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The Current Transcript for September 18, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: We're living in a good time right now because we're not going to get away with it anymore. If we can make it a normal part of our culture that we think about it and possibly talk about it, maybe we can get to a better place where that stuff doesn't happen.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: When TV show creator Dan Harmon used his podcast to admit to even elaborate on and then apologize for ongoing sexual harassment and workplace misconduct directed at a female writer on the show, she accepted his apology and he was celebrated for having done the right thing. Now a year after a MeToo movement triggered by the Harvey Weinstein scandal, we're seeing others who faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment dipping back into public view, notably Jian Ghomeshi and John Hockenberry. In a moment we're asking about the meaning in their messages, contrition or a coy comeback. Also today, if you think efforts by U.S. lawmakers to keep African-Americans away from voting booths on election day is part of history of an era long gone, think again. Carol Anderson says new nefarious efforts are underway right now.

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VOICE: This was the first presidential election in 50 years that did not have the protection of the Voting Rights Act and states went hog wild.

AMT: After decades of tracking efforts to disenfranchise black and minority voters, Carol Anderson says voter suppression tactics by individual states present a greater threat to democracy in the U.S. than any interference by Russia. She takes us through what she's found in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How publishers have ignited the debate on redemption in the #MeToo era

Guests: Ruth Spencer, Rick MacArthur

AMT: Well former CBC Radio host, Jian Ghomeshi, was back in the news this past weekend. This time, writing a personal essay in The New York Review of Books reflecting on what his life has been like in the years since career-destroying allegations were made against him. Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted in March of 2016 on four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking, involving three complainants. And in relation to a complaint from a fourth person, he signed a peace bond that saw another count of sexual assault withdrawn and which required him to apologize to the complainant. His essay entitled, Reflections From A Hashtag, is vague about the specifics of his behaviour. But Mr. Ghomeshi does express "deep remorse" for it. The essay also discusses at some length, the personal toll he says he's paid, since becoming a public outcast. The essay provoked a swift and largely negative response on social media and among advocates against sexual violence. It is one example of men accused of wrongdoing in the era of MeToo, trying to redeem themselves in the public eye and stirring debate about their sincerity and motivation. The October issue of Harper's magazine includes a personal essay by John Hockenberry a former US public radio host who faced allegations of sexual harassment. In a moment, we will hear from Harper's president and publisher, Rick MacArthur, about why he thinks it was important to publish that piece and his thoughts on the heated conversation that has ensued. But first, Ruth Spencer is the senior editor at The Cut, a woman's fashion and lifestyle website run by New York magazine. Ms. Spencer has been writing about the aftermath of MeToo and we have reached her in New York. Hello.

RUTH SPENCER: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: What was your first reaction to seeing Jian Ghomeshi's essay in The New York Review of Books.

RS: Well, I was angry, I think. I was angry. I was frustrated and I was pretty surprised quite frankly, to see him in the New York Review of Books.

AMT: And why were you so angry?

RS: Under the guise of sort of you know "reflections on a hashtag," when I read the piece, I actually found it surprisingly lacking really of any sort of reflection, whatsoever. It felt to me like a piece that was full of ego and sort of self obsession. He book ends the piece with two anecdotes about him charming women. I found that it was lacking any real sense of him taking responsibility for his actions or really addressing the women, the many, many women that he has hurt so deeply. In fact, he really downplays the allegations against him. He dismisses them, he sort of describes himself more as a bad boyfriend or sort of a player and not a man who has been accused of punching women so hard that they couldn't see straight.

AMT: What do you think he was trying to achieve by publishing this?

RS: You know, I'm really not sure what he was trying to achieve. I think that he feels that he has a right to return to a prime place in our culture and he quite simply does not. If you're going to attempt to atone for something that you've done wrong, then he has to demonstrate that he's actually done the work. That he has taken time to really reckon and think about what he's done and that requires acknowledging what he has done and he has completely failed to do that. It felt to me more like he was trying to sort of manipulate us, to remind us what we used to like so much about him and that was really disappointing to see.

AMT: You have written that you knew Jian personally. You dated him briefly. How does that experience affect how you read his essay?

RS: Yeah I did know Jian briefly. We had you know a few months long relationship back in 2010. I want to be explicit and say that I am not one of Jian's victims, that he did not assault me. That said, when I didn't know him, I came to sort of understand his character fairly well. I got a sense of his sort of duplicitousness, his kind of Jekyll and Hyde like personality where he could sort of pretend to be one way in public and in private actually, become someone else. My experience with him really helps me believe so many of the other women who have come forward.

AMT: And I should point out, as I read in the introduction, he was acquitted in a criminal trial. He did have a peace bond. Some of the things that are alleged are not criminal.

RS: Yes, that's true.

AMT: As a journalist making editorial decisions, how do you temper biases you might have on the subject with this wider issue of people coming forward?

RS: Well I think that in the piece that I wrote, I certainly describe what happened and I think you can kind of tell the story of Jian Ghomeshi and the story of the allegations coming up and the trial itself and sort of lay the evidence out for readers to come to their own conclusions. The trial was certainly a mess and I think I can speak from my own experience and in terms of what I experienced with Jian and his sort of duplicitous character. I certainly saw a lot of the same things in that essay and that's sort of what I attempted to speak to.

AMT: Your publication, The Cut, broke the story of allegations against public radio host, John Hockenberry. He just wrote a nearly seven thousand word essay in Harper's that has attracted a great deal of criticism. What do you make of that piece?

