Poll Taxes: Not Just for Negroes (and never were)
Before it was even a laughable thought to give the vote to Women, or African-Americans, or Indigenous Americans, or so many others…
…first, they denied the vote to poor Whites.
That’s the shell game at play, so many decades later, in Florida today. This attempt at voter suppression uses ancient tools — ones that never seem to go away.
As briefly noted in "Where the White Women Vote?", American Voting was originally built for “privileged” folks. Only certain groups of folks could even think about having the ability to take time off to get to a polling place. Therefore, states built voting systems around assumptions of the classes that would vote…
….this really hasn’t changed, has it?…
Then, as more and more were granted The Franchise, so too did those in power find ways to constrain the impacts their votes would have. From parties to “encourage” the right votes from White men, to patriarchal pressure on Women to vote the “right” way for domestic bliss, time and again America had led in how to corall voters.
And poll taxes, in America, have an especially long and storied history of suppression, one that goes well before people like me got to vote. As historian Keri Leigh Merritt pointed out in an article last year:
By the 1850s, a growing group of incredibly wealthy men, born into slaveholding families of great privilege, were brazenly identifying themselves as aristocrats or oligarchs — they simply did not believe in the benefits of “pure democracy.”
[…]
From poll taxes to residency requirements, the master class easily maintained control over the political privileges of poorer whites. Men who had been previously convicted of certain crimes, or who did not have a long period of continuous residence in a certain state and locality, or could not afford to pay a poll tax of close to a day’s wages, were liable to become disenfranchised.
And they, in turn, learned how to poll tax from the British:
[…] colonists paid poll taxes just before the American Revolution - part of that whole taxation without representation bit that kept Americans unhappy.
Poll taxes in the colonies, and subsequently in the states, weren’t always linked directly to voting. Instead, they were per person taxes[…]
And this is why they are so insidious — they’ve been used for so long to suppress and haunt people of lesser means, that they are kind of “baked into” our American soul. It’s why they were so useful, for so long, to keep not just African-American votes suppressed, but also poorer Whites. If you might accidentally vote against the people who led Jim Crow, they needed to stop-gap you — a “problem” that would be remedied via teaching raw bigotry at home, and the Lost Cause in schools.
This is why it’s important to understand the shell game being played, here. As much as racism is real and corrupting, and White Supremacy is a brutal and real stain upon the American psyche, commerce, and so much more — it’s almost never coming alone.
Rather, as I said last post, White Supremacy is a tool. It’s George Wallace, demonizing for power. It’s Strom Thurmond, accumulating power thru racism, while paying for his secret, mixed-race, child to go to great schools.
And yes, it’s Trump — but he’s not the first, and I fear he won’t be the last.
How do we fight this? Locally.
We cannot depend on POTUS, or SCOTUS, or the Federal Congress.
We must recognize that the systems in-place to disempower us started locally. They still influence, locally. The people who hold Federal offices today that enforce these systems, started in states, not in DC.
They don’t write-off regions, or groups — hell, they’ve still trying to crack African-Americans, if poorly!
For me, that means I’m focusing my time on the systems that got us here, and my money on local and state races, up to the Federal Senate level.
If we can put time and energy and money into actually proposing better ways locally, ways theat improve people’s economic status while also breaking down barriers, we can start to put a real hurting on these systems of oppression. We must go local because that’s where these systems have grown their deepest root. They use those roots to hide from the Federal government until they can, as they are doing today, subvert it — yet again. (Yes, ala Dukes of Hazzard…)
We can fight all this. Yet, at some point, you have to chose to go where the hurt starts, in order to truly heal it.
Thanks for reading.