuasion, Neil Gorsuch, could be nominated and approved.
A white privileged male of suitable political persuasion who has no compunction about putting the health of colleagues at risk.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor has diabetes, a condition that puts her at high risk for serious illness or death from COVID-19, and has been the only justice to wear a mask on the bench since last fall when the Supreme Court resumed in-person arguments.
However, recently, as justices gathered to consider arguments over COVID-19 vaccine mandates, only eight were present in the courtroom, one was virtual from chambers.
Only eight were in person because a white privileged male of suitable political persuasion, Neil Gorsuch, who sits next to Sotomayor on the bench, arrogantly refuses to mask, therefore keeping Sotomayor from hearings or even attending weekly conferences in person.
Privilege where, contrary to John Locke’s argument that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions,” white people, and Republicans, get to choose whose health, whose liberty, get protected.
Where mostly white people, and occasional people of color seduced either by profit or proximity to whiteness, get to choose who votes, who remains oppressed, who dies.
Whose liberty indeed.
MLK wrote from Birmingham that “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Demanded by the oppressed.
Demanded by believers in freedom, justice and democracy.
Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at [email protected].
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