RS: Oh boy. I don't know why these essays need to be so long. You know, Hockenberry's I thought was quite a piece of work. Again, under the guise of sort of an attempt to reckon with his misdeeds, he certainly doesn't seem to acknowledge anything that he did wrong. In fact, he spends seven thousand words defending himself, explaining away what happened, describing himself as romantic. You know as though he's this misunderstood, innocent character and lying and saying he reached out to the women who came forward with allegations against him. But we went out and talked to his alleged victims and asked them if they had heard from him in the aftermath, which they all said they had not.

AMT: What do you make of these two pieces coming out at the same time? What's going on here?

RS: Well I guess it's the season of the comeback. I don't know how we should go about rehabilitating these men or what should really happen to them professionally. What I do know is if you were someone like that and you really wanted to go about trying to reckon with what you'd done or apologize, you would probably do something other than write a long essay for an elite publication or do a standup routine as Louis C.K. did and make a joke about rape whistles. I think you would have to do better than that.

AMT: There's been one attempt that's been better received. Dan Harmon was the show runner for the comedy series, Community, and on his podcast he responded to allegations of misconduct from a writer on the show, Megan Ganz. I've got a little clip of that.

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VOICE: I drank. I took pills. I crushed on her and resented her for not reciprocating it and the entire time, I was the one writing her paychecks and controlled whether she stayed or went and whether she felt good about herself or not and said horrible things. Just treated her cruelly, pointedly. Things that I would never ever ever have done if she had been male.

AMT: TV producer, Dan Harmon, on his podcast in January, the person he was talking about, the writer Megan Ganz publicly accepted the apology and urged people to listen to that podcast. What do you think he got right, Ruth Spencer?

RS: Well you can hear it in his voice. I mean he is taking responsibility. He is acknowledging the pain that he caused someone. You know it's up to Megan what she feels about that and what she's come out and said is that she does accept that apology and I think that that's a successful attempt to sort of really reckon with what you've done. He apologizes. In Jian Ghomeshi's essay he explicitly states that he can't quite bring himself to apologize.

AMT: So if we look at this wider, should these men be permanently unemployable? What should happen to men like Jian Ghomeshi and John Hockenberry?

RS: I think in this movement right now, we're in the middle of sort of figuring that out. I personally, I don't know what should happen to them. But it's not as though the only options available are to sort of write a big essay or you know feel as though you're entitled to return to this prime place that you had as a cultural figure. There are plenty of other options available to them. I just don't think necessarily that the right way to go about it is to rub everyone's noses in your defense and to sort of implicate all of us, including the women that you've hurt in your sort of personal atonement project. There's a difference between arguing that you deserve a second chance and refusing that you ever did anything wrong in the first place.

AMT: Ruth Spencer, thank you for your thoughts.

RS: Thank you Anna Maria.

AMT: Ruth Spencer is a senior editor at The Cut, a women's lifestyle site run by New York magazine. She was in our New York studio. I mentioned Jian Ghomeshi had signed a peace bond that required him to apologize to the complainant. That complainant is Kathryn Borel, a former CBC employee. We reached out to her for comment on this story and she sent us this statement and I'm quoting. "When I heard the New York Review of Books was publishing a personal essay by Ghomeshi, I thought I don't have time for this. I wonder if his other victims felt the same way. What did this achieve? How did it add productively to a crucial conversation? Why did Ian Buruma, the man who gave Ghomeshi a platform, use his power to publish something so confusing, traumatic and irresponsible? No good editor would have run this. It was a reckless decision that resulted in a stunningly inferior piece of writing." A statement from Kathryn Borel. Just days before the Ghomeshi essay came out in The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine published a similar essay by former US public radio, host John Hockenberry. In an investigation published last December by The Cut, former staff and interns alleged Mr. Hockenberry forcibly kissed and touched them, sent them inappropriate chat messages and in one case made a sexual advance at a producer while they were working in his hotel room. There were also allegations he bullied staff and made racist and sexist remarks. In his essay entitled, Exile, Mr. Hockenberry says that in his view, none of the accusations against him could be construed as criminal or coercive. He says he's guilty of bad judgment of quote, "improper failed and awkward attempts at courtship". And he laments that society does not seem capable or interested in distinguishing between his indiscretions and those of rapists and sex offenders. That's all in the first 700 words of Mr. Hockenberry's nearly 7000 word essay. Joining me now is Rick MacArthur, the president and publisher of Harper's Magazine, which published Mr. Hockenberry's essay. And Rick MacArthur joins us from our New York studio. Hello.

RICK MACARTHUR: Hi. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Why did Harper's decide to publish John Hockenberry's essay?

