On Politics, History, Racism, and SCOTUS

I can't.

I honestly just can't.  I have lost any and all ability to can today, ladies and gentlemen.  And only part of that comes from the fact that I am wading through a dataset that seems intent on destroying me.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 as a crucial response to the prevalence of Jim Crow Laws throughout the American South.  Jim Crow Laws were, in case you are unaware, a series of laws throughout states and municipalities which, through enforcement of "poll taxes" or "literacy tests" (I use scarequotes here for a reason -- the actual results of these tests or costs of these poll taxes varied greatly depending on the color of your skin), restricted the access of African Americans to the polls, in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment which guaranteed them that right to vote. (Seriously, though.  Track down a copy of the Alabama Literacy Test and tell me if, when someone slapped that down in front of you because they didn't like the way you looked, you would be able to pass and vote. (Though are you really surprised these laws were in effect less than 100 years after many of these same people thought that people were property?))

In 1965, Congress voted to pass measures which restricted the rights of states to impose discriminatory voting regulations which kept a significant portion of the population from being able to go out to the polls.  An essential piece of the legislation included a stipulation that areas with histories of these kinds of regulations, as well as repeatedly low voter turnout and registration numbers (because that doesn't look suspicious at all), would have to get federal approval before making changes to their voting regulations and voting procedures.

Well, today the Supreme Court overturned that stipulation. In a time where voter ID laws have come under intense criticism for their potentially racist limitations on the ability of minorities to vote, a restriction that has prevented actual legally-binding discrimination and a breach of the US Constitution for more than forty years has been overturned by the body responsible for protecting the Constitution.

Do I think the implications of this are as heavily racist as they would have been in the '60s -- no, at least not on the surface.  But I do think it's democratically-questionable.  Note: many of the areas which have been subject to this clause in the past, including Shelby County, AL, which was involved in specifically this Supreme Court case, are predominantly Republican.  Minority votes are, by-and-large, opposed to the Republican party.  Do I think there's going to be a massively racial backlash?  Probably not, because it's typically a bad PR move.  But do I think there's potential for party politics that will, ultimately, have racial consequences to prevent a large amount of the opposition constituency from turning out to the polls?  Absolutely.

Congratulations, SCOTUS.  I can't.

Furiously yours,
Rachel Leigh

P.S., Let's hope they do better on Prop 8/DOMA than they did with this one.  Love is love, my friends.

On Digital Humanities and My Job

I don't often talk about my work, but seeing as I'll be doing it 40 hours a week for the next seven weeks, maybe it's not such a bad idea to give everyone a little 'splaining.

If you followed the other blog linked to this account, you probably know I'm a writing consultant, as I used that blog to discuss the training process and the challenges I expected to face as a writing consultant.  But what you may or may not know is that for the last three years, I have worked at the UR Digital Scholarship Lab.

The DSL is a Digital Humanities research lab.  To a lot of people, digital humanities sounds like something of an oxymoron, because the humanities (history, philosophy, etc) tend to be pursuits we naturally link with neo-Luddism.  Okay, no, most people don't think it's an oxymoron -- mostly, they just kind of look at me like "huh?"

Our work in the lab is some bizarre hybrid of historical research and computer science skills that come together to create interesting historical resources which match the modern age -- interactive maps, updated digital archives, things which make often inaccessible research or concepts modern and graspable.

My pet project since I've worked there has to be Visualizing Emancipation -- an interactive map of the emancipation process during the Civil War.  A lot of people think (and we're certainly taught) that Emancipation happened when Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation and, like a magic spell, all the slaves were free.  Maybe, if your education was a little more in-depth, you were taught that what gave the emancipation of slaves legal teeth was the passing of the 13th Amendment.  Yay no more slaves!

What VE shows is the fact that the process was much more complex than that, and also precisely that -- it WAS a process.  Every emancipation event in the database corresponds to a primary or secondary source which can point to the exact date at which a slave ran away, was liberated, was re-enslaved, or any number of other major events which focus on the fact we're not just talking about a historical or political moment in time.  We're looking at the lives of people with real agency and whose freedom was not simply given to them.

This is not even to touch on the continuing plight of slaves and human trafficking victims which persists in a country that points to a point in history as the time when Americans stopped owning other Americans.  But that's a topic for another day.

For the time being, if you want to check out what I've been up to or the Visualizing project, you can go to http://dsl.richmond.edu, http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation, or follow the project on twitter at @vizemancipation.

Historically (and digitally) yours,
Rachel Leigh