RM: Well, before we go there, I'd like to inform your readers, excuse me I'm not thinking about my readers, that Mr. Hockenberry is in a wheelchair, which is something you really ought to. He's a paraplegic, so that does inform the piece immensely. And the reason we published it and I will also remind you, that we're edited by a woman, Ellen Rosenbush, who thought it was a very good piece of writing. It's kind of a sequel to the Katie Roiphe we published back in February, which does make the argument, Katie made the argument also that the MeToo movement has had a tendency, an unfortunate tendency, to lump together everybody who from Harvey Weinstein to the guy who looked at you funny in the lunchroom, at the the office canteen or who maybe sent you a suggestive message, there is a distinction to be made and the response in many cases has been disproportionate. Now Hockenberry's essay, contrary to what the writer from The Cut said, is not just a long defense of his behavior or irrationalization. It's a complicated mix of atonement, regret and an attempt to explore sexual relations between men and women in the modern age. And he brings up a lot of other issues, he quotes Andrea Dworkin, a noted feminist author who is not around anymore to talk unfortunately. He talks about the novel, Lolita, what the impact would be today if a novel like that was published. Would that be banned by MeToo? These are all issues, which make it rise to the level of a serious essay, by a thoughtful person, who yes, has been driven out of his job and does take some responsibility for having been driven out of his job, but is making a complex argument. And I'll just add that one of the interesting things about the responses I've heard, which from The Cut writer and from the woman who says she was assaulted or I don't know exactly what her charge is, is that these pieces are too long. They're too hard. I don't have time for it. This I find astonishing and this to me is the real problem with what's going on right now is that we're running into a kind of buzz saw of illiberalism, refusal to see another point of view. At the same time that we don't have the patience to read and consider. It's far more complex.

AMT: Okay well I did have the pateince. I did have the patience. Let's go back. He's a paraplegic. What does that have to do with the fact that he was accused of sexual harassment? Does that excuse him?

RM: It's hard to get out of your wheelchair and attack somebody. I would think that's one thing your audience should know.

AMT: Well sexual harassment isn't just about physical attack, it is to suggest to a woman in a hotel room to a subordinate.

RM: What I was saying to you earlier was there is an inability on the part of MeToo and a lot of people, to distinguish between a Harvey Weinstein, who is physically aggressive, an accused rapist and somebody like Hockenberry, who showed bad judgment, he says, and made awkward passes.

AMT: Okay, but Mr. Hocken.

RM: From his wheelchair and I insist that there is a distinction to be made between people in between, I'm not just these are the extreme examples, Weinstein and Hockenberry.

AMT: Right. Okay, but hang on a second. What's your understanding of sexual harassment? You have to be touched?

RM: No. No. No. No. No.

AMT: Because I mean women are told, you can be sitting down, whether you're in a wheelchair or not and tell a woman all sorts of things that are sexual harrasment, so again, what's your point?

RM: My point is there's a distance between a criminal act and he's not been accused of anything criminal Hockenberry, he's been erased and that's the argument he's making in his piece. He's been erased from the culture.

AMT: Right. OK, so let me just.

RM: And he can't work anymore.

AMT: Right. So let me just. Hold on.

RM: And there is something in the tone of voice I hear, in your tone of voice and in the tone of voice of the other person that was on the show, it rises to the level of Soviet style reeducation. These guys have got to be reeducated. They have to show sufficient atonement, remorse, they have to go through some kind of reeducation process. And in fact, some companies have tried to do this with guys like this.

AMT: Well OK. And we won't go into Soviet, have you ever worked in the Soviet Union?

RM: I'm asking you.

AMT: Cause I have.

RM: I'm asking you to consider the metaphor, there's a kind of extreme tone to this, can I, let me just tell you one other thing about.

AMT: Let me get a question in here. I really want to pick up on a point that you just made, OK.

RM: Right. Right.

AMT: And you're making the point that there's a big difference between that and Harvey Weinstein. So let's just get on the table here that there is absolutely a difference and there were criminal, there are criminal charges, but sexual harassment as you should know, as you likely know as a publisher and a boss, sexual harassment isn't always a criminal act, but it is under most labor codes.

RM: I agree.

AMT: It is a fireable offense.

RM: And we fired a guy nine years ago. Harper's always ahead of the curve. We fired a guy nine years ago for sexual harassment. You know talking to women who were lower than he was in the hierarchy. It's a very small office, at bars and so on and so forth. We fired him. Now this guy, I'm not going to name because he's suffered enough. He was rehabilitated. He got his career back together. He hid out for a long time. You know the guy was sort of on the on the run let's say.

AMT: What did you do, did you rehabilitate the women who complained?

RM: Rehabilitate them? We, they continued to work there and he was fired. None of them, you know, we listen to their complaints and we fired the guy. The point is that eight years, nine years later, this anonymously written "shitty media men's list" appears on the internet written by someone, who as I was saying, lumps together the guy who looks at you funny, looks at you cross-eyed and the guy who attacks you in your hotel room.

AMT: OK so.

RM: And this guy was put back on, was put on the list after 8-9 years of model behaviour.

AMT: Well I'm going.

RM: And so, all of a sudden he's being boycotted again by editors and by individuals.

AMT: OK, we're almost out of time Rick and I do want to talk to you about.

RM: It's a disproportionate response.

AMT: Right, but you know you talk about tones of voice, you sound pretty flippant. You sound like this is no big deal.

RM: Oh I think it's a very big deal because I think it's distorting the conversation that ought to be going on in the country about power relationships, about economic relationships, about the Equal Rights Amendment. One of the things I've said for a long time is that the Equal Rights Amendment has to be reinvigorated. You know it was killed back in the 80s by Phyllis Schlafly's right wing women's movement. Equal pay in the workplace, promoting women like we do at Harper's, I have a woman editor. The women in the office are very supportive of this piece. Most of the women and I think there has to be a conversation in the United States. I don't know what's going on in Canada about economic power relationships.

AMT: OK.

RM: That's a fundamental issue that has not been addressed here.

AMT: We have to leave it there, but economics, we're dealing with an issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. Regardless of that and that's what I wanted to talk about.

RM: But I take exception.

AMT: We're out of time.

RM: And I take exception to your saying I'm flippant about this.

AMT: Well you called me a Soviet.

RM: No, no. I said. I didn't call you a Soviet. I said there's a Soviet tone.

AMT: You actually.

RM: A Soviet tone. I said there's a Soviet tone.

AMT: Well again, I'm just curious. I wanted to know the thinking behind that, but we're out of time. Rick MacArthur, thanks. Rick MacArthur, president, publisher of Harper's magazine. What do you think? Let us know. Tweet us. We are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to the website. This is The Current.

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Laws to suppress black vote in U.S. are being drafted with 'horrific efficiency,' says author

Guests: Carol Anderson

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: No such thing as a vote that doesn't matter. It all matters. And after we have achieved historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, especially in the African-American community, I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good send off, go vote. And I'm be working as hard as I can these next seven weeks to make sure folks do.

AMT: That was outgoing US President, Barack Obama, speaking before the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, which would put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. And despite that full throated appeal for African-Americans to vote, there was a 7 percent drop in turnout compared to the 2012 election. There have been a number of theories about why African-Americans stayed away from the polls during the last U.S. presidential election, including voter suppression. And as the midterm congressional elections loom in November, concerns are mounting that the black vote is once again being undermined in some states. Carol Anderson looks at the African-American vote, its history and its future in her new book. It's called, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. Carol Anderson is the chair of African-American studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. And that's where we've reached her. Hello.

CAROL ANDERSON: Thank you so much for inviting me Anna Maria.

AMT: I want to talk about all of this. You write that the disappearing minority voter is the 2016 campaign's most misunderstood story. Remind us what the narrative was for why minority voters didn't turn out in the numbers in that election, as they did for Barack Obama.

CA: One of the things that I really said repeatedly in the press was that you know black folks just didn't show up because they really weren't energized by Hillary Clinton. Hillary was a flawed candidate. Hillary didn't have the ability to mobilize and energize the minority community. Hillary, as everyone knows, is corrupt. Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. And so the kind of misogyny that followed Hillary's campaign was there in the post-mortem, that the decline of African-American voter turnout was due to Hillary being a flawed candidate who had so many structural issues that she just didn't have Barack Obama's magic.

AMT: And why is that narrative wrong?

CA: Oh it is eight ways to Sunday wrong. And it is wrong because this was the first election in 50 years, the first presidential election in 50 years that did not have the protection of the Voting Rights Act. And without the protection of the Voting Rights Act states went hog wild. Republican-dominated states figuring out how do we target African-American voters as the North Carolina, as the fourth circuit court said in North Carolina, with nearly surgical precision in order to block them from the ballot box. It was a re-assertion of Jim Crow.

AMT: Well and this takes us back in history and I want to go back, before we continue to look forward. The United States, especially the South, had a number of mechanisms in place before 1965 to disenfranchise African-American voters. I'm going to play a piece of tape. This is a scene from the movie, Selma, which came out in 2015 and we're going to hear Oprah Winfrey and her role as a civil rights activist going to register to vote in Alabama.

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[Scene from Selma]

VOICE 1: I ain’t stirring no fuss. I'm just here trying to register to vote.

VOICE 2: Recite the Constitution's preamble. Do you know what a preamble is?

VOICE 1: We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.

VOICE 2: How many county judges in Alabama?

VOICE 1: 67.

VOICE 2: Name them.

AMT: Carol Anderson, what tactic was being depicted in that scene?

CA: Oh that was the literacy test. The literacy test was part and parcel of the Mississippi plan of 1890. 1890 is when the southern states began to implement Jim Crow to figure out how do we disfranchise this black population? How do we keep them from voting and having a say in this government? Who their representatives will be and but there was this thing coming out of the civil war, called the 15th amendment, that said you cannot deny the right to vote on account of race. And so these governments had to figure out how do we systematically deny black people the right to vote, without saying we don't want black people to vote. And what they decided to do was to use this societally created characteristics of a people and then use those characteristics as the litmus test for access to the ballot box. So with the literacy test, what we know is that the south implemented Jim Crow ferociously and vigorously. And one of the key areas in which they did that was education. And so you have massive disparate funding in education. The average was that white schools received 252 per cent more in funding than black schools. In Mississippi the average was over 700 per cent. What if what you do is you systematically deny education to a population and by the time we were in the mid-1940s, over 50 per cent of the adult black population in Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi had less than five years of Jim Crow education. That was it. Now imagine then after you have societally imposed this, then turning around to that very population and saying boom, read the Constitution and then interpret it.

AMT: And if you can't do that, you don't get to register to vote.

CA: You don't get to register to vote.

AMT: And that wasn't the only tactic they used. What else did they do?

CA: Oh there was also the Poll Tax. The way that the Poll Tax worked and all of these have that veneer of being reasonable. The way that the Poll Tax worked was to say, well you know democracy is expensive and holding these elections, they're expensive and so we need people to pay a tax in order to be able to finance the elections, a poll tax. But the way that it worked, again you go after the characteristics of poverty, the black community had been impoverished coming out of slavery with absolutely very few resources. Then you get the reimposition of what they called slavery by another name was sharecropping and peonage, a debt slavery. And then you turn to that population and say I want you to pay in order to vote, but not only just pay. The ways that the laws were written, it wasn't clear when you should pay and where you should pay. And the tax was cumulative, so that after you've kind of figured out all of the rules, but it's taking about 20 years to do so, you owed 20 years of back taxes, in order to be able to vote. To put this into context, the average family income for a Mississippian was $100 a year. $100 a year for a family. If what you do then is require a percentage of that, it was coming out to somewhere between, two to six per cent of their annual income being required for that one year alone. Multiply that by the cumulative effect and you have effectively shut down the ballot box.

AMT: And if you couldn't pay the poll tax, you could be accused of vagrancy. Then what happens to you?

CA: Then if you didn't pay that Poll Tax, one, you couldn't vote, but the other piece, when the poll tax was first created was coming out of the civil war. And if you couldn't pay that tax then you were basically arrested for vagrancy and your labor was auctioned off to the highest bidder, as if slavery had never ended.

AMT: So why would you even show up to register?

CA: Exactly. The power of the literacy test and the Poll Tax combined, by the mid-1940s, early to mid-1940s, when the US is part of a coalition fighting the Nazis, only 3 per cent of African-American adults were registered to vote in the south. That poll tax, literacy test and I've got to add, there were a couple of other features, but one of the major ones, was Election Day violence, election day terrorism. The willingness to kill black people for registering to vote or the willingness to kill black people for actually voting and having the justice system say that that's OK.

AMT: So in 1965 the president is Lyndon Johnson. He signs the Voting Rights Act. What did it do to try to ensure people weren't disenfranchised because of their race?

CA: The Voting Rights Act, frankly was a brilliant effective piece of legislation. What it did was and the best way for me to talk about this is to talk about the 1957 Civil Rights Act and what that did was it finally got the federal government to say OK, we understand something's going wrong with the voting. And so now you can sue in federal court to be able to you know get your voting rights. You know if something's gone wrong, but what that did then was that it required a violation of your voting rights. Then it required finding somebody who was willing to actually sue the government, then and still be in that community. Then it required all of the years of investigation. Then it required a trial. Then it required after the verdict, an appeal. So you had years going by while massive disenfranchisement is still going on. So what the Voting Rights Act did because it was very clear that the 1957 Civil Rights Act was not working, the Voting Rights Act required what they call preclearance. So that states who and there was a test for which states would require preclearance, states that had fewer than 50 percent of their age eligible adults registered to vote, so that's every citizen that's in that state. So African-American, white, Latino, Native American. 50 per cent, if you've got fewer than 50 per cent, and if your state uses one of those devices to determine who's eligible to vote, a poll tax, a literacy test, an understanding clause and that's your ability to interpret to the likings of the registrar, this constitutional document.

AMT: If you're in one of those states, then you could get preclearance to vote?

CA: Yeah and so what preclearance did is required the state or that jurisdiction, that anytime it wanted to change any one of its voting laws, it had to get the approval first of the U.S. Department of Justice.

AMT: Oh I, OK. Yeah.

CA: Yes. That's what preclearance meant. So in fact, it stopped all of the chicanery from happening and all of the results of a tainted election from going on because now, before you could implement something to disfranchise, now the federal government was watching you and if you did it, they were coming after you.

AMT: And so what impact did that act have on the voting patterns of African-Americans, especially in the south?

CA: Oh it was a tremendous piece of legislation. You saw for instance in Mississippi, before in the 1960s, before the Voting Rights Act, African-American voter registration was in the single digits in terms of percentage .in the single digits. Just a few years after the Voting Rights Act, 64 or 62 percent of African-Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote. Think about that, just in a few years going from single digits to over 60 per cent. You saw the same kind of rise in Alabama and in Georgia. You had the first African-American elected official since reconstruction since the 1800's happening in Mississippi because now African-Americans were able to get to the ballot box.

AMT: But after that act passed, the Republicans adopted something called the Southern strategy. What was it?

CA: Whoa. The Southern strategy. So Lyndon Johnson was a Democrat. Actually, he was from Texas, the South and but he saw that America could not be America as long as it had Jim Crow. And so he pushed hard and for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Well the Southern Democrats, the south had been what they called the solid Democratic South. And that was because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

AMT: And the Southern Democrats didn't like that. Yeah OK. They didn't want part, they didn't want to be associated with the Republicans at that point.

CA: At all. At all. And so you had the solid Democratic South and that solid democratic south now looked up at a Civil Rights Act that declared that discrimination was fundamentally wrong and that the federal government would weigh in on this discrimination and go after the perpetrators. You also had the Voting Rights Act. And so now you've got the Southern Democrats, who are in this Democratic Party that's talking about equality, equal rights, racial equality, gender equality, voting rights and willing to fight for voting rights and you have African-Americans really moving into the Democratic Party. White southerners were like oh no. And the Republicans looked up and said this is an opportunity for political power and the Southern strategy was to woo those Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. And you really began to see this with Richard Nixon in the 1968 election and developed to a fine art by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, where he was in Neshoba County, Mississippi. And that is highly symbolic because Neshoba County is where the civil rights workers, Andrew Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney were killed because they were trying to register African-Americans to vote and their deaths help spark the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So when you've got Ronald Reagan in Neshoba County talking about I'm a firm believer in states rights, that means federal government go away.

AMT: That's code for we want you to be able to do what you want.

CA: Yes.

AMT: So we go from there to a little further into the future. I want to ask about the current American Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. You have some pretty pointed criticism of his tenure as U.S. attorney in Alabama, especially specifically how he dealt with African-American voters who used absentee voting. What happened?

CA: So in Perry County, Alabama, Perry County Alabama was 60 per cent African-American in terms of its population. And by the late 1970s it still did not have one black elected official and Albert Turner, who was a civil rights warrior, he was at Selma in the 60s fighting for voting rights. He was a lieutenant of Martin Luther King and he was an activist in Alabama and he started looking at this and he said this isn't a right. Something's going on and what he figured out was that white politicians had been encouraging whites who no longer physically lived in the county, but had property there, to use absentee ballots in order to keep political power solely in white hands. And so Albert Turner said absentee ballots, oh that's what's being done here. Well it seemed appropriate for the black population in Perry County as well, because almost 50 per cent, there was a large percentage that were over 65 and elderly, so the kind of mobility you need and to be able to get to the polls that on Election Day were only open for four hours and there was another large percentage that worked outside the county, so almost 50 per cent of voters, of black voters could use absentee ballots. So he figured out how to do it by going to training. In the election in 1982 because of what Albert Turner, his wife Evelyn and his colleague Spencer Hogue had done, was that they had in 1982, you had the first black elected officials in Perry County. The District Attorney immediately thought voter fraud. I mean if black people are voting, it's got to be fraud. So he called Jeff Sessions, who was the U.S. attorney. So that's the federal office and Jeff Sessions called in the FBI. So when the 1984 election happened and the FBI followed the Turners and Hogue as they deposited the absentee ballots in the mail box. The FBI seized the mail box, starts going through all of the ballots and believes that they have identified a number that have been forged. Sessions then rolls in, rounds up the elderly, the black elderly voters, puts them on a bus with a sheriff and police escorts down to Mobile, a hundred and sixty miles away. This black community is now terrified because what sheriffs and police mean that they're not the protectors. They're are the images, the very real memories of Bull Connor in Birmingham, the very real memories of Jim Clark in Selma.

AMT: So they round them up because on suspicion of some kind of election fraud, but all they were doing was what the voters were already doing and they were allowing for white voters.

CA: Exactly. Exactly. And the elderly black people down in Mobile were fingerprinted, photographed and then put before a grand jury and they were terrified. I mean you read through and they're talking about, I'm never voting again. I know what they're trying to do and I'm not voting again. I mean it sent the signal and based on that, then Jeff Sessions went after and prosecuted the Turners and Spencer Hogue.

AMT: How?

CA: Exactly, this was a prosecution that was designed to intimidate. There wasn't, the evidence wasn't there. Most of the charges were thrown out because there was no evidence and what was left the jury found them not guilty.

AMT: But it didn't matter by this point.

CA: But it didn't matter. By this time Evelyn talked about and years later, I mean years later, she's like I will never forget, as long as I stay black.

AMT: OK so in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court comes down with a ruling that has huge consequences for the Voting Rights Act. What happens?

CA: It was the Shelby County v. Holder decision. In that suit Shelby County said it wasn't fair for them to have to you know, times have changed. In that 5-4 decision, John Roberts, the chief justice, wrote a decision that basically said you know the Voting Rights Act has basically outlived its usefulness. The U.S. this is no longer the racism of the 1960s. This is no longer the racist, we don't have the racism of Jim Crow and that the Voting Rights Act unfairly picked on the south, that this as if the south hadn't done anything. And that the law was inelastic, it did not take, it wasn't dynamic enough. Also not true. There were bail in and bail out clauses in the Voting Rights Act. The bail out clause is that if you were a preclearance jurisdiction, but you don't discriminate against your minority population for five years, you no longer have to be a preclearance state. So what that means is stop discriminating against your citizens and you no longer have to have the federal government watching over you.

AMT: And then you can discriminate against. And of course this happened in 2013, so there's a black president. So this was the argument, we've got a black man in the White House, there's no problem with blacks voting.

CA: Right and the problem with that is and it's part of the narrative that you hear about America, how racist can America be? We elected a black man twice to the presidency, except not since 1964 and the Civil Rights Act and 65, the Voting Rights Act, have the majority of whites who have voted, voted for a Democratic candidate. Let me say that again. Not since 1964, have the majority of whites in America who voted, voted for a Democratic candidate. And remember it was the Democrats who pushed for the Civil Rights Act, who pushed for the Voting Rights Act. So that is telling you something really pernicious, coursing through the body politic in the United States. And those voters went to the Republicans. And so who put Barack Obama in the White House? You had a large number of whites, but again, not a majority, but you had an overwhelming number of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and the poor people, who made less than $15,000 a year. It was that coalition that turned out in mass and put Barack Obama in the White House twice.

AMT: So the election in which Donald Trump came to power, the 2016 presidential election, was the first one to take place after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

CA: Yes it was. Yes it was. And we saw it in its full unvarnished fury. What we saw for instance, there were a number of devices that the states had begun to implement and so I'll start with Alabama because let's start with Alabama. In 2011, when Alabama was still a preclearance state, so this is before the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County, Alabama passed a voter ID law, saying that you needed an ID, a government issued photo ID, in order to vote. Now the Republicans had recorded themselves talking about this and they said how do we depress the black voter turnout because you know you've got all of these Aborigines and all of these illiterates, getting on these HUD and that's housing and urban development, HUD financed buses, to go to the polls. I mean the level of racism in that sentence is toxic, based on how do we depress the black voter turnout. Alabama passes a voter ID law. Now Alabama identified the types of IDs that are acceptable. What was not acceptable, for instance, for a government issued photo ID was public housing ID, but it doesn't really get more government issued than public housing, but Alabama's a poor state and 71 per cent of those in public housing were African-Americans. So if you deny that voter registration, that that kind of ID, then you're beginning to call out the electorate. You're beginning to shut the door on black voters.

AMT: Because they wouldn't have the other kinds of ID, that they're asking for, in the same numbers.

CA: Exactly. And then Alabama wanted to reinforce that. So then in the Black Belt counties and those are the counties in Alabama that have significant African-American populations, the governor shut down the Department of Motor Vehicles in those counties. So the access to a driver's license, which is like the holy grail for ID, government issued photo ID, was not available.

AMT: Where would they have to go?

CA: To another county. But think about this, if you don't have a driver's license, so you don't drive, how do you get over to another county? Particularly in Alabama, which is ranked 48th out of 50 states, in terms of financing public transportation. So you don't have public transportation and you're about 50 miles away from the nearest Department of Motor Vehicles. Yes. Now Alabama knew in 2011, it couldn't get that law through, a Department of Justice preclearance review. But after Shelby County v. Holder, that law was implemented.

AMT: OK so after the the Voting Rights Act is gutted, they can get that law through.

CA: Yes. And they did that.

AMT: So the argument that the African-American vote in the 2016 election was lower, that dropped was because the argument that it was because Barack Obama wasn't running, it's not the argument.

CA: It's not the argument. It's not the argument.

AMT: And the Hillary argument is not the argument.

CA: It's not the argument.

AMT: So you're telling me there's a paper trail here, a paper trail of intent. It's pretty obvious.

CA: Yes. Yes. This this it is so glaring, but part of why this hasn't received the kind of attention that it needs, I firmly believe, one, is the rhetoric of America. That this is the world's greatest democracy and so it's hard to fathom and that the civil rights movement handled the issue of racism and Jim Crow. You know it's the John Roberts argument. And so it seems unfathomable that something as racist, as pernicious, as vile and as destructive as these laws are actually being drafted, discussed, voted upon and implemented and operationalized with horrific efficiency, but it's going on.

AMT: How do you react to this?

CA: There is a seething, I've got to tell you, a seething anger. I think about my father. My father was a career military man, career army. My father fought in World War II. My father fought in Korea. I think about when my father was fighting to make the world safe for democracy and to rid the world of Nazis and Aryan supremacy, as a governing principle for a nation. When my parents were stationed in Fort Benning, Georgia, they couldn't vote or they would be killed. That's and to think about all of the struggle, all of the marches, the protests, the beatings, the deaths to get us to a voting rights act, so we can begin to open up this democracy and have the United States of America be the United States of America. To then have this reactionary moment in the nation, where you have a Supreme Court that can look at the power of the Voting Rights Act and say, we don't need it anymore and that creates anger I've got to say. John Roberts said look we've got all of these black politicians now, we've got all of these Latino politicians now, but what he'd refuse to look at was that the Voting Rights Act up til 2006, when the Act was reauthorized, had blocked over seven hundred changes to voting rights laws in the States because the Department of Justice had determined that these laws would have a racially discriminatory impact. How the chief justice of the Supreme Court and four other justices, could look at that kind of data and just wipe it away, as if it didn't exist and to lead us into this moment where African-Americans and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans are systematically denied the right to vote. It's unconscionable.

AMT: I hear your anger, you're still very calm. I wonder sometimes, you must just want to cry too.

CA: Yeah. Yeah, but that's why we fight. I mean that's why we fight this. What you're seeing in America is not people rolling over and just acquiescing going, well you know that's the way it is. I mean I am so proud of civil society. Civil society being those organizations such as the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the NAACP LDF, the legal defense fund, the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, who the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, I mean these groups have been doing the heavy lifting of democracy. They have been taking these governments to court over and over and over. So they are providing the incredible documentary evidence of systematic discrimination at the voting box.

AMT: I have another clip, I'd like you to hear. This one comes from December 14th, 2017. Democrat Doug Jones had just defeated Republican Roy Moore, flipping the ruby red Senate seat to blue. The New York Times posted a video of African-American women in Alabama talking about this historic election. Let's listen.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Black people were involved in this race because it was an opportunity to show the power of the black vote.

VOICE 2: When I was in that voting precinct and I saw all of the African-Americans flooding in, it reminded me of eight years ago when President Obama decided to run for president.

VOICE 3: Waking up this morning, seeing the world, the world like in Germany, r,oot for Alabama congratulating and thanking black women that has made, right here.

CA: Carol Anderson, what role did black women play in the defeat of Roy Moore?

CA: Black women are fierce. The kind of grass roots organizing and mobilizing was absolutely essential for the defeat of Roy Moore and to be clear, Roy Moore was Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. He had to be removed twice because he refused to abide by the law, the Constitution and he believed that the last time America was great, was when we had slavery. That was Roy Moore. Black women understood the consequences of having that kind of person sitting in the U.S. Senate, making federal laws, dealing with education, dealing with the criminal justice system, dealing with health care, dealing with employment and labor opportunities, that kind of person would be absolutely destructive. And the mobilization, the grassroots mobilization was I smiled, the last chapter in the book deals with that historic election and what you see there was, one, figuring out exactly what Alabama had done to block black people from voting. Because black Alabama had deployed every method of voter suppression against its black population.

AMT: So you're saying that the activists on the other side, the women who, the black women in Alabama who went out to fight this, understood the tactics and fought them.

CA: Exactly. I mean so much of it reminded me of the civil rights movement, I've got to say because in that struggle in the 50s and 60s the black leadership and the black community understood how those laws worked and how the system was able to stay in place and then they started getting at the weak spots in that system. That is exactly what happened in Alabama.

AMT: How did you react that night when you saw that he was being defeated.

CA: Oh my gosh. I remember seeing the polls, turning on, watching, you know you how you're watching with one eye like ugh and when I saw Doug Jones take the lead. And I remember Bernice King, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King's daughter, tweeted, Selma Lord Selma, because that's when you saw that there was no way that Roy Moore was going to be able to win this election because the massive voter turnout in those black belt counties, in those voters suppressed counties, was so far exceeding, not only the secretary of state's expectations, but even the state voter turnout rate. I jumped up and I just that's where the hope is. When I talked about that fight, people are not rolling over and just accepting this and say you know that's the way it is, but saying not today, not today. Not on my watch. And the beauty is that you had this incredible fusion, you had multiple groups working together, a group working on issues of felony disfranchisement to make sure that those who could vote knew that they had their voting rights and could be registered to vote. You had groups working together because of the massive poll closures that Alabama had done. They had closed 66 polling stations.

AMT: So going into the midterms, are other states and sort of are other people fighting this and learning from Alabama? Is there stuff their allies can learn from that?

CA: I think Alabama's a blueprint. I think Alabama is a blueprint because one of the things that Alabama understood, was you got to understand how Alabama works and how Alabamians work. How Alabamians think. And that was all of the TV ads really don't mean much. It is about knocking on doors and talking to your neighbors. That's what Alabamians understood. So it is a locally driven, locally custom oriented fight that then had enormous resources, financial resources coming in from the outside because all of that knocking on doors, requires a lot of money. Being able to set up a car pool to move people to and from the polls. Having caravans going into poor neighborhoods alerting those who had been convicted, that they may in fact have their voting rights. Having lawyers swoop in and be at these polling stations, these key polling stations, to ensure that irregularities were not happening and that people were not being denied their right to vote. All of that required resources, but it required a cognisance of the ways that those local communities worked and allowing those local folks to do the work they wanted to do.

AMT: So you know we're talking about homegrown manipulation of the vote in the United States of America. There's been a lot of attention paid to the interference of the intelligence services in the US elections and that you've found some overlap. How did Russia try to suppress the black vote in the 2016 election?

CA: You know so what the Russians did was they understood, the way that the Soviets did during the Cold War, that discrimination against African-Americans, racial discrimination and the role of white supremacy in the way that this nation is governed, is America's Achilles heel. It is really hard to be the Jim Crow leader of the free world. And the Soviets understood that, just the way that the Russians understood it. And so one of the things, one of the things that you saw was that the Russians really weighed in heavy for instance on social media and what they would do is that they would mask themselves as activists, social justice warriors and they would walk the walk, and talk the talk in their social media thing. And then after getting a number of followers and some kind of credibility for the way that they would denounce certain political leaders and the things that they would say, then the Russians would come back with you know we really need to show them our power and not vote. Yeah. And that kind of playing on the cynicism that after lo these many years, democracy just can't function because of the virulent racism in the United States and the kind of false equivalency between Hillary Clinton, the Democrat, and Donald Trump, who was the Republican, running for president saying well you know, they're just the same. The whole system is corrupt. And you saw that beginning to take off in certain key areas and understand that the combination it was like a twin pincer motion. Because on one hand, you have the home grown voter suppression doing everything it can to keep African-Americans from voting, then you have the Russians weighing in via on social media doing everything that they can to keep black people from voting. Because what the Russians understood was that it was the minority voter turnout that would be the difference for Hillary Clinton and they wanted Donald Trump and that this election was going to be close because of the massive voter suppression that was happening in states like Wisconsin, in states like North Carolina, in states like Florida.

AMT: This explains the denial at the official Republican level, of the whole Russian interference issue as well. It's that they have to look at where the template came from.

CA: Exactly. I mean because the Republicans really basically put a target on the black population and said hit here and the Russians went, yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

AMT: So let me ask you, in your view, how does the voter suppression by U.S. courts and state politicians compare with Russian interference in U.S. elections as a crisis in American democracy?

CA: I think that the Russians would not have been able to be as effective, if we didn't have American politicians in the courts implementing and okaying voter suppression. That's how I see it. A one-two punch, but the big punch came from Americans who went after American citizens and said we will do everything in our power to deny your right to vote.

AMT: Your work chronicling and documenting all of this from the history to this moment in time, really opens our eyes. Thank you.

CA: Thank you.

AMT: Carol Anderson, her book is called, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. She is the chair of the African-American studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. That is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q, when two members of Baroness von Sketch, that hilarious CBC program, Aurora Browne, Meredith MacNeill from Baroness von Sketch join host Tom Power to discuss season three of their award-winning comedy series. Remember, you can take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app, free from the App Store or Google Play. Now in keeping with our discussion on voter suppression in the US, voting rights has been a central goal of the civil rights movement that galvanized African-Americans and so many others to become politically active in the 50s and 60s. We're going to leave you with one of the rallying cries of the movement. The folksong, "Keep Your Eyes On The Prize." The one you're going to hear is a gospel tinge diversion performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-woman African-American A cappella ensemble. Here it is. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: "Keep Your Eyes On The Prize" by Sweet Honey in the Rock]

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Sept. 18, 2018 episode transcript

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